The evidence for the valence-and-arousal view of emotion came from mathematical analyses of how people report feeling. These mathematical techniques told us that negative emotions like fear and sadness often happen together, as do positive emotions like amusement (humor) and awe. That is, emotions that are similar in valence tend to happen together. So do emotions that are similar in arousal. In other words, certain emotions are correlated —meaning they often rise and fall together—because people tend to report feeling them at the same time or in similar situations. But these mathematical analyses have not always been able to tell us when two emotions are different. We do not know whether fear is truly distinct from sadness, and amusement from awe, beyond their similarities and differences in valence-and-arousal levels.
In our study, we wanted to discover how many emotions people really have. When people say what they are feeling, can what they tell us be boiled down to how good or bad, excited or calm they feel? Do we need five emotions, like the ones from Inside Out? Or do we need a lot more?

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Go to source: https://kids.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/frym.2018.00015