what are the 27 human emotions

Here’s the short answer: in the UC Berkeley study that popularized the question “what are the 27 human emotions,” the 27 emotion categories identified were:

1. Admiration

2. Adoration

3. Aesthetic appreciation

4. Amusement

5. Anger

6. Anxiety

7. Awe

8. Awkwardness

9. Boredom

10. Calmness

11. Confusion

12. Craving

13. Disgust

14. Empathic pain

15. Entrancement

16. Excitement

17. Fear

18. Horror

19. Interest

20. Joy

21. Nostalgia

22. Relief

23. Romance

24. Sadness

25. Satisfaction

26. Sexual desire

27. Surprise

These 27 came from a 2017 UC Berkeley project that mapped people’s reactions to thousands of short emotional video clips, going beyond the old “six basic emotions” (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, disgust) into a richer emotional “atlas.”

What Are the 27 Human Emotions?

Quick Scoop

Scientists at UC Berkeley analyzed how hundreds of people reacted emotionally to over 2,000 short online videos, and from those patterns they identified 27 distinct emotion categories that tended to show up reliably. This work has become a trending reference point whenever people ask “what are the 27 human emotions” in forums, articles, and Q&A sites.

The key idea: emotions don’t fall neatly into just six boxes; they blend and shade into one another, like colors on a gradient map. The research produced an interactive “semantic atlas of emotion” where each of the 27 is a region on a continuous emotional landscape rather than a separate, isolated island.

The Full List in One Place

Below is the list that’s most often cited when people search for “what are the 27 human emotions,” based on the UC Berkeley study and later summaries.

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#	Emotion	Very short sense of it
1	Admiration	Warm respect for someone’s qualities or actions.
2	Adoration	Deep love and devotion, often idealized.
3	Aesthetic appreciation	Enjoyment of beauty (art, nature, music).
4	Amusement	Light, playful enjoyment or humor.
5	Anger	Feeling of hostility or frustration toward something.
6	Anxiety	Tense anticipation of possible negative events.
7	Awe	Wonder mixed with vastness or power, sometimes with fear.
8	Awkwardness	Social discomfort or self-consciousness.
9	Boredom	Unstimulated, restless dissatisfaction.
10	Calmness	Relaxed, peaceful ease.
11	Confusion	Not understanding what’s going on.
12	Craving	Intense desire for something specific (food, substance, activity).
13	Disgust	Revulsion or strong dislike, often physical or moral.
14	Empathic pain	Hurting when you see someone else suffer.
15	Entrancement	Being spellbound or absorbed, like in a movie or music.
16	Excitement	Energized anticipation or stimulation.
17	Fear	Alarm in response to perceived threat.
18	Horror	Intense fear plus shock or revulsion.
19	Interest	Curiosity and engagement with something.
20	Joy	Bright, uplifting happiness.
21	Nostalgia	Bittersweet longing for the past.
22	Relief	Ease after a threat or worry passes.
23	Romance	Tender, idealizing affection, usually toward a partner.
24	Sadness	Down, heavy feeling after loss or disappointment.
25	Satisfaction	Contentment after a need or goal is met.
26	Sexual desire	Attraction and longing for sexual connection.
27	Surprise	Reaction to something unexpected, good or bad.

Note: Some popular summaries swap in “sympathy” and “triumph” instead of “anger” and “relief,” but the core research list (as reported by Berkeley and Wikipedia’s summary of that exact study) includes anger and relief and excludes sympathy and triumph.

Why 27 Emotions Became a “Trending Topic”

• The study challenged the older idea that emotions are mostly just six basic types and everything else is a blend.

• It fits with late‑2010s and 2020s online culture where people talk about “vibes,” emotional nuance, and mental health in much more detail.

• Media coverage and health sites keep revisiting the list, especially when discussing stress, anxiety, and overall wellbeing, so it still pops up as “latest news” and “what science says now about emotions.”

A lot of forum discussions now use this list as a talking point: people compare which of these emotions they feel most often, or debate what might be “missing” (like shame, pride, or love as a single category).

“Do I really feel 27 different emotions in a single day, or is that just my group chat?” – a rough paraphrase of the kind of jokes you’ll see in comment sections reacting to this research.

A Quick Story-Style Example

Imagine you’re scrolling short videos late at night:

• A baby giggles uncontrollably: you feel amusement and a little adoration.

• Next clip is a risky stunt gone wrong: there’s a spike of fear and horror.

• Then a montage of mountain lakes at sunrise: you sink into calmness, maybe a touch of awe and aesthetic appreciation.

• An old home‑video of friends from years ago appears in your feed: suddenly, you’re wrapped in nostalgia, mixed with a hint of sadness and joy at the same time.

That’s the point of the 27‑emotion “map”: in real life, we don’t flip between just happy/sad/angry; we glide through a rich gradient of emotional states, often combining several at once.

Multiple Viewpoints: Is 27 “The” Correct Number?

Psychologists don’t all agree that 27 is a magic or final number; it’s one influential way of carving up the emotional landscape based on a particular method.

Other viewpoints include:

• Basic‑emotion theorists who emphasize a smaller set (like six or so) as biologically fundamental, with others built from them.

• Appraisal and dimensional theories that focus more on underlying dimensions (pleasant vs. unpleasant, high vs. low arousal, control vs. lack of control) rather than counting discrete categories.

• Historical views, like Aristotle’s list of nine emotions, showing that how we name and group emotions has always been shaped by culture and era.

So when you search “what are the 27 human emotions,” you’re really tapping into one modern, data‑driven attempt to map what it feels like to be human, not a universal law of nature.

TL;DR: The “27 human emotions” usually refers to a UC Berkeley study that identified 27 distinct emotion categories (like admiration, awe, calmness, nostalgia, relief, and surprise) based on how people reacted to thousands of emotional video clips, offering a richer map of feelings than the classic six basic emotions.

Information gathered from public forums or data available on the internet and portrayed here.