What Makes Us Feel Good? A Data-driven Investigation of Positive Emotion Experience

Is feeling grateful a different kind of experience than feelings of other positive emotions like pride, awe, or love? Here, we use semantic space theory to test which positive emotional experiences are distinct from each other based on in-depth personal narratives of experiences involving 22 positive emotions (n = 165; 3,592 emotional events). A bottom-up computational analysis was applied to the transcribed text; unsupervised clustering was employed to maximise internal granular consistency (i.e., the clusters being as different as possible from each other while internally as homogenous as possible). The analysis yielded distinct positive emotion experiences, characterised by admiration, amusement, being moved, feeling respected, excitement, hope, interest, lust, positive surprise, pride, sensory pleasure, and tenderness. Applying bottom-up language analysis techniques to rich accounts of emotional experiences reveals that there are at least 12 unique dimensions of positive emotion experience in daily life