Human Emotion

Why do we have emotions? How do they help us?

Evolutionary psychiatrist Randolph Nesse of the University of Michigan thinks that individual emotions are actually adaptations selected by evolution to help us cope with specific situations.

Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions

This diagram demonstrates a selection of major human emotions, how they are related to each other, and how they are different too (or bipolar as he calls the emotions at opposite sides). At the center  there are eight basic emotions such as ecstacy and grief. Each of these is connected to two more subtle emotions that lead to what Plutchik calls the eight advanced emotions –around the outside. 

We Feel Fine- Link to website

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world's newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling". When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the "feeling" expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

I thought this project was interesting and I really liked the way the website sets out the varieties of emotions which are from all around the world all from 100's of different types of people.It helps people to see the everyday ups and downs in the human life which i think is quite amazing. You can also change the visual looks of the page to different types.

Some examples I print screened when I was on it.