Trial reportProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2017
Self-report captures 27 distinct categories of emotion bridged by continuous gradients.
Trial report in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 195 papers, 4 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
195 citing papers in PubMed, 4 syntheses or guidelines pooled it.
- Do we feel colours? A systematic review of 128 years of psychological research linking colours and emotions.Psychonomic bulletin & review · 2025Pooled it
- The neuroscience of social feelings: mechanisms of adaptive social functioning.Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews · 2021Pooled it
- The role of incidental affective states in appetitive risk behavior: A meta-analysis.Health psychology : official journal of the Division of Health Psychology, American Psychological Association · 2020Pooled it
- Does non-invasive brain stimulation modulate emotional stress reactivity?Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2020Pooled it
- Trait-relevant movies amplify neuroticism-associated brain responses.Communications psychology · 2026Article
- Emotion profile: A data-driven method to dissect context-specific and co-occurring patterns of emotion.Behavior research methods · 2026Article
- The expression of awe: evolutionary origins and cultural elaborations of a basic emotion.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Review
- The impact of emotion regulation strategies on experiential and physiological responses to negative emotional videos.Philosophical transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological sciences · 2026Article
- The Signature Emotions of a Happy Life, a Meaningful Life, and a Psychologically Rich Life.Affective science · 2026Article
- Granularity of Emotions in Brain and Behavior and Resilience to Childhood Violence Exposure.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2026Article
- Development and Validation of a Multimodal Emotion Recognition Ability Test Based on the Chinese Cultural Context.Journal of Intelligence · 2026Article
- Article
- Towards a Mathematical Structure of Global Phenomenal Consciousness.Entropy (Basel, Switzerland) · 2026Article
- An fMRI-informed EEG model of the amygdala is associated with salience network dynamics during naturalistic emotional stimulation.Molecular psychiatry · 2026Article
- NEVi: Negative Emotional Video dataset - categorizing stimulus intensity ratings based on valence and arousal.Scientific data · 2026Article
- The inadequacy of normative ratings for building stimulus sets in affective science.Emotion (Washington, D.C.) · 2026Article
- Experiencing awe in daily life is linked to lower loneliness.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Intelligent generation of product bionic image forms via multimodal emotion-weighted quantification.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Shape information used for face identity and expression recognition is highly versatile and context specific.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Dynamic emotion fabric theory: a new framework for understanding the biology of flexible emotion states.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2026Review
135 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
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2 authors.
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Abstract
Emotions are centered in subjective experiences that people represent, in part, with hundreds, if not thousands, of semantic terms. Claims about the distribution of reported emotional states and the boundaries between emotion categories-that is, the geometric organization of the semantic space of emotion-have sparked intense debate. Here we introduce a conceptual framework to analyze reported emotional states elicited by 2,185 short videos, examining the richest array of reported emotional experiences studied to date and the extent to which reported experiences of emotion are structured by discrete and dimensional geometries. Across self-report methods, we find that the videos reliably elicit 27 distinct varieties of reported emotional experience. Further analyses revealed that categorical labels such as amusement better capture reports of subjective experience than commonly measured affective dimensions (e.g., valence and arousal). Although reported emotional experiences are represented within a semantic space best captured by categorical labels, the boundaries between categories of emotion are fuzzy rather than discrete. By analyzing the distribution of reported emotional states we uncover gradients of emotion-from anxiety to fear to horror to disgust, calmness to aesthetic appreciation to awe, and others-that correspond to smooth variation in affective dimensions such as valence and dominance. Reported emotional states occupy a complex, high-dimensional categorical space. In addition, our library of videos and an interactive map of the emotional states they elicit (https://s3-us-west-1.amazonaws.com/emogifs/map.html) are made available to advance the science of emotion.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.