Random Emotion

What the emotion generator does

You need a feeling. For a writing prompt, an acting exercise, a mood board, a check-in, or a moment when somebody asks how you are and the honest answer is that you do not have the word.

This gives you one. Pull a handful and watch which ones you can define instantly and which ones you recognise but could not explain. That gap is the interesting part.

What follows is a real and unfinished argument in science about what these things even are. Whether the list is a list of universal, built-in states, or whether the list is doing something stranger, which is helping to build the feelings it names.

How to use it

1. Choose how many you want. A few at a time works best. You want to compare them.
2. Press Generate. A fresh set every time.
3. Press Copy to take the set with you.

Nobody agrees how many there are

Start with a question that sounds like it should have an answer. How many emotions are there?

There is no agreed number. Not roughly, not within a factor of ten. This is not a gap waiting to be filled. It is a live fight between two ways of seeing what a feeling is, and the list you are pulling from sits right on the fault line.

On one side is Paul Ekman. In the 1970s he took photographs of posed faces to remote communities, including the Fore people in Papua New Guinea who had had almost no contact with Western media, and found that people everywhere sorted the faces into the same small set. From that he argued for a handful of basic emotions, something like six, that are universal and built in and wired into the species. Happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust. Evolved programs, the same face firing in every human on earth. If that is right, most of the words on this list are just shades and blends of those few primary colours.

On the other side, and this is the part that has been winning ground, is Lisa Feldman Barrett.

Her claim is that there is no fear program. No anger circuit sitting in the brain waiting to fire. She calls it the theory of constructed emotion, and the idea is that your brain takes raw bodily arousal, a racing heart, a tight chest, a jolt, undifferentiated stuff, and builds an emotion out of it in the moment, using concepts it learned from your culture and the situation you are in.

On her account the emotion is not discovered. It is assembled, and it is assembled using the words you happen to have.

Which flips the whole thing. On Ekman's view a list of emotion words is a catalogue of things that already exist inside you, like naming the organs. On Barrett's view a list of emotion words is closer to a set of tools, and the more of them you have, the more finely your brain can carve up the raw feeling into something specific.

The research has been arguing this since the 1990s and it is not settled. But the second idea leads somewhere you can actually use, and it comes with evidence.

The people with more words feel better

Here is where it stops being abstract.

There is a measurable trait called emotional granularity. It is simply how finely a person distinguishes their own feelings. Low granularity is when everything bad collapses into one word, I feel bad, and everything good into another, I feel good. High granularity is being able to tell, in the moment, that what you are feeling is not just bad but specifically resentful, or let down, or ashamed, or restless, and that those are different and call for different things.

And people who are high in it are, on average, doing better. They regulate emotion more effectively. They drink less, and they are less likely to respond to stress with aggression. When something hits them they have more precise options, because you cannot respond well to a feeling you have labelled only as bad.

Think about why that would be. If your brother says something at dinner and all you can register is that you feel bad, you have almost nothing to work with. If you can tell it is specifically the feeling of being condescended to, which is different from the feeling of being excluded, which is different again from being disappointed in him, then you know what actually happened and roughly what to do. The word is the handle. Without a handle you cannot pick the thing up, you can only be hit by it.

So look again at the list. Aggravation, exasperation, indignation, resentment, bitterness. Somebody could group all five under angry. But they are not the same feeling, and being able to tell them apart is not vocabulary showing off. On the constructed view it is the actual mechanism by which people cope, and the evidence lines up with that.

This is genuinely the most useful thing on the page. A list of emotion words, taken seriously, is not trivia. It is the raw material for feeling your own life more precisely, and precision is what lets you handle it.

The feelings your language forgot to name

Now the part that makes the whole argument vivid.

If emotions were purely universal and built in, every language would carve them up the same way. They do not, and the gaps are not random.

German has schadenfreude, the pleasure you take in someone else's misfortune. English has no single word for it, so English borrowed the German one, which is a quiet admission that the feeling was always there and we simply never named it. Naming it did not invent it. It just handed you a handle you did not have.

Portuguese has saudade, a heavy, aching longing for something loved and absent, that may never return and perhaps never existed quite the way you remember. It is close to nostalgia, on your list, and it is not the same, and Portuguese speakers will tell you the difference matters enormously.

Japanese has amae, roughly the feeling of leaning on someone else's goodwill and being allowed to, the comfortable dependence of a child on a parent extended into adult life. There is no clean English word, so describing it takes a paragraph, which is what a missing word looks like from the inside.

