Within affective science, the central line of inquiry, animated by basic emotion theory and constructivist accounts, has been the search for one-to-one mappings between six emotions and their subjective experiences, prototypical expressions, and underlying brain states. We offer an alternative perspective: semantic space theory. This computational approach uses wide-ranging naturalistic stimuli and open-ended statistical techniques to capture systematic variation in emotion-related behaviors. Upwards of 25 distinct varieties of emotional experience have distinct profiles of associated antecedents and expressions.
