Scientists Create a New Map of Our Moods

How many different emotions, really, can run through a person's mind? Some scientists have argued that there are six distinct types, give or take—anger, fear, sadness, disgust, surprise, and happiness. But based on Americans' descriptions of their own experiences in a recent study, there may actually be many more.

Researchers at the University of California, Berkeley enlisted online participants to indicate their emotional responses to a stock of more than 2,000 video clips and GIFs featuring baby animals, an awkward high-five, a starry sky, graphic violence and nudity, and myriad other flavors of imagery plumbed from the depths of the internet.

Based on statistical analyses, the team concluded that an array of 27 separate categories of emotion best accounted for viewers' professed experiences—ranging from "empathic pain" (imagine watching a Jackass stunt) to "adoration" (common when viewing puppies) to straightforward "excitement." At the same time, certain emotions, such as awkwardness and amusement, were often evoked by the same video. "There doesn't seem to be a discrete boundary between categories," says Alan Cowen, who co-authored the report with Dacher Keltner.

The researchers also produced an interactive visualization based on the emotional responses to each clip. The closeness of emotion labels to one another loosely indicates how frequently the emotions tended to arise in tandem.

The map is not definitive: It leaves out emotions like envy and shame, which might require more personal forms of elicitation, and its categories could vary across cultures. But it does illustrate the richness of our emotional landscape, and that in itself is pretty exciting.