THE EXPERIENCE OF EMOTIONS IN EVERYDAY LIFE

A total of 47 employed adults were asked to record, in structured diar ies, details of four episodes of emotion from the set that we regard a s basic (happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust) and also to note oc currences of other emotions not in this set. Subjects experienced an a verage of about one episode of consciously recognised emotion a day, a nd in rating intensities they said that 11% of episodes were as intens e as they could imagine. Anger was the most frequent of the basic emot ions, and disgust the least frequent. There were no significant differ ences in rates or intensities of basic emotions as a function of gende r. We predicted 69% of these emotions correctly from the goal-relevant events that elicited them: happiness was typically caused by achievem ents, sadness by losses, anger by frustration, and fear by threat, but the causation of disgust was more difficult to identify. In 31% of ep isodes pairs of basic emotions occurred in mixtures. Positive emotions tended to help plans, while negative ones tended to hinder them.