Have you ever struggled to express your emotions? Everyone has, and there's good reason: it's officially been proven that emotions are way more complicated than we knew. It's been identified that humans feel 27 emotions - a few more than the 6 that scientists previously thought we had.
A new study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences has shown that our basic emotions go far beyond just the basic 6, which were long thought to be happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust and surprise. The study's authors claim it is the 'richest array of reported emotional experiences studied to date', and was conducted by showing 853 men and women short video clips of emotional events like people getting married, people dying, and babies being born. The bank of 2,185 videos also included scenes of spiders and people engaging in awkward handshakes. Each participant then recorded how the clip made them feel, and the extent to which they felt it.
'We found that 27 distinct emotions, not 6, were necessary to account for the way hundreds of people reliably reported feeling in response to each video', explained the study's senior author and expert on the science of emotions, Dacher Keltner.
Lead author Alan Cowen, who is a doctoral student of neuroscience at UC Berkeley, commented that 'Emotional experiences are so much richer and more nuanced than previously thought.' He added, 'We sought to shed light on the full palette of emotions that colour our inner world.'
The study concluded that the full list of human emotions are as follows: admiration, adoration, aesthetic appreciation, amusement, anger, anxiety, awe, awkwardness, boredom, calmness, confusion, contempt, craving, disappointment, disgust, empathic pain, entrancement, envy, excitement, fear, guilt, horror, interest, joy, nostalgia, pride, relief, romance, sadness, satisfaction, sexual desire, surprise, sympathy, and triumph. Not only that, but there is a scale on which we feel each emotion, and you can obviously experience more than one at once. The findings were displayed on a map, which shows all the identified emotions linked because 'everything is interconnected', says Cowen.
It's no wonder we sometimes get caught up in all the feels.
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.