Emotions of cognitive dissonance

Basic emotions correspond to bodily signals. Many psychologists think that there are only a few basic emotions, and that most emotions are combinations of these few. Here we advance a hypothesis that the number of principally different emotions is near infinite. We consider emotions as mental states with hedonic content, indicating satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Our hypothesis is that a large number of emotions are related to the knowledge instinct (KI, or a need for knowledge). Contradictions between knowledge and bodily motivations, between various elements of knowledge are known as cognitive dissonances. We suggest that specific emotions are involved with cognitive dissonances. The number of cognitive dissonances is combinatorial in terms of elements of knowledge. Correspondingly, the number of these knowledge-related emotions is very large. We report experimental results indicating that emotions of cognitive dissonance exist. We propose that these emotions are different from basic emotions in principle, and outline future research directions toward showing that their number is large.