Seth Godin discusses how folks have six emotions or buttons to be pushed click here. If you ask your Google machine “How many emotions are there?” you’ll generally wind up with 6 to 8 as an answer (click here.) Happiness, surprise, anger, fear, disgust, and sadness are Seth’s six basic ones.
However, there is this Plutchik fella who really took this emotion question to its extreme in the form of his Wheel of Emotions:
I mention all this because Monday watching the Skins play the Eagles I thought of the many emotions that football fans experience as they watch a game. Fans enter a game happy, upbeat and positive about their team’s upcoming performance. However, during the game, if things don’t go the way of the fans’ team, anger and disgust take over. Should the team then make a comeback, as the Skins did late in the game, surprise and happiness follow.
Keeping with the football example, it made me recall a college psych instructor who noted that the list of possible emotions could be distilled down to three: glad, sad or mad. Glad if your team wins; mad and sad if they do not. Everything else is just nuance. Do a little inventory today and see how many emotions you experience. Hopefully, they are all positive.
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