Wikiversity

Motivation and emotion/Tutorials/Core emotions

< Motivation and emotion | Tutorials

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

Overview

edit
  • 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

edit

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

edit

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

edit

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

edit

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

Emotional intelligence

edit

What is "emotional intelligence" (EQ)?

It could also be termed emotional literacy.

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

Table 1.

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

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

Emotion knowledge

edit
 
Schadenfreude (pronounced shar-den-frood-ar) is a German word for pleasure that one may derive from the misfortune of another (e.g., laughing at someone slipping on a banana peel).

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):

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

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

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.

 
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 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

edit

See also

edit
Additional tutorial material
Wikipedia
Lecture
Tutorials
Admin

References

edit
Goleman, D. (1997). Emotional Intelligence. Bantam.
edit
Retrieved from "https://en.wikiversity.org/w/index.php?title=Motivation_and_emotion/Tutorials/Core_emotions&oldid=2674799"