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Researchers Alan S. Cowen, Hilary Anger Elfenbein, Petri Laukka and Dacher Keltner have created a fascinating interactive map that visualizes how short, wordless vocal bursts can express an array of 24 different emotions. The information for this fascinating chart comes from an incredibly insightful collaborative paper that was published through the American Psychological Association.
We find that vocal bursts convey at least 24 distinct kinds of emotion. Emotion categories (sympathy, awe), more so than affective appraisals (including valence and arousal), organize emotion recognition. In contrast to discrete emotion theories, the emotion categories conveyed by vocal bursts are bridged by smooth gradients with continuously varying meaning. We visualize the complex, high-dimensional space of emotion conveyed by brief human vocalization within an online interactive map.
