

Teaching Emotions to Kidsįrom the moment we are born, we have the ability to experience emotions. They are as follows:Īs you can see, the majority of these emotions are too complex for children, and some of the core emotions, like happiness and sadness, aren’t even on this list.

List of EmotionsĪccording to research conducted by the University of California, Berkeley, there are 27 distinct categories of emotions. Let’s look at that list of 27 emotions that we first talked about. Later, you can progress to teaching more complex emotive words as your child better understands their feelings. No child, or even adult, is going to be able to identify 34,000 emotions, and even 27 is way too many for a child to be able to distinguish and understand.įive core emotions is a much simpler concept to teach children. This makes it much easier to teach children about their feelings in a relatable, tangible way.

What’s great about this concept is that these five core emotions are the same five emotions/characters from the Disney Pixar movie Inside Out. Discrete Emotion Theoryĭiscrete emotion theory suggests there are five core emotions and thousands of emotion-related words, which are all synonyms or describe varying intensity levels of these core emotions. I want to introduce you to a more straightforward concept that I prefer when teaching emotions to children-the Discrete Emotion Theory. We’ll take a look at that list of 27 emotions in a moment – but first. On top of that, we can experience more than one emotion simultaneously. One scientific study claims there are 27 distinct emotions that humans experience. Did you know that there are actually over 34,000 different motive words? Yikes.īut how many different emotions are there?
