Psychologists have yet to fully tackle the question “How many emotions do we have?”

Part of the difficulty is because our experiences are so complex and involve so many different factors, so distinguishing one emotion from another is a lot like drawing lines of sand in the desert. It can be hard to determine where one emotions ends or another begins. Even when we analyze a commonsense emotion like “happiness” or “anger,” we know from everyday experience that these emotions come in many different degrees, qualities, and intensities. In addition, our experiences are often comprised of multiple emotions at once, which adds another dimension of complexity to our emotional experience.

Despite how difficult these distinctions may be, plenty of psychologists have attempted to classify our emotions into different categories. Early philosophy of mind posited that all emotions could be categorized as either “pleasure” or “pain,” but since then more in depth theories have been put forth. In this post I want to go over some of the main theories that have been researched over the past half century.

Ekman’s List of Basic Emotions (1972)

Ekman devised his list of basic emotions after doing research on many different cultures. He would describe a situation and ask individuals to choose a facial expression that best fit. He would also show photographs of different facial expressions and ask individuals to identify the emotion. Across all cultures studied, Ekman found 6 basic emotions:

Anger
Disgust
Fear
Happiness
Sadness
Surprise
Ekman added to this list in the 1990s, but stated that not all of these can be encoded via facial expressions:

Amusement
Contempt
Contentment
Embarrassment
Excitement
Guilt
Pride in achievement
Relief
Satisfaction
Sensory pleasure
Shame

Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions (1980)

Robert Plutchik created a new conception of emotions in 1980. He called it the “wheel of emotions” because it demonstrated how different emotions can blend into one another and create new emotions. Plutchik first suggested 8 primary bipolar emotions: joy versus sadness; anger versus fear; trust versus disgust; and surprise versus anticipation. From there Plutchik identified more advanced emotions based on their differences in intensities. If you look at the diagram below you can see how each emotion relates to the other:

Parrots’ Classification of Emotions (2001)

The most nuanced classification of emotions so far is probably Parrots’ 2001 theory. Parrot identified over 100+ emotions and conceptualized them as a tree structured list:

Research of Emotions In The Future

As you can tell, there is a lot of disparity on how researchers choose to group different emotions. It’s amazing to me how despite all the technology and scientific advancements we’ve made, we still don’t have a clear-cut answer on how many emotions the human mind is capable of experiencing. I assume that future research is going to build on the above theories and start identifying the neural correlates between each emotion (measured through fMRI brain scans). Neuroscience is probably the only way to determine an “objective” measure of what emotions we have and how they related to one another. Unfortunately, there is still a lot of research to be done, so we are probably going to have to sit and wait until we can learn more about the emotional aspects of the human mind.

So as we can see there is a huge list of human emotions that we are capable of experiencing. However often times we only experience a very limited number of emotions.

It is always the same few ; happiness, anger, love, confidence, anxiety, stress, relaxed. Ask people what emotions do they experience in a week and they'll invariably say those common emotions.

The more type of emotions we feel, the more colorful our life experience will be. It is not that we can't experience a wide array of emotions, rather it is because we often label different emotions into a common group like happy or sad that we forget to experience that emotion for what it is.

Take happy. There is happy, ecstatic, cheerful, relax, excited, exhilarated etc. All those emotions are unique in their own way but we usually label it as happy. By doing that we unintentionally take away it's characteristics and thus take away our experience.

By changing how you label what your emotions you'll change the way you feel. Use stronger labels when experiencing positive emotions and less intense descriptions when going through negative emotions. Doing that alone will literally change your emotional experience. The list below will help you do that.

Final thoughts...

Always remember that there are so many types of emotions out there. Come back to this list of human emotions frequently and check how many did you experience. A life filled with emotions is a rich life.

Now go out there and enjoy every experience you have.

references:

http://www.self-improvement-mentor.com

http://trudyvandenberg.wordpress.com/2011/05/27/how-many-emotions-do-we-have/