A question I am often asked is how many emotions are there and what are they? People are often surprised at my hesitation to answer the question. This happened last week whilst I was teaching at the JR hospital in Oxford (Part of Oxford University Medical Sciences Division) and as usual I hesitated. “There is no definitive answer, it depends on who’s research you accept.” One student was so surprised I couldn’t just give an answer he blurted out “But it’s 2010, we must at least know how many emotions there are” with incredulity.
He was even more dumb struck when I said there wasn’t even agreement on what an emotion was let alone how many there are or what they are. Even in 2010 this is quite a complex question. Part of the reason for the lack of clarity is that it is difficult to separate out where cognition(thinking), emotion and feeling (sensory sensations like pain) each stop and the other starts. In fact there is a growing group of researchers and philosophers who argue it is impossible to make any distinction between between cognition and emotion anyway.
There are growing number of scholars who are highlighting the interdependence of our cognitive and emotive functions. Indeed more and more modern research is actually blurring the distinction between our thinking, behaviour, emotions and sensory functions rather than making the delineation between them clearer.
So it shouldn’t be a surprise there isn’t complete agreement about how many emotions there are or even what they are. having said that…
For an answer or two - see the next blog “How many emotions are there? An Answer”
Tags: Emotion
