Self-report captures 27 distinct categories of emotion bridged by continuous gradients
Open accessAbstract
Significance: 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.
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On the subjectively experienced level, universalism extends beyond the canonical Ekman's 6 basic emotions to a variety of non-basic or social emotions known to have discrete neural and expressive bases.
“This suggests that on subjectively experienced level, the universalism extends beyond the canonical”
From Bodily maps of emotions are culturally universal (2020) · cites this paper as Cowen & Keltner, 2017
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- Authors
- Cowen, A. S., & Keltner, D.
- Affiliations
- University of California, Berkeley (US)
- Venue
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
- Publisher
- National Academy of Sciences
- Published
- 2017-09-05
- Volume
- 114
- Issue
- 38
- Pages
- E7900-E7909
- ISSN
- 0027-8424 (ISSN-L)
- 1091-6490
- PMC
- PMC5617253
- OpenAlex
- W2752234108
- Cited by
- 897
- References
- 31
- Citations by year
- 2026: 82 · 2025: 148 · 2024: 98 · 2023: 131 · 2022: 134 · 2021: 107 · 2020: 92 · 2019: 74 · 2018: 28 · 2017: 1 · 2016: 1 · 2013: 1
- FWCI
- 69.44
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Locations
- Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (publishedVersion)
- Europe PMC (PubMed Central) (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- John Templeton Foundation (Universality of Awe)
- Topics
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Experimental and Cognitive Psychology › Emotion and Mood Recognition
- Social Sciences › Psychology › Social Psychology › Emotions and Moral Behavior
- Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Aesthetic Perception and Analysis
- Keywords
- emotion categories, valence, dominance, affective domain, emotion lexicon
- MeSH terms
- Adult, Emotions, Female, Humans, Male, Visual Perception, Self Report
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