"Most people think of emotions in categorical terms"

"Most categorical theories present emotions as an unstructured collection of distinct entities and thus fail to capture our intuitions about the similarities and differences among emotions."

"It is the experience of Decoding.com that this (Smith & Ellsworth) approach comes closest to describing real behavioral situations".

1. the desirability of the situation (pleasant or unpleasant);
2. the effort that one anticipates spending on the situation;
3. the certainty of the situation;
4. the attention one wants to devote to the situation;
5. the control that one feels over the situation; and
6. the control that one attributes to nonhuman forces in the situation..

To illustrate, let's take the last two dimensions regarding control (e. & f.)  Anger is associated with an unpleasant situation caused by another person, guilt is associated with an unpleasant situation brought about by one's self, and sadness is associated with an unpleasant situation controlled by circumstances.

Thus if you and your friend miss a concert that you had your heart set on hearing, you will feel anger if you missed it because your friend carelessly misplaced the tickets, guilt if you misplaced them, and sadness if the performance is cancelled due to a performer's illness.

The virtue of the Smith & Ellsworth approach is that it specifies the appraisal process in detail and accounts for a wide range of emotional experiences.  It is the experience of Decoding.com that this approach comes closest to describing real behavioral situations.

Quote From Smith & Ellsworth:
"Most people think of emotions in categorical terms: "I was scared," or "I was sad," or "I was frustrated." In complicated situations they may say, "I felt sad and frustrated." The idea that there is a small set of fundamentally different emotions, has a long and illustrious history in science as well, dating back at least to Aristotle and reemerging in the theory of the four humors, in the works of eighteenth-century philosophers, and in Darwin (1872/ 1965). In recent years the categorical approach to the study of emotions has become prominent in psychology, stimulated by the monumental work of Sylvan Tomkins (1962. 1963, 1982; Ekman & Friesen, 1971; Izard, 1971, 1972, 1977; Izard & Buechler, 1980). This view of emotional experience admirably captures our intuition that happiness, anger, and fear are basic feeling-states, easily recognizable, and fundamentally different from each other.

However, most categorical theories present emotions as an unstructured collection of distinct entities and thus fail to capture our intuitions about the similarities and differences among emotions. Some emotions are commonly viewed as opposites, such as joy and sorrow, or fear and anger. Once we start considering the similarities and differences among emotions, more specific questions inevitably demand our attention. Are joy and sorrow opposite in the same way as fear and anger? Clearly not, because joy is pleasant, but fear and anger are both unpleasant. Then in what ways can emotions be "opposite?" The very idea of opposition implies a dimension or set of dimensions along which emotions can be arranged, so that we can begin to make more specific statements of how emotions are similar or dissimilar to each other.'

From Smith & Ellsworth, Patterns of Cognitive Appraisal in Emotion, Stanford University 1985-87