As tan bear clearly shows us, if there’s one thing many people know about emotions, it’s the idea that there are positive ones and negative ones. But it’s not just silly cartoon animals that share this idea: In emotion research, the categorization of emotions into the two simple categories of positivity and negativity is called valencing.
Valencing theory tells us that there are two kinds of emotions: Positively valenced emotions are evoked when something is attractive to us, and negatively valenced emotions are evoked when something is aversive. There is also some attempt to valence emotions into the categories of pro-social, which is positive, and anti-social, which is negative. What’s funny is that when you start to question the criteria under which an emotion is valenced, the categories begin to fall apart almost immediately.
