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Motivation and emotion/Tutorials/Core emotions

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Tutorial 07: Core emotions
This is the seventh tutorial for the motivation and emotion unit of study.

Overview

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  • Explores the psychological concept of core emotions – what are the criteria for an emotion and what are the core emotions?
  • The class exercise involves sorting many emotion words to create to linguistically model underlying clusters of emotional experience

Criteria

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What are the criteria for a core emotion?

To be classified as a core or basic emotion, the affective state should exhibit each of the following criteria:

  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; present in primates)
  5. Adaptive (i.e., has a distinct purpose)
  6. Short-lived (rapid onset, short duration; 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

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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

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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

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Linguistic models of emotion are developed from analysis of language (words) used to describe different affective states.

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

Activity: Emotion sort

  1. Open this list of emotion words
  2. Each person selects an emotion word and classifies it as either a:
    1. core emotion (and allocates it to a core emotion family)
    2. non-emotion (and indicates the reason it doesn't qualify as an emotion)
  3. Classifications can be changed if you disagree
  4. Repeat until all words are classified—a progress bar will be displayed
  5. If unsure, use chat or the comments column
  6. Discuss the:
    • experience of categorising: e.g., what was like? easy? hard? why?
    • unusual/unknown words or emotions you'd like to share or want to know more about?
    • results based on data analysis about:
      • % classified as emotions or not emotions
      • which emotion families were most popular and which words were allocated to each emotion family
      • which reasons were most used for excluding affective states as emotions

Bar chart showing the frequency of affective words sorted into 19 categories of emotion

Emotion knowledge

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Schadenfreude (pronounced shar-den-frood-ar) is a German word for pleasure that arises from the misfortune of others (e.g., laughing when someone slips on a banana peel).
Emotions wheel showing aspects of seven core emotions

What is emotion knowledge?

Emotion knowledge is part of emotional intelligence.

Emotion knowledge refers to the library or vocabulary of distinct emotion concepts (represented by words) that a person has access to. The bigger the library, the more chance there is of being able to distinguish between subtle shades and nuances of emotional states (e.g., various flavours of anger or joy):

Emotion knowledge can be improved by expanding one's linguistic repertoire for describing emotions. Our vocabularies provide windows into our psychoemotional experience. For a deeper dive, see the work of James Pennebaker, one of the study's authors, via Google Scholar.

Emotional intelligence

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What is "emotional intelligence" (or emotional quotient (EQ))? It can also be called emotional literacy.

Howard Gardener (1983) proposed emotional intelligence as one of several multiple intelligences.

Goleman's (1995) conceptualisation of emotional intelligence suggested four aspects, based on awareness/management and self/other distinctions (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Four Quadrants of Emotional Intelligence (based on Goleman, 1995)

Awareness Management
Self Self-awareness Self-management
Other Social awareness Relationship management

The term "intelligence" implies a fixed, steady state, however the four aspects of emotional intelligence are learnable and trainable, such as in school and the workplace.

Foreign emotion words

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Non-English emotion words and definitions suggested by a class in 2023.

Many nuances of emotion are not as well described in the English language as they are in other languages.

There are plenty of non-English words in the 7,000 or so other human languages that capture various subtleties in the kaleidoscope of human feeling. Some of these words have been imported to English, such as schadenfreude (German) which means pleasure derived from the misfortune of others, but there are many others which do not have an English equivalent and haven't been incorporated into English.

What words from other languages describe unique types of emotion? Share an example (from your knowledge or by exploring the links below) and its description.

Friluftsliv (pronounced free-loofts-liv) is a Norwegian word for the practice of purposefully spending time outdoors and the physical and mental health benefits that this engenders.

Lists of non-English emotion words:

What are the psychological implications of our emotion knowledge? 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. In other words, our consciousness and experience is determined by our language. Therefore, expanding our language, can expand our emotional experience.

So, linguistic relativity implies that we can enrich our emotional lives by expanding our emotional vocabulary and incorporating more non-English emotion words.

Recording

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See also

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Wikipedia
Lecture
Tutorials
Admin

References

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Gardner, H. (1983), Frames of mind: The theory of multiple intelligences. Basic Books.

Goleman, D. (1995). Emotional intelligence. Bantam.

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