0.7 A conversation about measuring emotion and its conclusion: mood  (Page 13/26)

The advanced emotions in the graph by Plutchik are the ones on the outside. They are advanced because they are a combination of the two legs of the diagram that they are in between. For instance aggressiveness could be the result annoyance, interest, anger, anticipation, rage and vigilance. The interest there raises the persons energy level and the anger directs it into aggression. Like I said before, some emotions and emotional states, moods, can be very complicated and some can be very simple. Just basically describing ones feelings in the most complicated way, by showing all of them and how they relate to the other feelings, is a great way to try to think about what you or someone else might be feeling.

An emotional state must be a lot more complicated than simply being a combination of a few feelings like afraid, happy, sad, anxious, etc. Each one of those feelings is going to be unique every time based upon what happened. For instance, if you were afraid because there was a gun involved, then the gun is going to contribute to the unique feeling of fear for that instance. There are probably going to be other things contributing to your feeling of fear that you aren't aware of but might be if you thought about it more, maybe something like a person you met earlier that day or some other smaller factor you might have not been aware of.

That just basically means though that everything in life contributes to unique feelings and emotional states. That is rather obvious, it is just then a matter of figuring out what the significant and relevant factors are. There might also be significant things that aren't obvious to most people, however. There is a way that emotions function on a moment to moment basis that is significant. If someone understood how much happiness would be too much for someone, then they might understand when someones excitement would automatically decrease in order to decrease the happiness to keep it from getting too large. A sort of emotional balancing probably occurs between emotions all the time that would be worthy to note. If you take into account all the thoughts that people have that they are not aware of, it seems clear that many of those thoughts could be significant you just don't happen to aware of them unless you learned which might be significant first. There are prejudices, social judgments, perceptions and self concepts - a lot of which you might not be aware of.

You could do your best to guess everything that someone was feeling at that moment. If you think about it that way, you could describe someones feelings based off of real things around them and that happened to them, instead of just with feelings and emotions. Just saying, "this person just went to the store" reflects something about their emotional state. It is taking it too a deeper level of analysis to then say, "this person just went to the store, so they are happy they got to get out of the house". If you just describe absolutely everything that is going on you would then have a better idea as to what the person was feeling. You can ask someone what their feelings are or what the best way to describe them would be. Showing the emotions (like the diagram by Plutchik) could help to discuss what the feelings someone is experiencing are.