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While emotions are not at all simple experiences (as Dan Siegel makes clear in his book, “The Developing Mind”), there is a class of emotion which are universal, cross-cultural, and definable in ways that most of us will quickly understand. These are called the “categorical emotions”, and are generally listed as: anger, sadness, fear, disgust, contempt, joy (happiness), and surprise. (Varying theorists would make this list slightly differently, but we’ll go with this one.)