UC Berkeley

What are the emotions? For 50 years, scientists have sought to map emotion-related experience, expression, physiology and recognition in terms of the “Basic 6” emotions– anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise. Claims about the relationships between these six emotions and prototypical facial configurations have provided the basis for a longstanding debate over the diagnostic value of expression. Here, building upon recent empirical findings and methodologies, I offer an alternative conceptual and methodological approach that reveals a richer taxonomy of emotion. Dozens of distinct varieties of emotion are reliably distinguished by language, evoked in distinct circumstances, and perceived in distinct expressions of the face, body, and voice. Traditional models – both the Basic 6 and affective circumplex (valence and arousal) – capture a fraction of the systematic variability in emotional response. In contrast, emotion-related responses (e.g., the smile of embarrassment, triumphant postures, sympathetic vocalizations, blends of distinct expressions) can be explained by richer models of emotion. Determining the full extent of what emotional expressions can tell us, marginally and in conjunction with contextual cues, will require mapping the high-dimensional, continuous space of facial, bodily, and vocal signals onto richly multifaceted experiences using large-scale statistical modeling and machine learning methods.