Categorizing emotions

I wrote a bias categorizing article about their unwillingness to be categorized. Some biases are specific to certain small situations. Other biases belong to multiple groups. Emotions have the same problem. There is no clear and fully scientific way to categorize emotions. But emotions have been much easier to study as you can get people to categorize them in no time as they are easily understood by even small kids. They have been studied systematically since even before psychology was a science. And more importantly, we have had evolutionary psychologists study emotions systematically which means they were studied from a scientific point of view right away instead of being something that we just thought loosely about like biases. We know pretty much why emotions evolved and how they solve problems.

I strongly recommend you visit this Wikipedia article to understand emotion classification. I pretty much copied it for my blog post.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_classification

Psychoevolutionary Theory of Emotion (Plutchik)

Plutchik’s emotion categories are the most widely used and well-known categories. He is a great and well-known scientist too who understood emotions in-depth. He created 10 postulates about emotions presenting them as universal instincts.

1. The concept of emotion is applicable to all evolutionary levels and applies to all animals including humans.
2. Emotions have an evolutionary history and have evolved various forms of expression in different species.
3. Emotions served an adaptive role in helping organisms deal with key survival issues posed by the environment.
4. Despite different forms of expression of emotions in different species, there are certain common elements, or prototype patterns, that can be identified.
5. There is a small number of basic, primary, or prototype emotions.
6. All other emotions are mixed or derivative states; that is, they occur as combinations, mixtures, or compounds of the primary emotions.
7. Primary emotions are hypothetical constructs or idealized states whose properties and characteristics can only be inferred from various kinds of evidence.
8. Primary emotions can be conceptualized in terms of pairs of polar opposites.
9. All emotions vary in their degree of similarity to one another.
10. Each emotion can exist in varying degrees of intensity or levels of arousal.

His thinking about emotions is still on the forefront of this science. But you still need to add some creative thinking to create a functional model from these 10 postulates and then all the other findings he used.

Plutchik’s wheel of emotions

Plutchik made this 3D figure of emotions in 1980.

The left side are proactive emotions: anger, anticipation, joy and trust. On the right side are reactive emotions: fear, surprise, sadness, disgust.

I added in the text outside the edges of the petals.

The second-row emotions can combine into feelings in dyads: Joy, trust, fear, surprise, sadness, disgust, anger, anticipation.

Here is my illustration of what emotions they combine into in dyads. For example, Joy+Anticipation creates the feeling of optimism. They can also combine in triads, but I’m yet to recreate that chart in Tableau.

This is how the second-row emotions combine into feelings.

You are welcome to use my charts in any way you see fit, just make sure you can use the models too as I didn’t create them. I created all charts here except for the 2 first ones. Emoji copyright: Emojis made by Freepik and Smartline from www.flaticon.com

TenHouten

This is a newer rethinking of Plutchik’s dyads by TenHouten. This one is a bit harder to figure out just by looking at it.

TenHouten, W. D. (2006). A general theory of emotions and social life. Routledge. Page 111

Contrasting basic emotions

This is a list where emotions are categorized as problem-solving instincts.

Robinson, D. L. (2009). “Brain function, mental experience and personality”. The Netherlands Journal of Psychology. pp. 152–167.

Emotional flow

Six emotion axes relevant for learning.

Kort, B.; Reilly, R.; Picard, R.W. (2001). “An affective model of interplay between emotions and learning: Reengineering educational pedagogy-building a learning companion”. Proceedings IEEE International Conference on Advanced Learning Technologies. pp. 43–46. doi:10.1109/ICALT.2001.943850. ISBN 0–7695–1013–2 — via www.academia.edu.

HUMAINE’s proposal for EARL

Here emotions are just grouped so that we easier can talk about them.

“HUMAINE Emotion Annotation and Representation Language”. Emotion-research.net. Archived from the original on April 11, 2008. Retrieved June 30, 2006.

Geneva Emotion Wheel

Here the emotions are sorted on 2 dimensions and you can even pick how strong you feel an emotion by picking the right circle size. They redo this model from time to time and have it copyrighted.

Here are the 2 main dimensions used in emotion models:

… as outlined by Watson and Tellegen (1985), a twodimensional structure is currently the most widely advocated. Generally these two dimensions are defined as a pleasantness-unpleasantness dimension (happy, glad versus sad, upset) and an arousal dimension (excited, tense versus relaxed, sleepy).

Morgan, R., & Heise, D. (1988). Structure of Emotions. Social Psychology Quarterly, 51(1), 19–31. Retrieved January 28, 2020, from www.jstor.org/stable/2786981

Scherer, K. R. (2005). What are emotions? And how can they be measured?. Social science information, 44(4), 695–729.

Interactive version: https://github.com/kwarpechowski/Components-for-psychological-research/tree/master/packages/gew

Conclusion

Emotions are much easier to sort than biases. There are not as many primary emotions in most models and hundreds of people have made easily accessible models for emotions. But there is still no clear way to categorize the thousands of human instincts that evolved in different ways at different times.

For example, why would jealousy not be considered a primary emotion? It’s a state making one irritable if your partner seems unfaithful which will let the partner know that any extramarital affair will have negative consequences. This largely protects men from raising children who are not theirs and protects women from missing out on resources from their men. As this emotion is crucial to reproduction it’s crucial to human life. But seemingly it’s not general enough to be considered a primary emotion in most emotion models. Maybe because it can be said to be a sub-emotion to disgust or anger. And some emotions did evolve from other emotions just like losing and pain causes the same type of feeling.

Even though no model is conclusive there are quite a few useful models out there and they can be useful to teach people about feelings or let people illustrate how they feel by pointing to a feeling in a model.