complex emotion
any emotion that is an aggregate of two or more others. For example, hate may be considered a fusion of anger, fear, and disgust, whereas love blends tenderness, pleasure, devotion, and passion. Comprising the majority of one’s affective experiences, complex emotions include, among others, awe, disgust, embarrassment, envy, gratitude, guilt, jealousy, pride, remorse, shame, and worry. Research suggests that these emotional composites are seen more often in older adults than in children, who have only a partial conceptualization of such complexity: They understand the arousal associated with the emotion but have no knowledge of the kinds of situations that evoke it. Conversely, simple emotions are those that are irreducible by analysis to any other emotion. They are pure, unmixed states and include anger, fear, and joy, among others.