Who Is This Test For?
This test is for anyone who is curious about which emotion is more dominant in the way you experience things or express yourself.
About This Human Emotion Test
This test is designed to help you find out which of the four basic types of human emotions drives you.
Although emotions and the way we experience them can shift, the test is not meant to be a measure of your current mood. Each response corresponds to one of the four main emotions.
What to Know About Human Emotions
Emotions shape how we feel, perceive events, make choices, and mingle with others. Over the years, researchers and psychologists have debated the definitions of emotions and the number of emotional states that exist.
In the 1970s, a psychologist named Paul Eckman said there were six basic emotions all humans experienced. He named these as happiness, sadness, disgust, fear, surprise, and anger.
Psychologist and professor Robert Plutchik created the Wheel of Emotions, also called a feelings wheel. His theory was that basic emotions could be built on to describe more complex emotions and mixed emotional states. The wheel has basic emotions and several others that branch out and even combine to create new emotions. For example, disgust combined with anger equals contempt.
One 2017 study published in Proceedings of National Academy of Sciences identified 27 different basic emotions.1
A 2019 study published in Frontiers in Psychology identified four basic emotions. The research also discussed deeper layers of emotions where basic emotions can branch out.2
4 Types of Human Emotions
The four main types of basic human emotions include happiness, sadness, fear, and anger. You can think of them as a foundation for the range of emotional states we experience. Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions includes these, with several others branching off from them.
Happiness
Happiness is the most pleasant of the four basic emotions and the one we most often hope to experience. It’s associated with joy and well-being.
Even though it’s considered a basic emotion, happiness can be more complex. Happiness for one person can be completely different for another person. Sometimes we think certain things or circumstances will lead to happiness, but we end up being wrong.
Some research suggests happiness is linked to better health and potentially even living longer. However, expressing only happiness without the other emotions might indicate a denial of other feelings or issues.3
Who doesn’t like to feel happy? We spend our lives trying to feel this way! Just remember that happiness is an emotion, and like all emotions, it isn’t constant. It’s okay to feel other things and know that you will feel happy again in the future.
Sadness
Sadness can be experienced as a temporary state that ranges in intensity, or it can be ongoing. For example, sadness that doesn’t go away is one of the two main symptoms of a major depressive episode. It’s associated with grief, feeling hopeless, or disinterest.
The way we experience sadness and how we express it depends on the person and the cause of sadness. Sadness brought on by a sudden action or event might be expressed through crying, while long-term sadness might be expressed through symptoms connected to depression.
Coping with sadness might lead to behaviors like substance use and withdrawing from other people.
Everyone feels sad, lonely, disappointed, rejected, and low from time to time. If you have trouble shaking that feeling, or sadness comes around for you most days, a therapist might be able to help you.”
Fear
Fear is an emotion that developed in humans for survival. It’s an intense emotion brought on by a perceived threat. Fear is what triggers our fight or flight response, which tells us to take action and get away from danger—something that would have been especially helpful to our hunter gatherer ancestors.4
Your body might physically react to fear with tense muscles, a raised heart rate, and racing thoughts.
In the modern world, fear is often associated with anxiety. Although, fear is defined as an emotional response to an immediate threat and anxiety is considered a response to a perceived threat in the future.
Fear is an indicator that we might be in danger, but sometimes our minds alert us to danger that is not there. If you feel fearful a lot of the time, or experience fear that is not proportionate to the situation, a therapist might be able to help.
Anger
Anger is an intense emotion associated with hostility, rage, and frustration. The cause of anger could be an injury, either real or imagined, or a believing an injustice has occurred.
This powerful emotion can be expressed as aggressive behavior intended to cause harm, but that’s not always the case. Anger can also be used as a constructive force to help us remove something unpleasant or harmful from our lives. However, anger that is intense or hard to control can negatively impact life and relationships and potentially be harmful to others.
Like happiness, research has found anger has an impact on health. It’s thought to be linked to developing chronic conditions such as heart disease and diabetes.5
Anger can be an effective way for our brains to tell us something isn’t acceptable. But if you find that you struggle to control your behavior when you feel angry, anger management support can help you regulate this emotion in a healthy way.