Humans possess 27 distinct types of emotions, says study

Scientists from the University of California, Berkeley have marked a breakthrough in the classification of emotions as it identified 27 distinct types of emotions challenging the previous premises that distinguished feeling under universal categories of happiness, sadness, anger, surprise, fear, and disgust.

Researchers analysed the responses of more than 800 men and women to over 2,000 emotionally evocative video clips using novel statistical methods.

Dacher Keltner, a professor at UC Berkeley and senior author of the study stated, "We found that 27 distinct dimensions, not six, were necessary to account for the way hundreds of people reliably reported feeling in response to each video".

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Moreover, in contrast to the notion that each emotional state is an island, the study found that "there are smooth gradients of emotion between, say, awe and peacefulness, horror and sadness, and amusement and adoration", added Keltner.

The study published in the journal PNAS made a demographically diverse group of 853 men and women to watch online random sampling of silent 5- to 10-second videos intended to evoke a broad range of emotions.

(With inputs from PTI)