The 27 Emotions List: What Recent Science Says We Feel
This article will make you feel at least one of them
“I don’t want to be at the mercy of my emotions. I want to use them, to enjoy them, and to dominate them.”― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
When talking about social media, politics, and $30 Starbucks coffees, we often feel a familiar combination of disgust and anger. But a study in 2017 came to the conclusion we have far more emotions despite what our modern internet age tells us.
In 2017, two researchers from the University of California, Berkely, Alan S. Cowen, and Dacher Keltner, PhD, came to the conclusion there are 27 distinct classifications of emotions in humans.
In fact, their study in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences journal was the largest collection of emotional data to date!
They used new forms of statistical analysis to analyze 324,066 individual judgments from over 800 people using Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Cowen and Keltner initially collected 2,185 five-second videos with the goal of eliciting as many emotions as possible. The videos included births, babies, weddings, death, cute animals, art, explosions, sexual acts, and everything in between.
