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I believe that emotions are more discrete than colors. Hues can blend into hybrid colors but I struggle to conceive of how distinct emotions could 'blend'. My best guess is that emotions oscillate in unique patterns and periods during emotionally confusing experiences.
"Tears of joy" is the conventional example of a hybrid emotion, but it's fallacious. Tears are not an emotion. They are generated by certain levels of emotional intensity, typically sadness, often joy, sometimes fear, etc. One may weep with joy that a criminal met justice, and
one may also shed tears feeling hatred for the damage that criminal caused. The tears remain constant, but the underlying emotional "pump" only coherently functions in an oscillating pattern between, say, joy and hate.
We may describe the victim's behavior as a manifestation of "joyful hate," but that is merely a linguistic convenience on our part. The definition of "hate" in no way relies on attributes of "joy," and vice versa. Blending them in reality negates the meaning of both.
Another common argument for hybrid emotions is that people, when asked how they feel, can genuinely respond, "I don't know." This allegedly demonstrates that they are experiencing a tertium quid on the emotional color wheel, but in fact they are just uttering another linguistic
shortcut for the much more ungainly expression, "I don't know how to describe the oscillating pattern of competing emotions I'm sensing right now." Gradually, by analysis, he may be able to dissect the pattern into a flash of fear, a flash of rage, etc.
But at no time during such analysis does it shed any light on the emotional texture of his experience by foisting a psychological chimera like "furious dread" upon the world. At most I concede that emotions may coexist like strands woven into a larger cord, but that does not
entail that they melt together like braided candles.
