The Colorful Palette of Emotions

Emotions play a huge role in our everyday life and yet, we know so little about them. How we feel impacts how we experience life and how we interact with the world around us and still most of the emotional aspect of our lives is a gray area. The question of emotions, how many are there and how can we categorize them has intrigued scientists & philosophers for generations and it continuous to do so even today.

Our feelings and emotions are part of what it means to be human. We all share the trait of experiencing both good and bad feelings and emotions. Emotions are part of human nature. We as human beings have the ability to feel and express emotions. Emotions are central to our human experience and they guide us on our journey to experience and interact with the world. Emotions are indicators, they give us data about what we are experiencing and help us react and respond.

Understanding our emotions is referred to as emotional awareness. Emotional awareness is an important skill to develop, because understanding how you feel and why you feel that way, makes you capable to react and express your emotions more meaningfully. Emotional awareness allows you to communicate more effectively, to understand more deeply who you are and to accept more easily your temperament.

How can you understand your range of emotions and become more aware of your emotions? There are some interesting tools and theories that can help in building your skill in emotional literacy and we look into some of them in this post.

In short, this post looks at the following aspects about Emotions:

• About feelings and emotions
• Understanding the Range of Your Emotions
  • What psychologists say about the range of emotions
  • What the spiritual view is about the range of emotions
• Conclusions

About Feelings and Emotions

The terms “Emotion” and “Feeling” both describe how something or someone makes us feel and therefore we tend to use them interchangeably in everyday speech. “ Feelings” and “emotions” are used in everyday conversation as synonyms. Most people use the term “emotion”, when referring to a feeling and the term “feeling” when in fact they are talking about an emotion. Emotions and feelings are so closely related that we tend to use the words interchangeably and that is all well. From a general, lifestyle, wellness perspective there is no big difference. The difference between feelings and emotions is more obvious and important from a clinical perspective.

Clinically, academically there is a difference in how feelings and emotions are defined, but currently there is no scientific consensus on these definitions. According to Bryn Farnsworth, Ph.D “Emotions are lower level responses occurring in the subcortical regions of the brain “, meanwhile” a feeling is the side product of your brain perceiving an emotion and assigning a certain meaning to it”. [1] For the sake of ease, however in this post we are using the terms emotions and feelings as interchangeably as we use them in everyday speech.

Why do we have emotions ?

There are theories better and worse, but in fact we don’t really know the accurate answer. Emotions are complex psychological and physiological states that we all experience. But why? Why do do we feel what we call emotions?

Some of the theories say that our basic emotions are felt by us to help us survive. We are born with 6 basic emotions for simple survival reasons. These researchers claim that there are a number of basic universal emotions experienced by people all over the world regardless of background or culture. Without much verbal communication most of us can understand how a person feels just form the other persons facial expression and posture. The basic emotions are often presented on the wheel of emotions as the starting point for more complex emotional combinations. The 6 basic emotions are : fear, disgust, anger, surprise, happiness, and sadness.

A new research by Glasgow University challenges the classic 6 basic emotion theory and suggests that we have only 4 basic emotions that originates biologically for survival reasons : happy and sad, afraid and angry. The other two surprise and disgust develop later as well as all the other variations for social evolutionary purposes. Lead researcher Dr Rachael Jack said: “We show that ‘basic’ facial expression signals are perceptually segmented across time and follow an evolving hierarchy of signals over time – from the biologically-rooted basic signals to more complex socially-specific signals.”

In the academic approach emotions are essential experiences of our body and form a part of our human biology. Emotions are physiological body changes, electrochemical signals released by the brain as a response to a stimulus, something perceived from the world or something imagined. We feel emotions to pay more focused attention and to motivate us towards beneficial courses of action.

As babies we all experience emotions and express how we feel. We feel and show our emotions, but we don’t have yet the skill to understand why we feel that way. As we grow we become more skilled and practiced in dealing with emotions. We learn to understand how to use our emotions to our benefits.

