Core emotion criteria

What are the criteria for a core emotion?

To qualify as a core emotion, consider whether an affective state is/has a:

1. Distinct physiological/neurology response? (e.g., neurological activation, hear-rate)
2. Distinct feeling? (subjective/phenomenological state)
3. Unique expression? (e.g., unique facial expression and body language)
4. Innate? (i.e., evident from birth)
5. Adaptive purpose/function?
6. Short-lived (vs. moods which are longer-lived)
7. Triggered by same circumstances each time? (i.e., has a specific causal trigger)?
8. Universal (i.e., recognised by different cultures)

Non-emotions

There are several affective psychological experiences which do not qualify as emotions and may instead be better considered as:

1. Attitudes (e.g., hate)
2. Behaviours (e.g., aggression)
3. Cognitions (e.g., confused)
4. Disorders (e.g., behavioural conduct disorder)
5. Moods (e.g., grumpy)
6. Personality traits (e.g., neuroticism)

Steps

1. Face-to-face
   1. In small groups, cut up the list of emotion words - need scissors and lots of table space
   2. Sort the emotion words:
      1. sort those which represent emotions into core emotion families - try not to be restricted or overly-guided by previous theory - go with what seems to make sense.
      2. discard those which do not represent core emotion families
   3. Label each emotion family
   4. Share and discuss your group's model with the rest of the class
2. Virtual
   1. Go to the online list of emotion words
   2. As a group, work through each emotion word, classifying as either a:
      1. member of a core emotion family
      2. non-emotion word
   3. After the initial classification, sort and review the words by emotion family
   4. Discuss the results

Emotion knowledge

This core emotion sort exercise is also designed to expand "emotion knowledge", which is the "number of different emotions any one person can distinguish" (e.g., various shades of anger) which is part of emotional literacy and emotional intelligence. Emotion knowledge can be improved by expanding one's linguistic repertoire for describing emotions. Reeve (2009, p. 353) suggests that "the finer and more sophisticated one's emotion knowledge is, the greater his or her capacity to respond to each life event with a specialised and highly appropriate reaction".

Foreign language emotion words

There are many non-English words for emotional states that are not so well described in English e.g.,:

• 17 words we don’t have in English that describe feelings we have every day
• There are at least 216 foreign words for positive emotional states and concepts that we don’t have in English
• Buy more books than you ever read? The Japanese have a word for that.