SELF: New Research Says There Are Only Four Emotions
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“Just because you’ve got the emotional range of a teaspoon doesn’t mean we all have,” an angry Hermione tells her friend Ron in a heated Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix moment.
Actually though, we all might have. New research from the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology at the University of Glasgow, published this week in Current Biology, says the range of human emotion may be a little closer to a teaspoon than previously thought.
Writing in The Atlantic, Julie Beck does her homework and bring us up to date.
Conventional scientific wisdom recognizes six “classic” emotions:
happy
surprised
afraid
disgusted
angry
sad.
But the Glasgow scientists studied people’s facial expressions, and the emotions they signal, by showing people computer-generated facial animations.
They asked the observers to characterize the faces based on those six basic emotions, and found that anger and disgust looked very similar to the observers in the early stages, as did fear and surprise.
For example, both anger and disgust share a wrinkled nose, and both surprise and fear share raised eyebrows.
Emotions are difficult to deal with from any point of view: control, expression, frequency,and even recognition.
Emotions are what we live by but they also get us into trouble.
For example, we think we buy things using reason (and sometimes we do) but mostly we buy on emotion and we justify the purchase, (we rationalize it) with reason.
Or what passes for reason!
We can’t solve problems often because our emotions cloud the clarity of our thinking.
To get a handle on this check out my book
No really, what IS your problem?
The Sherlock Holmes Guide to problem identification.
If emotions are clouding your life visit me here on Self-Knowledge College.
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Frank Daley
daleyfrank0@gmail.com