Emotional awareness grows as we develop as persons. Emotional awareness and understanding can help us react better to challenging situations. However, emotional intelligence and emotional awareness doesn’t come as easy as it seems. Why? The situation with emotions gets more complicated when we realize that we don’t experience pure emotions, but rather a mixture of them. There aren’t only these 4 or 6 emotions that we experience. In fact we experience a large range of emotions and they mix together in most of the cases while dynamically changing in short periods of time.

Understanding the Range of Your Emotions

“Just because you’ve got the emotional range of a teaspoon doesn’t mean we all have,”

said Hermione [to Ron] nastily, picking up her quill again.

Many different theories have emerged over time to identify and categorize the emotions that we feel. As early as the 4th century B.C., Aristotle attempted to identify the exact number of core emotions that humans feel and experience. He proposed that we feel 14 different emotions : fear, confidence, anger, friendship, calm, enmity, shame, shamelessness, pity, kindness, envy, indignation, emulation, and contempt. Psychologists, philosophers and even business people studying human behavior have created various visual charts and practical applications since then to understand and visualize our range of emotions.

The consciousness levels are not something fixed. We are continuously fluctuating through these levels of emotional and mental states. We continuously fluctuate emotionally, but there is a predominant level that can be considered our normal state. We have a tendency to stay in that emotional zone more than in the other zones. This is our predominant emotional state of being set by our current level of consciousness. With a growth mindset we have the possibility to transcend our current normal level of consciousness and move up the scale and create a new “normal” state for us.

The academic approach to the emotional range

Throughout life, we all experience a lot of emotions in varying intensity. How many emotions are there that we experience? No one really knows. An emotion is a subjective states. Different people may have different emotional experiences even when faced with similar circumstances.  Psychologists have tried to identify the different types of emotions that people experience, but emotions are highly subjective experiences so there is no universally accepted emotional categorization yet.

Some say we have only two emotions : one that feels good and one that feels bad and we just name them differently based on intensity. Others have identified so far 34,000 different distinct emotions. The number of emotions researchers come up with greatly depends on how specifically emotions are defined but most of them agree that there are a number of basic emotions and the rest of the emotional experience comes from the variations, combinations and differences in intensity.

• Charles Darwin –  theorized that emotions came into being as part of the evolutionary process and their main role is to help us survive. He approached emotions form a biological and evolutionary perspective. He categorized emotions in six emotional states: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust.
• Paul Eckman – was mostly interested in nonverbal communication. His research on facial expressions has contributed greatly to our current understanding of emotions. He considered some emotions universal and he also classified emotions in 6 main categories : fear, disgust, anger, surprise, happiness, and sadness. Later in his research career he expanded his list to include other emotions like shame, embarrassment, pride and satisfaction.
• Robert Plutchik – introduced a new way of categorizing emotions. He differentiated 8 primary emotional dimensions and matched them with 8 primary colors. In his approach much like primary colors can be used to create the other colors on the palette, so can we mix and combine primary emotions to form the full spectrum of human emotional experience.

The Wheel of Emotions

This colorful representation of emotions is a usefull tool, when one tries to understand an emotional situation. There are 8 basic emotions identified on the Emotional Wheel. The most basic emotions are considered primary emotions and they are : sadness, fear, disgust, anger, anticipation, surprise, joy and trust.

These 8 basic emotions are combined based on the idea of duality to form polar opposites: joy- sadness, acceptance- disgust, fear- anger, surprise- anticipation. The opposite emotions are presented on the wheel across from each other. The rest of the emotions we experience are explained as mixtures of these basic emotions.

The spiritual approach to the emotional range

The spiritual approach to emotions differs in many ways from the assumptions and theories of modern psychology. Emotions is are related to our level of consciousness and energy, rather than being strictly results of our human biology.  One of the basic guidelines is that everything consist of energy and energy vibrates. Every thought, every emotion therefore vibrates on a different level so we can categorize emotions on a vibrational scale. Emotions correspond to levels of consciousness and so emotional attitudes reveal ones level of consciousness. Understanding the spectrum of emotions brings us closer to understanding the spectrum of human consciousness.

