A shared structure for emotion experiences from narratives, videos and everyday life

Our knowledge of the diversity and psychological organization of emotion experiences is based primarily on studies that used a single type of stimulus with an often limited set of rating scales and analyses. Here we take a comprehensive data-driven approach. We surveyed 1000+ participants on a diverse set of ratings of emotion experiences to a validated set of ca. 150 text narratives, a validated set of ca. 1000 videos, and over 10,000 personal experiences sampled longitudinally in everyday life, permitting a unique comparison. All three types of emotion experiences were characterized by similar dimensional spaces that included valence and arousal, as well as dimensions related to generalizability. Emotion experiences were distributed along continuous gradients, with no clear clusters even for the so-called basic emotions. Individual differences in personality traits were associated with differences in everyday emotion experiences, but not with emotions evoked by narratives or videos.