Humans Only Have 3 Emotions

Positive, Negative, and Neutral.

These are the sole, the only, human emotions.

Yeah, I don’t really think that… and I’d wager you don’t think there are only 3 emotions either.

Furthermore, we’d be in good company to make such a wager. A research article that UC Berkeley published in PNAS would also claim that there are more than 3 human emotions, as they were able to identify 27.

27 different, distinct categories of human emotion - that’s quite a bit more than 3. Note: All the sciency stuff about how they work can be found here.

To address the limitations of traditional sentiment analysis, modern approaches are emerging that incorporate advanced techniques such as Natural Language Processing (NLP), machine learning, and deep learning (like Stylo!).

These approaches are designed to capture the nuances of human language (of which there are many), contextual information, and emotional and cognitive states.

Now - we have all this great power to identify different emotions, but the unfortunate truth is that 27 emotions are too many scores to pay attention to. That is why we chose to keep it at 3 signals, but we only chose the 3 most actionable signals which are a combination of emotions.


Frustration, Urgency, and Delight.


These emotions can tell you a lot about how your customers are entering and leaving conversations.

So next time you see a summary of an interaction with a single neutral face, and no other context, ask yourself this - what does that even mean?

-Austin