Alright. So we can describe emotional experiences using 2 dimensions. And some researchers have tried using more than these 2 dimensions, but honestly, these 2 work very well and so most researchers tend to stick with these. So the first dimension is valence, which is essentially going to tell us whether the emotion feels pleasant or unpleasant. So valence will range from negative to positive.

So negative valence essentially means that the emotion feels unpleasant to us, and positive valence means that the emotion feels pleasant. And then our other dimension is arousal, which is essentially going to be the level of physiological arousal that the emotion causes. You can kind of think of this as how much the emotion energizes you or drains energy from you. So arousal will range from low to high. So low would kind of be draining your energy, high would be energizing you.

So if we look at our little graph here with our two dimensions, again, we're going from high arousal, energizing down to low arousal, kind of draining our energy, and then from negative valence or feeling unpleasant to positive valence or kind of feeling more pleasant. So you can kind of think of this like an intercept midpoint as complete neutrality. It doesn't feel pleasant. It doesn't feel unpleasant. Your body is basically producing 0 physiological change.

You are just at complete neutral homeostasis there. So obviously, emotional experiences are subjective, but most people can use these two dimensions to label some basic emotions very easily. So we're going to do that right now. So imagine we have some negative valence, so the emotion feels unpleasant to us, but very high arousal. So let's say our respiration, our blood pressure, our heart rate are increasing.

We feel very energized, and it's paired with that unpleasant or negative feeling. Maybe many of us would label that type of feeling as anger. Right? Anger tends to be very energizing, but it obviously feels kind of unpleasant. Now imagine we still have that high arousal, so we have increased blood pressure, heart rate, respiration, etcetera, but now it is a pleasant feeling emotion.

We might interpret that more like excitement. Right? Excitement is very energizing and it obviously feels very good. Now if we move down to low arousal, so let's say we have kind of a drop in blood pressure, slow our breathing, slow our heart rate, but we still have that positive valence, it still feels pleasant. That might be interpreted more like feeling calm.

Right? We might even get some muscle relaxation in there. Now if we have that low arousal but it is a negative valence, it feels kind of unpleasant, we might feel something more like sadness. Right? Being sad is like the energy-draining emotion. Right? It's very hard to feel energized when you feel sad. Alright. So those are just some ways to label some basic emotions using these two dimensions, and I will see you guys in the next video.

Bye bye.