Greek separated two things English jams together. Eros, the desire kind of love, and agape, the selfless kind. Your list has love as one entry, one word doing the work of at least four.

Here is the thing to sit with. When you read schadenfreude just now, you did not learn a new feeling. You recognised one you already had and had never been given a name for. And on Barrett's account, that recognition is not neutral. A person who has the word can reach for that feeling deliberately, notice it in themselves, talk about it, tell it apart from its neighbours. A person without the word feels something blurrier in the same spot.

So this list, in whatever language you read it, is missing feelings. Every language's list is. The words you have are not a complete map of what a human can feel. They are the particular set your culture happened to carve out and hand down, and there are others, sitting just past the edge of the vocabulary, waiting for a word.

Where these come from

The emotions here come from a list our team put together and checked by hand. Press the button and one is drawn out of it at random.

That is the whole thing, and it runs on your own device.

What to actually do with one

Depending on why you came, a random feeling is more useful than it looks.

For writing. Do not name the emotion in the scene. Pull one, then write the body and the behaviour and let the reader arrive at the word themselves. A character who feels contempt does something specific with their mouth and their attention, and a reader who works it out is more convinced than a reader who is told. The word is your target, not your text.

For acting. The generalist emotions are a trap and the specific ones are the gift. Anyone can play sad. Play specifically humbled, or trepidation, or bitterness, and you are forced into real physical choices, because those words will not accept a generic face. The narrower the word, the more it tells your body what to do.

For a check-in. This is the one that matters, and it connects straight back to the granularity research. When the honest answer to how you are is a shrug, pull a handful and use them as a menu. Not to perform a feeling you do not have, but because sometimes the right word is sitting right there and you just could not retrieve it cold. Recognising oh, it is actually restlessness is worth more than another day of fine, because now you have something you can act on.

For teaching. Give a child the difference between frustration and disappointment and you have handed them a real tool, not a vocabulary word. A kid who can say I am frustrated instead of only having a meltdown available has been given an actual alternative to the meltdown. That is granularity being built, live, and it is one of the more useful things you can do for a young person.

Questions people ask

Are these all real emotions?

Depends whose theory you ask, which is the honest and slightly unsatisfying answer. On the strict basic-emotion view only a handful are primary and the rest are blends and shades. On the constructed view the question barely makes sense, because an emotion is not a fixed thing to be counted, it is something the brain builds, and a culture can build as many as it has concepts for. Either way, every word on this list names something a person can feel, which is the only test that matters if you are trying to use them.

Is a feeling the same as an emotion?

Researchers usually split them, and the split is useful. Affect is the raw layer, just how pleasant or unpleasant you feel and how activated or calm, with no story attached. An emotion is what you get when the brain gives that raw affect a meaning and a name. So the tight chest is affect. Anxiety is the emotion your brain built out of it once it decided what the tight chest was about. On the constructed view, that second step is where the list on this page does its work.

So how many emotions are there really?

There is no accepted number and you should be suspicious of anyone who gives you a confident one. Ekman worked with around six basic ones but left the door open to more. Other researchers have proposed eight, or several dozen, or, on the constructed view, effectively as many as a mind can assemble. A specific figure sounds authoritative and is really just a vote for one theory over another. The absence of an answer is the honest state of the field.

Why are so many of these negative?

Because unpleasant states need finer distinctions to survive, and language obliges. Fear, disgust, anger, sadness and their many shades each point at a different kind of problem needing a different response, so it paid to tell them apart precisely. Positive feeling is less finely carved because it needs less troubleshooting. That is why your list has a dozen shades of distress and comparatively few shades of contentment, and it is a fact about what feelings are for, not a fact about pessimism.

Is there one for moods or something lighter?

This list is the broad one and it already ranges from euphoria to dread. If you want the flatter, longer-lasting background states rather than the sharp momentary ones, that is the affect layer from the question above, and it is quieter than most of the words here. Most of this list is the loud stuff.

References

1. Ekman, P. (1992). An argument for basic emotions. Cognition and Emotion, 6(3 to 4), 169 to 200. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699939208411068
2. Barrett, L. F. (2017). The theory of constructed emotion: an active inference account of interoception and categorization. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12(1), 1 to 23. https://doi.org/10.1093/scan/nsw154
3. Kashdan, T. B., Barrett, L. F. and McKnight, P. E. (2015). Unpacking emotion differentiation: transforming unpleasant experience by perceiving distinctions in negativity. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(1), 10 to 16. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721414550708
4. Ekman, P. and Friesen, W. V. (1971). Constants across cultures in the face and emotion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 17(2), 124 to 129. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0030377