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300 Human Emotions

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This is a pretty comprehensive list of all the words that humans have used to describe our complex human emotions.

Fundamentally there are only 7 main emotions shown in the middle of this wheel, but they then expand out into more nuanced expressions, and as the lists below show - there are combinations of words from all around the world that provide even more nuance (and potentially a sense of the culture itself)

My intention with this is to use it for both Deprojection Narrative Workflow & the Deprojection Audio Workflow essentially choosing an emotion to focus on expressing through AV Composition.

It could be a strong practice for daily 04. EXPRESSION and will be something that the machines can't understand at least for a while. It also provides a good feed for 05. TRANSMISSION as human emotions are also something that connects us outside of language barriers. We both know what it feels to like to be fearful, and when you look the tertiary level that then connects you more deeply with another as feeling insignificant or worthless is not common for all, neither is feeling persecuted or excluded.

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Positive Emotions

Positive emotions are pleasant or desirable states. When we think of positive emotions, we often think of happiness. But positive emotions include so much more than that. They range from high-energy emotions like excitement to low-energy positive emotions like calmness. The extent to which we find these emotional states pleasurable depends on us. Some of us prefer excitement to calmness and some of us prefer the opposite. And some have suggested that there are genetic underpinnings to these preferences (e.g., the COMT gene).

Here is a list of some of the most common positive emotions:

Negative Emotions

Negative emotions are unpleasant or undesirable states. But, just because they are unpleasurable doesn't mean they are unhelpful. Negative emotions help us do important things in our lives. For example, fear helps us escape from a tiger, anger helps us stand up for our own needs, and sadness helps us take a step back or seek social support. We need negative emotions just as much as we need positive emotions. When it comes to our well-being, we just need to learn how to regulate emotions in effective ways.

Here is a list of some of the most common negative emotions:

Emotions & Definitions (According to Basic / Discrete Emotion Theory)

There are a few theories of emotion that help organize different emotions and help us understand how they relate to each other. The most well-known of these theories is the discrete (or basic) theory of emotion. This was the theory used in the movie Inside Out. The basic premise is that emotions are separate, discrete things and that they are basic because they originate from having to deal with fundamental life tasks like running away from a predator (Ekman, 1999).

Enjoyment
Enjoyment is thought to be the only basic positive emotion. It may include other positive emotional experiences such as:

Sadness
Sadness is a low-activation (low-energy) negative emotion that we often feel in response to things like rejection or loss. A list of sadness related emotions include:

Fear
Fear is a high-activation, avoidance-motivated negative emotion that we tend to feel in response to threats. Here's a fear-related emotion list:

Anger
Like fear, anger is a high-activation negative emotion. But unlike fear, it is an approach-motivated emotion. When we feel anger we want to approach the object of our anger rather than run away from it. Here is a list of anger-related emotions:

Disgust
Disgust is an avoidance-motivated emotion. There is something that we don't want to be around or experience, and we desire to move away. Here are some disgust-related words:

Emotions (According to the Circumplex Emotion Theory)

Although the basic theory of emotion makes some sense, others have argued that emotions are not discrete things. They don't have specific locations in the brain, they almost always co-occur with each other, and there are many blends of emotions. Reasons like these led psychologists to develop the Emotion Circumplex Model (Russell, 1980).

This model suggests that emotions can be mapped in a circle. These are two axes: one axis is from high to low energy; the other axis is from high to low pleasure. Early researchers believed any emotion could be mapped on this circle. However, more recent research has suggested that there may be more than two dimensions required to understand and map emotions. For example, one study suggested that mapping emotions on how controllable and useful they are is helpful. Plus, this adds two additional dimensions (Trnka et al., 2016). Basically, the only thing we really know for certain about emotions is that they are complex.

Here is a list of emotions from the Emotion Circumplex Model:

High-energy positive emotions:

Emotions (From Plutnik's Wheel of Emotions)

Another well-known model of emotions is Plutnik's wheel. This wheel suggests that there are primary, secondary, and tertiary emotions. Each of the emotions in the wheel can be combined to create new emotions. Here is a list of emotions from Plutnik's model:

Complete List of Emotions

According to Lisa Feldman Barrett, author of the book How Emotions Are Made, recognizing different emotions builds emotional granularity, which means being able to construct precise emotional experiences.

The benefits of building emotional granularity are immense:

People who recognize the different unpleasant feelings were 30% more flexible when regulating their emotions.

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