Emotions As Discrete Categories
Many theorists define some emotions as basic where others are complex. Basic emotions are claimed to be biologically fixed and therefore universal to all humans and many animals as well. Complex emotions are then either refined versions of basic emotions, culturally specific or idiosyncratic. A major issue is to define which emotions are basic and which are complex.
One of the problems here is that there is no consensus on the method by which basic emotions can be determined. Theorists and researchers can point to universals in recognizing facial expressions (e.g. Ekman), distinctive physiological symptoms (e.g. the blush of embarrassment), or labels common to different languages. Moreover there should be some plausible developmental story concerning how the various non-basic emotions can be grounded in the basic ones.
- The Li Chi: Joy, anger, sadness, fear, love, disliking and liking (1st Century BC Chinese encyclopedia, cited in Russell 1991: 426).
- The Stoics: Pleasure/delight, distress, appetite and fear (Cicero, