Cowen & Keltner 2017
This research study sought to answer the questions:
- How many distinct varieties of emotion do people reliably report experiencing across distinct situations?
- Is reported emotional experience better understood in terms of categories or dimensions?
- Do boundaries between emotion categories correspond to discrete jumps or smooth transitions?
Cowen & Keltner 2017
Researchers showed participants video clips designed to elicit emotional responses. They had participants self report the emotions they experienced while watching the videos. Click the link to the right to view the videos used in the experiment.
Warning: there are some mature and/or disturbing videos in the datset. Do not click if you do not wish to view.
Cowen & Keltner 2017
Participants responded via Amazon Mechanical Turk, linked to the right. There were three groups of subjects:
Group 1
Group 2
Group 3
Cowen & Keltner 2017
Results were analyzed using a Principle Component Analysis (PCA)
Click here to view the results
Cowen & Keltner paper: Research questions
- How many distinct varieties of emotion do people reliably report experiencing across distinct situations?
- Is reported emotional experience better understood in terms of categories or dimensions/constructive?
- Do boundaries between emotion categories correspond to discrete jumps or smooth transitions?
Emotions are understood as categories
Which is a better way to explain how the particpants grouped the videos? Using categories? or using affective dimensions?
Categories
Affective Dimensions
Results showed that categorical dimensions explained more of the variance in the dataset. In other words, the participants grouped the videos more based on the categories.
Cowen & Keltner paper: Research questions
- How many distinct varieties of emotion do people reliably report experiencing across distinct situations?
- Is reported emotional experience better understood in terms of categories or dimensions?
- Do boundaries between emotion categories correspond to discrete jumps or smooth transitions?
There are smooth transitions between categories
This map shows how many times a video was categorized by two different categories.
Cowen & Keltner paper: Results
Question 1 Results: 27 distinct emotions emerged, rather than just a few basic ones. Question 2 Results: Emotions are best captured as categories rather than continuous dimensions. Question 3 Results: Boundaries between emotions are not rigid; they form smooth gradients. For example, fear blends into anxiety, horror, and disgust.
Did they group them by categories, like certainty, control, safety?
Did they group them along affective dimensions, like joy, fear, and surprise?
Group 1: These subjects gave free response interpretations of their emotional response to the vidoes they viewed.
Group 2: These participants rated each of the videos they viewed in terms of the degree to which it made them feel the 34 emotion categories of interest.
Group 3: These participants rated each of the videos they viewed in terms of its placement along 14 widely measured scales of affective dimensions.
We should be cautious when interpreting self report measures:
They are the most accessible measure of subjective experience, though not a direct readout of experience. There are limits to what can be expressed with language, and factors like culture, gender, and social class influence language use.
The stimuli consisted of 2,185 separate videos, on average 5 seconds in length. They were found using contextual phrases targeting at 34 categories of emotion. These categories were based on Darwin's observations (admiration, adoration, sympathy), emotion taxonomies from theories, recent studies of positive emotions (awe, joy, love, desire, excitement), emotions around daily interactions (confusion, awkwardness, calmness), and others (fear, anxiety, horror).
This is a statistical technique used to identify which variables explain most of the variance in a dataset. In other words, which variables in your experiment most explain your results? This was used to identify which emotional categories best explained the videos they viewed.
Results showed 27 distinct categories of emotion: Admiration, Adoration, Aesthetic, Appreciation, Amusement, Anxiety, Awe, Awkwardness, Boredom, Calmness, Confusion, Craving, Disgust, Empathetic pain, entrancement, Envy, Excitement, Fear, Horror, Interest, Joy, Nostalgia, Romance, Sadness, Satisfaction, Sexual desire, Sympathy, Triumph
Research on emotion
Sarah Cook
Created on October 2, 2025
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Transcript
Cowen & Keltner 2017
This research study sought to answer the questions:
Cowen & Keltner 2017
Researchers showed participants video clips designed to elicit emotional responses. They had participants self report the emotions they experienced while watching the videos. Click the link to the right to view the videos used in the experiment.
Warning: there are some mature and/or disturbing videos in the datset. Do not click if you do not wish to view.
Cowen & Keltner 2017
Participants responded via Amazon Mechanical Turk, linked to the right. There were three groups of subjects:
Group 1
Group 2
Group 3
Cowen & Keltner 2017
Results were analyzed using a Principle Component Analysis (PCA)
Click here to view the results
Cowen & Keltner paper: Research questions
Emotions are understood as categories
Which is a better way to explain how the particpants grouped the videos? Using categories? or using affective dimensions?
Categories
Affective Dimensions
Results showed that categorical dimensions explained more of the variance in the dataset. In other words, the participants grouped the videos more based on the categories.
Cowen & Keltner paper: Research questions
There are smooth transitions between categories
This map shows how many times a video was categorized by two different categories.
Cowen & Keltner paper: Results
Question 1 Results: 27 distinct emotions emerged, rather than just a few basic ones. Question 2 Results: Emotions are best captured as categories rather than continuous dimensions. Question 3 Results: Boundaries between emotions are not rigid; they form smooth gradients. For example, fear blends into anxiety, horror, and disgust.
Did they group them by categories, like certainty, control, safety?
Did they group them along affective dimensions, like joy, fear, and surprise?
Group 1: These subjects gave free response interpretations of their emotional response to the vidoes they viewed.
Group 2: These participants rated each of the videos they viewed in terms of the degree to which it made them feel the 34 emotion categories of interest.
Group 3: These participants rated each of the videos they viewed in terms of its placement along 14 widely measured scales of affective dimensions.
We should be cautious when interpreting self report measures: They are the most accessible measure of subjective experience, though not a direct readout of experience. There are limits to what can be expressed with language, and factors like culture, gender, and social class influence language use.
The stimuli consisted of 2,185 separate videos, on average 5 seconds in length. They were found using contextual phrases targeting at 34 categories of emotion. These categories were based on Darwin's observations (admiration, adoration, sympathy), emotion taxonomies from theories, recent studies of positive emotions (awe, joy, love, desire, excitement), emotions around daily interactions (confusion, awkwardness, calmness), and others (fear, anxiety, horror).
This is a statistical technique used to identify which variables explain most of the variance in a dataset. In other words, which variables in your experiment most explain your results? This was used to identify which emotional categories best explained the videos they viewed.
Results showed 27 distinct categories of emotion: Admiration, Adoration, Aesthetic, Appreciation, Amusement, Anxiety, Awe, Awkwardness, Boredom, Calmness, Confusion, Craving, Disgust, Empathetic pain, entrancement, Envy, Excitement, Fear, Horror, Interest, Joy, Nostalgia, Romance, Sadness, Satisfaction, Sexual desire, Sympathy, Triumph