If you took the whole spectrum of human emotion and tried to map it, what would it look like? What geometrical shape would it take? Or would it be more like a schematic? How to accurately represent this crucial aspect of our inner world has been a topic of much debate among psychologists.
The nuances and interconnectedness of the human emotional landscape has proven difficult to represent visually. Two of the most common models, maps and semantic spaces—the framework used to represent word meanings—have both fallen flat. So recently, researchers at UC Berkeley attempted a new approach.
Though we by and large are all well-versed in human emotion, it’s a subjective experience. There are hundreds and even thousands of words related to emotional states. Also, finding the boundaries between one category and the next can be tricky. Researchers in this study call their model a “conceptual framework.”