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What Emotions Look Like

Design educator Orlagh O’Brien earned an M.A., attention in her field, and lots more with Emotionally}Vague, a survey of 250 people that attempted to figure out how people experienced emotions in a “systematic but playful way.” Among other things, she tried to map out what emotions ‘look like’ by layering drawings people drew to represent different emotions and averaging them out.

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From left to right, above, are “anger,” “joy,” “fear,” “sadness,” and “love.” Click the image to see it fully-sized.

O’Brien also collected words people associated with emotions and tallied them up. The most frequent ten words for each, from more to less frequent:

Anger: people, when, injustice, me, in, being, rudeness, my-someone (tie), bad-I-the-to-lies-of (tie)

Joy: friends, music, with, my, a, family-when (tie), good, the, and, I-people (tie), sunshine

Fear: the, of, in, being, death, alone-heights (tie), people-when (tie), dark-darkness (tie), control-I-not-snakes-to (tie)

Sadness: death, people, of, the, when, being-loss (tie), in, my-someone (tie), I, and-family (tie)

Love: family, my, friends, people, and-with, a, being, I-love-the (tie), in-when (tie), to, boyfriend, children-girlfriend-me-someone-you-kindness-of (tie)

There are many more fascinating results at Emotionally}Vague, including full word lists, color charts associated with each emotion, and further explanation of how the study was conducted.

(Emotionally}Vague via Reddit)

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