Emotions · Clusters
Emotion clusters
Above Vela's 42 primary emotions, a second-tier taxonomy: families (shared resemblance), structural groupings (shared form), valence groupings (shared direction). Each cluster names why these emotions belong together and how the members differ from each other. Use these as orientation when the flat list of primaries doesn't carry your reading.
Shame family
familyEmotions organized around exposure of the self before a real or imagined witness. The cluster's spine is shame proper — the felt collapse of who-I-am under another's gaze. The siblings differ by what specifically is exposed (a deed, a body, a status) and how the self responds (hide, repair, double down, sink). Family resemblance, not identity: the self is on trial in each, but the verdict and its address differ.
9 members
Organized around absence
structuralEmotions whose subject is something missing — a person, a place, a time, a future that won't arrive. They differ by the temporal direction of the absence (toward the past, toward the future, toward an unreachable other) and by whether the absence is acknowledged as permanent. Reading them together makes visible what literature does well: it offers language to people whose object is gone.
7 members
Hostile-judgmental
structuralEmotions that direct outward and pronounce a verdict on their object. They differ by the verdict's content (this is wrong / this is beneath me / this is repulsive) and by whether they're keyed to a specific incident or carry forward as a sustained orientation. Together they sketch the map of how a person says *no* to the world.
5 members
Approach-positive
valenceEmotions of moving-toward. Their valence is positive and their structure is open: the self leans into the world rather than away. They differ by what's being approached (a person, a felt-state, a recognition, a registered gift) and by the depth of the contact.
8 members
Anticipatory
structuralEmotions whose object is a future that hasn't arrived. They differ by whether the unknown is registered as opportunity or threat, and by whether the body's signal is mobilization or paralysis. Kierkegaard's name for anxiety — *the dizziness of freedom* — sits across this whole cluster: the future opens, and the self must lean toward or away.
5 members
Cognitive rupture
historiographicEmotions that name a discontinuity in what the self thought it knew. They differ by the *kind* of break: a sudden new fact (surprise), a model that won't compose (bewilderment), a state of mid-revision (confusion), or a moment of integration (realization). They sit together because their phenomenology is *the click* — knowledge-state-change felt as a feeling.
4 members
Self-conscious
structuralEmotions where the self is the explicit object — the felt-fact of being-watched (by another, by oneself) is the spine. Overlaps heavily with the shame family but extends further: pride and pride-as-defense sit here too, because their structure is also self-as-watched-object. Provides a useful second cut for readers who don't experience their feelings in shame's register but recognize the watching.
5 members