Researching some stuff for work I happened on a diagram that expresses a simple conceit: we all have 8 basic emotions and 8 advanced emotions (which are each composed of 2 basic emotions).
Truth be told, I fell in love with this diagram because of its overt simplicity, complete fallibility and because PhD Robert Plutchick (God rest his soul) was so optimistic that he firmly believed the complex wash of human emotions can be distilled logically into a pretty flower (where rage is a petal and that petal is fuschia).
I don’t think it’ll ever be that simple. That’s why people like being human.
Maybe I suffer from a touch of synesthesia because I fell on my head when I was a kid but I’ve always thought of emotions as flavors. Like flavors, they’re hard to pinpoint and language tends to fall short when you try and express them. Even something as unmistakable as rage is different for everyone and it’s rarely as pretty as a tulip.
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August 4, 2010 at 7:52 am
Elias Haileselassie
This is just a simpler model of human emotion! and this is all we have for now. Because this model exists now, may be we will have a better model in the future. But it had to start some where.
Think about ‘Time’ is it discrete or continuous? we count elapsed time in seconds like 1, 2, 3 …. but time is continuous! and smooth! we feel it, still we count it only with some integral precision!
We can also think about the gravitational acceleration of the earth g=9.81 m/s2. Is this correct? No this is only an approximation! We always try to have a model of some thing! same goes to behavioral models. I can see that there is an emotion in between joy and sadness! however our model might be refined in the future.