The Tree of Emotions: Exploring the Relationships of Basic Human Emotions

Human emotions are complex in their nature and relationships to each other. Some authors, like Shaver et al. (2001) recognized different categories of human emotions which are not linked together, i.e. they don’t show how emotions in each category relate to other categories. As it would be a long and complex process to try and relate all the human emotions in a unified hierarchy, this paper deals with a restricted category of emotions known as the “basic emotions”. It will discuss how those emotions can be related to each other, which ones come first and which follow, and which are more “basic” than others. This can be extended to a wider range of emotions based on the tree model suggested.