What Emotion Am I? A Quiz To Find Your Dominant Emotion

We all experience emotions differently, and certain emotions may present more strongly depending on the person.

According to clinical psychologist Nicole Beurkens, Ph.D., CNS, an individual may have a tendency to move toward certain emotions more frequently, or they may more strongly identify with a specific emotion.

Whether it's joy, grief, anger, or fear, knowing which emotions are strongest in you can not only help you understand yourself more deeply—but also make changes if those emotions aren't serving you.

Emotions are defined by the Oxford Dictionary as "a natural instinctive state of mind deriving from one's circumstances, mood, or relationships with others." Depending which psychological theory or research study you reference, there are anywhere from four to 34,000 emotions—and neither would really be wrong.

One 2019 study published in the journal Frontiers in Psychology1, for example, suggests there are four types of basic emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, and anger. But when we start to dig a little deeper, we understand that happiness can encompass everything from joy to curiosity to love, while fear can encompass everything from anxiousness to dread to panic.

Additional research has identified 27 main emotions, while another popular theory of emotions developed by psychologist Robert Plutchik, Ph.D., holds that humans have the capacity to experience over 34,000 unique emotions. Plutchik and other theorists have often depicted these various types of feelings as an emotion wheel, such as the one below:

Happiness includes everything from feeling joyful, inspired, creative, open, and so much more. As Beurkens tells mindbodygreen, there are, indeed, people who operate from a happy or otherwise content state of mind. "They live from a place of having more internalized joy and looking for the joy," she explains.

According to Beurkens, sadness is often very misunderstood, and if you've ever heard the expression, "Depression is living in the past, anxiety is living in the future," this explains a lot. As Beurkens notes, "A lot of what people attribute to sadness in their life is actually more accurately labeled as grief. Depression tends to be grief, regret, guilt, resentment—which is all about stuff that's already happened."

Just as sadness can be interpreted as living in the past, fear would be living in the future or namely, a negative anticipation of future events.

As Beurkens explains, "Some people absolutely identify with being afraid of everything, often on a very subconscious level. They don't realize that they've taken it on as their identity and that fear drives most of how they view the world and how they behave in it."

Anger is defined as "a strong feeling of annoyance, displeasure, or hostility," and according to Beurkens, we can become angry so often that it begins to permeate our thought processes unconsciously. An angry person may get easily frustrated, hostile, or antagonistic, whereas a more peaceful person may be less emotionally reactive in that way.

If you're not pleased with your quiz results, the good news is, it doesn't have to be a forever thing. As Beurkens explains, "We may have a tendency towards [certain emotions], but those are modifiable—we can do work to shift those driving emotions, which is the fun and hopeful part," adding that the more we're able to live in the here and now, "the better adjusted we tend to be, and the better regulated we are around our emotions."

Emotions are an inherent part of the human experience, and even the emotions we tend to label as "negative" deserve their own recognition and compassion.