CLEVELAND—A road map of human emotions is more than a flat line from euphoria to anguish, according to a CWRU psychologist.

Eric Youngstrom, CWRU assistant professor of psychology, thinks emotions are more complicated, involving a third factor of control or dominance that influences and adds a new dimension to how people feel.

In several psychological studies, Youngstrom found that emotions are more complicated than the accepted two-dimensional model. He proposes expanding the two-dimensional model to a third dimension to have the map of emotions resemble a cone rather than a line.

Across cultures, all humans share a wide range of similar emotions, such as happiness, sadness, shame, anger, fear and shyness. According to Youngstrom, psychologists have mapped these emotions for three decades from positive to negative and from high-to-low activation along a grid that resembles a graph, with extreme emotions varying 180 degrees.

Youngstrom started questioning this model when he saw that anger and fear, two strong negative emotions, fell at the same point on the grid.

If both are negative, he asked, what sets them apart?

According to Youngstrom, anger is associated with violence, aggression and disruptive behaviors, while fear is linked to anxiety. If someone felt relatively in control of a threatening situation, he or she might respond with anger. Without control, the reaction might be fear, he said.

Youngstrom conducted four studies with college students to explore the third-dimension of emotions. He found a third dimension does emerge—control or contempt. In one study, he gave two questionnaires to more than 600 students. When the set of questions lacked references to contempt, he ended up with a flat, two-dimensional model. When he asked the same questions but included references to contempt, he saw the new model emerge from the answers.

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Comments:

Also see Dr. Plutchik's cone chart for colors that he did years ago and I modified it some, here.