The basic spiritual view about emotions is that emotions cannot be separated from the processes of the mind and so we are fully responsible for our emotional experience. In this sense we are also in control of our emotions in a indirect way. We can develop out of the automatic responsive state and become aware that it is us who holds and turns the Wheel of Emotions, so to say. Biology responds with emotions to a state of consciousness, a level of vibration, a frequency translated into thought first and emotion next.

Emotions come and go in a continuous flow as a form of communication. They are indicators and in this sense all emotions are neutral. There are no good and bad emotions, because there are no good and bad indications. Indications come to tell us something and emotions viewed as indicators are all usefull and valuable. Accepting the emotional flow no matter what emotion arises is the first and most difficult part in dealing with emotions.

• What did Buddha say about emotions? First and foremost there’s nothing wrong with having emotions. According to the teachings of the Buddha, emotions are a fundamental part of the human experience. The emotions are all accepted and they are differentiated not only from the point of view of feeling pleasant or unpleasant, but also whether they are virtuous or unvirtuous. Buddhism explores emotions from a perspective of ethical integrity so that the destructive emotions can be overcome and the constructive emotions can be nurtured. Learning to identify and deal with your emotions is a gradual process of inner transformation.

The Hawkins Scale

Dr. David R. Hawkins, in his book Power vs Force, lays out the spectrum of emotions and consciousness on a vibrational scale. The Hawkins scale goes from the lower levels of shame, guilt, apathy to the more expanded levels of love, ecstasy and enlightenment. The Hawkins scale is an essential framework to understand human emotions and the levels of consciousness. It can be a usefull coaching tool to understand where one is currently on the emotional consciousness scale and how they can move on to experience higher levels.

Instead of using the differentiation of basic biological emotions here emotions appear related to your consciousness state. These consciousness levels are not something fixed to us so there are no basic categories. We are continuously fluctuating through these levels of emotional and mental calibrations. We have the capacity to experience the full spectrum of emotional calibrations with its highs and lows. Although we continuously fluctuate emotionally there is a predominant level that can be considered our normal or basic state. Hawkins pointed out, based on his research, that unfortunately there are far more people calibrated on the lower levels than on the higher levels. He estimated that 85% of humanity is calibrated predominantly below the level of courage, so below the level 200.

The Emotional Guidance Scale

A similar approach to the Hawkins Map of consciousness is The Emotional Guidance Scale presented by Abraham-Hicks. In my opinion the Emotional Guidance Scale is one of the best representations currently on Emotions and it is a usefull tool to help us understand how emotions spiral down and up in a gradual process.

It’s biggest message is that emotions are interrelated. They don’t just jump from one state to another randomly. Why is that important to know? The common advice tells you to “think positively” no matter how you feel right now. The Emotional Guidance Scale can help you understand that when you are in hatred you cannot think positively. You allowed yourself to go too far down the spiral. The best thing you can reach for there is finding relief.

At the base of this theory lies that there are only two basic emotions. There is one that feels good and one that feels bad. All the other emotions are just vibrational variations. Our basic natural state is in the neutral state somewhere between feeling good and feeling bad with a larger tendency toward feeling good. But as we live life we can reprogram our thinking patterns and move our basic emotional state in the lower vibrational zones or the upper ones.

Summary

We are emotional beings. Some people are better at deciphering and understanding emotional reactions, expressions than others. We refer to them as empaths. Most people however find it difficult to understand their emotions well and so they are clueless regarding the emotions of others. Social bonding depends on how well we can understand our emotions and the emotions of others.

Various theories have been put forward to explain our emotional experiences. The general consensus among scientists today is that there are some basic emotions ( some say 2, some say 4 some argue for 6 ). It is suggested that these basic emotions serve as the elemental building blocks for all other emotions that we have in life. They form the foundation for the more complex and nuanced emotions that make up the human emotional experience. So when we are facing very complex emotional situations it is usefull to find what basic emotion is shaping our experience.

Photo credits: Abstract Emotions drawing , Plutchik Emotion Wheel , Hawkins Consciousness Scale, The Emotional Guidance Scale

Sources: 1. Measuring emotions , Understanding emotions, Hawkins scale, The 4 basic emotions, The Emotional Guidance Scale 

Further Reading