What's the basic of a basic?

Answer 1

A widespread assumption in theories of emotion is that there exists a small set of basic emotions.

From a biological perspective, this idea is manifested in the belief that there might be neurophysiological

and anatomical substrates corresponding to the basic emotions. From a psychological perspective,

basic emotions are often held to be the primitive building blocks of other, nonbasic emotions.

The content of such claims is examined, and the results suggest that there is no coherent nontrivial

notion of basic emotions as the elementary psychological primitives in terms of which other emotions

can be explained. Thus, the view that there exist basic emotions out of which all other emotions

are built, and in terms of which they can be explained, is questioned, raising the possibility that this

position is an article of faith rather than an empirically or theoretically defensible basis for the

conduct of emotion research. This suggests that perhaps the notion of basic emotions will not lead

to significant progress in the field. An alternative approach to explaining the phenomena that appear

to motivate the postulation of basic emotions is presented.

One of the most ubiquitous notions in the emotion literature

is that some emotions have a special status. These privileged

emotions are usually called basic, primary, or fundamental

emotions. For several contemporary theorists, the idea that

there exists a small set of basic emotions is central to their theories

(e.g., Izard, 1977; Oatley & Johnson-Laird, 1987; Plutchik,

1962, 1980; Tomkins, 1962, 1963, 1984). Yet, although they

and many others share the view that some emotions are basic,

there is little agreement about how many emotions are basic,

which emotions are basic, and why they are basic. Table 1 summarizes

the proposals of a representative set of emotion theorists

who hold (or held) some sort of basic-emotion position.

As the table shows, some emotion theorists have proposed as

few as two basic emotions. For example, Mowrer (1960) proposed

just pleasure and pain as the basic emotional states, the

onset and offset of which are related to hope, fear, disappointment,

and relief. Watson (1930) included only 1 of these, fear,

in his 3 basic emotions of fear, love, and rage. More recently,

Panksepp (1982) has proposed 4 basic emotions, expectancy,

fear, rage, and panic; Kemper (1987) has proposed fear, anger,

depression, and satisfaction; and Oatley and Johnson-Laird

(1987) base their theory on the primacy of happiness, sadness,

anxiety, anger, and disgust. At the other end of the scale, Frijda

(1986) identified 18 basic emotions, including arrogance, humility,

and indifference, as well as more commonplace examples,

such as anger, fear, and sorrow; however, on other occasions

(personal communication, September 8, 1986), he proposed

only 6 basic emotions and in one article (Frijda, 1987) he

Preparation of this article was supported in part by grants from the

National Science Foundation, BNS 8318077 and BNS 8721853.

We thank Gerald Clore, Nico Frijda, Jeffrey Gray, Phoebe Ellsworth,

Philip Johnson-Laird, John Teasdale, and Fraser Watts for their helpful

comments on drafts of this article.

Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Andrew

Ortony, Institute for the Learning Sciences, Northwestern University,

1890 Maple Avenue, Evanston, Illinois 60201.

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