Emotions can be as clear-cut as a bolt of rage or as hard to pin down as Jane Austen’s “half agony, half hope.” People often struggle to name their emotions, are torn by conflicting feelings, or conceal their true state of mind, leaving scientists stumped for ways to measure emotion in the lab. But in June, Carnegie Mellon University researchers reported they had identified, for the first time, unique brain activity patterns for nine specific emotions and could correctly guess which one a person was feeling — essentially reading the mind.
The researchers asked 10 method actors, trained to generate emotional responses on demand rather than just mimic them, to write vignettes that evoked each of nine feelings: disgust, anger, fear, happiness, lust, envy, pride, sadness and shame. Actors imagined…