Motivation and emotion/Tutorials/Core emotions

Overview

 * Explores the psychological concept of core emotions – what are they?
 * Hundreds of emotion words are sorted in a group exercise to create to a model which depicts underlying clusters of emotional experience.

Criteria
What are the criteria for a core emotion?

To be classified as a core emotion, the affective state should exhibit each of the following:
 * 1) Distinct neurological and physiological response (e.g., pattern of brain activity, heart-rate)
 * 2) Distinct feeling (i.e., subjective/phenomenological state)
 * 3) Unique expression (e.g., facial expression and body language)
 * 4) Innate (i.e., evident from birth)
 * 5) Adaptive (e.g., what is its purpose?)
 * 6) Short-lived (whereas moods which are longer-lived)
 * 7) Triggered by same circumstances each time (i.e., has a specific causal trigger)?
 * 8) Universal (i.e., recognised by different cultures)

Non-emotions
If an affective experience does not qualify as an emotion, they could instead be:
 * 1) Attitude (e.g., hate)
 * 2) Behaviour (e.g., aggression)
 * 3) Cognition (e.g., confused)
 * 4) Disorder (e.g., depression, behavioural conduct disorder)
 * 5) Mood (e.g., grumpy)
 * 6) Personality trait (e.g., neuroticism)

Core emotions
What are the core emotions?

Theoretical models typically identify about six to eight core emotions, usually including:
 * 1) Fear
 * 2) Anger
 * 3) Disgust
 * 4) Sadness
 * 5) Interest
 * 6) Joy
 * 7) Surprise
 * 8) Contempt

Emotion sort exercise
Linguistic models of emotion are developed from analysis of language used to describe different affective states.

The goal of this exercise is to organise many (250+) emotion-related words into core emotion families:


 * 1) Open this list of emotion words
 * 2) Each person selects an emotion word and classifies it as either a:
 * 3) core emotion
 * 4) non-emotion
 * 5) Classifications can be changed if you disagree
 * 6) Repeat until all words are classified - a progress bar will be displayed
 * 7) Use chat or the comments column to discuss (e.g., unusual/unknown words or emotions you'd like to share or want to know more about)
 * 8) As a whole class, discuss the results

Emotional intelligence
What is "emotional intelligence"?

It could also be termed emotional literacy or EQ.

Goleman's (1997) conceptualisation of emotional intelligence suggested four aspects (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Four Quadrants of Emotional Intelligence (based on Goleman (1997)

Emotion knowledge


Part of emotional intelligence is "emotion knowledge".

What is emotion knowledge?

Emotion knowledge is the library of distinct emotion concepts (e.g., represented by words) a person has access. The bigger your library, the more chance you have of being able to distinguish between various nuances of your emotional states (e.g., various shades of anger): ""the finer and more sophisticated one's emotion knowledge is, the greater his or her capacity to respond to each life event with a specialised and highly appropriate reaction" (Reeve, 2009, p. 353)."

Emotion knowledge can be improved by expanding one's linguistic repertoire for describing emotions. Our vocabularies can act as a window into psychological and physical well-being. For a deeper dive, see the work of James Pennebaker, one of the study's authors, via Google Scholar.

Non-English emotion words


Many nuances of emotion are not well described in the English language.

However, there are plenty of non-English words from the 7,000 or so other human languages that capture subtleties in the kaleidoscope of human feeling.

What words from other languages do you know that describe emotions?

Share an example (from your knowledge or the links below), the definition, and maybe why you like it, with the class.

Lists of non-English emotion words:
 * 20 foreign words for emotions you never knew you had (inc-aus.com)
 * Words for positive phenomena that don't have an English equivalent (mentalfloss.com)
 * 17 feeling words we don’t have in English (thoughtcatalog.com)
 * 25 beautiful words for emotions that don’t exist in English (berlitz.com)
 * 203 most beautiful untranslatable words (theintrepidguide.com)
 * Foreign words for positive emotional states and concepts that we don’t have in English (bps.org.uk)
 * English is surprisingly devoid of emotionally positive words
 * Untranslatable words for feelings from 20 different languages (gizmodo.com)
 * 14 untranslatable emotions that English can't convey (collinsdictionary.com)

What are the psychological implications of our emotion vocabularies? For example, the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis (linguistic relativity) argues that language enables experience. According to this essentialist view, our emotional vocabulary enables but also limits our capacity for emotional experience.

But linguistic relativity also implies that we can enrich our emotional lives by incorporating non-English emotion words.

Recording

 * Tutorial 07 (2023)