admiration, adoration, aesthetic appreciation, amusement, anger...

July 30, 2019 7:05 AM

How does one classify the emotions? In an Atlas or an Enyclopedia? Around a Wheel? As a Tree? In a Periodic Table? What is an emotion anyway?
posted by misteraitch (4 comments total)

I much prefer the dimensional approach to Ekman’s list (anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise). It doesn’t seem right to base your categorisation on facial expressions (unless that’s all you’re talking about) and the results don’t feel satisfying, to me. Disgust may have a very distinct facial expression, but I don’t think that makes it one of the major emotions.
posted by Segundus at 9:11 AM on July 30, 2019

Also, here's a nice map of hard-to-translate emotions from around the world (I think posted here several years ago?), by Pei-Ying Lin.
posted by Beardman at 9:15 AM on July 30, 2019 [3 favorites]

A map of subjective feelings, plus the paper it’s drawn from and some comments.
posted by Segundus at 9:20 AM on July 30, 2019 [3 favorites]

My high school German classroom had a poster on the wall which gave the German names for about 80 Gefühle, illustrated by cartoon facial expressions. If only I’d had a mirror I could have looked up the German word for the emotion of "baffled and somewhat alienated to think that my fellow humans, whose species I ostensibly belong to, distinguish 80 outwardly visible emotions in the first place, let alone associate each one with a distinct facial expression which they can recognize in caricature".

Nowadays, such a poster (and I’m sure this exists) could use emoji as a standard grounding. But there's enough confusion about what common emoji mean to make me feel like maybe I was never that weird to begin with. 😑
posted by aws17576 at 10:11 AM on July 30, 2019 [1 favorite]