Authors
Alan S. Cowen and Dacher Keltner
Berkeley Social Interaction Laboratory, Department of Psychology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720
Edited by
Joseph E. LeDoux, New York University, New York, NY
Approved date
August 7, 2017 (received for review February 9, 2017)
Claims about how reported emotional experiences are geometrically organized within a semantic space have shaped the study of emotion.
Using statistical methods to analyze reports of emotional states elicited by 2,185 emotionally evocative short videos with richly varying situational content, we uncovered 27 varieties of reported emotional experience.
Reported experience is better captured by categories such as “amusement” than by ratings of widely measured affective dimensions such as valence and arousal.
Although categories are found to organize dimensional appraisals in a coherent and powerful fashion, many categories are linked by smooth gradients, contrary to discrete theories.
Our results comprise an approximation of a geometric structure of reported emotional experience.
