A colorful mind can create colorful emotions. Starting from the darkest ones to the most enlighten states, we often go through all the specter without us even realizing how many emotions we feel in the same time. But how many emotions are out there? This is a question tougher than we might expect because we live through emotions every day.
This search of emotions started many years ago with Aristotle who concluded we have 14 different emotions (fear, confidence, anger, friendship, calm, grudge, shame, rudeness, pity, kindness, envy, indignation, rivalry, and contempt) which gives our life a purpose. I don’t know what kind of experiments he did (probably none), but it’s a big ass list. Since we, as humans, want to evolve and we want to clear some space in our mind since a list of 14 emotions occupies too much of our memory, we tried clearing up the list. So in 20th century, Robert Plutchik reduced the list to eight basic emotions (joy, sadness, trust, disgust, fear, anger, surprise, and anticipation) which interact with each other creating the so called Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions.
Because Mr. Plutchik’s model wasn’t enough, Paul Ekman started to play with our emotions and it seems that he hasn’t stopped yet because there are models from 5 to 7 emotions (based on this Atlas of Emotions, it seems that most researchers agreed on 5 basic emotions, which are anger, fear, disgust, sadness and enjoyment). There is also an animated movie called Inside Out with these five basic emotions, which gave me some interesting insights about how our mind might work.
Based on all these theories, which emotions you think you feel the most?