Emotion · about 4 minutes
Three Dials
In 1974 two psychologists proposed that every feeling a human being can have -- every one, including the ones you have no word for -- is a point in a room with three walls. Not a list of emotions. A space of them, with three directions you can travel in.
Here are the three dials. Thirty feelings are hiding in the space between them. Go and find some.
fine
Move a dial. The nearest named feeling lights up.
Two dimensions fit on a page. The third -- dominance -- is the size of each dot.
What just happened
This is the PAD model -- pleasure, arousal, dominance -- proposed by Albert Mehrabian and James Russell in 1974. The claim is not that there are three emotions. The claim is that emotional experience has three dimensions, the way physical space has three, and that every feeling you can name sits somewhere in the volume. Russell and Mehrabian later went and placed 151 emotion words in it, which is either magnificent or deranged depending on your temperament.
Two of the dials feel obvious the moment you touch them. Of course feelings can be nice or horrible. Of course they can be loud or quiet. Almost every emotion model in psychology has those two, and if you have ever seen a valence-and-arousal chart, you have met them.
The dial nobody expects
Dominance is the one that earns the model its keep, and the demonstration above is the reason. Rage and terror are nearly the same feeling on the first two dials. Both are deeply unpleasant. Both are extremely loud. On a two-dimensional map they sit almost on top of each other -- which is a problem, because no human being has ever confused them.
What separates them is who is in charge. Anger is the version where you are bigger than the thing. Fear is the version where the thing is bigger than you. Same unpleasantness, same volume, opposite standing -- and the whole character of the experience flips. Once you have felt that click, you start noticing it everywhere: pride and gratitude are both warm, but one puffs you up and one bows you slightly. Contempt and shame are the same disgust pointed in opposite directions.
A note on the middle
You arrived at the exact centre of this space, and the museum called you fine. That is a joke, but it is not only a joke: the origin of the PAD model is not an emotion. It is the baseline -- where a nervous system sits when nothing in particular is happening to it.
Which is why you will not find zen there, and it's worth a second to see why not. Go and look for calm, serene, content, relaxed: every word we have for peace sits well over to the right, in positive pleasure, at low arousal. Peace feels good, and feeling good is a displacement from centre. Equanimity is not the absence of emotion -- it's a pleasant one, quietly held, and you had to get there. The centre is emptier and less impressive than that. Nobody achieves fine.
Hold on to that, because the machine next door spends its entire life drifting back toward exactly this spot.
And a note on the far corner
Now push all three dials to the ceiling. The museum stops naming one feeling there, because two of them live at that address.
Maximum pleasure, maximum arousal, maximum dominance is I won, I actually won -- a person crossing a finish line with their arms up. It is also cruelty. The sadist is having a marvellous time; that enjoyment is precisely what makes it sadism rather than duty. It is intensely arousing. And having someone else entirely at your mercy is the third dial pinned to its top stop, by definition.
Winning a race and enjoying somebody's suffering are, in this model, not neighbouring points. They are the same point.
Mehrabian later extended PAD from momentary feelings to lasting temperament -- the same three axes averaged over a life instead of a moment -- and named the eight corners of the space: exuberant, dependent, relaxed, docile, disdainful, hostile, anxious, bored. Pleasant, loud and in charge is the one he called exuberant. It gets no second name for its darker occupant, and averaging over a whole lifetime doesn't separate them either. The cruel person is exuberant too. (The octants are his; putting sadism in that corner is ours. We think it belongs, and we would be glad to be argued out of it.)
What the dials can't do
Now the honest part, and it's why the meter below reads the way it does.
The model has no object. That corner is the sharpest case, but the problem is everywhere once you have seen it. The dials give you the shape of a feeling and cannot say one word about what the feeling is about. Grief for a person and grief for a country land on identical coordinates. Three numbers hand you the weather and never mention the sky -- and a great deal of what we actually mean by an emotion turns out to be the sky.
The model has no time. A dread that started nine months ago and a dread that started nine seconds ago read identically here. Nothing decays, nothing builds, nothing has been going on. This turns out to matter enormously, and it is exactly what the machine in the next room adds.
And three might be the wrong number. Paul Ekman's tradition says the dimensional picture is missing the point -- that there are discrete basic emotions with their own signatures, and smearing them into a continuous space loses what makes disgust disgust. Lisa Feldman Barrett's theory of constructed emotion goes further in the other direction and says both camps are wrong: emotions aren't triggered, they're built on the spot out of body budget and concepts you learned from your culture, and the reason you can't find the universal fingerprint of fear is that there isn't one. All three of these positions are held right now by serious people with data. Hence the meter.
Why it matters
You just spent a few minutes doing something odd: reading your own emotional vocabulary off a machine with three knobs, and finding -- probably -- that it mostly worked. That should be a little unsettling. The inner life you would describe as infinitely subtle got approximated to your satisfaction by a device with fewer controls than a shower.
Or it didn't, and you spent the time hunting for the feeling that wouldn't fit. That was the other half of the exhibit. Good hunting either way -- it's the same question the rest of this building keeps asking, which is whether a description of a thing can ever be the size of the thing.
Next door there is a machine running on exactly these three numbers. It has the two things this room is missing -- a sense of time, and momentum -- and you will be able to read its entire emotional state as it talks to you. It does not help as much as you would think.
Take it further
The model comes from Mehrabian and Russell's An Approach to Environmental Psychology (1974); the PAD emotional state model has been quietly running inside affective computing ever since. For the opposition, Lisa Feldman Barrett's How Emotions Are Made is the most enjoyable demolition job in the field, and it is very fond of the thing it is demolishing.
Fair warning about our source: Mehrabian is also the origin of the "93% of communication is nonverbal" line, which is a mangling of a different, much smaller study of his and which he spent years trying to correct. That has its own room now -- Exhibit № 39 -- and it is worth your time. Being right about one thing has never protected anybody from being quoted wrongly about another.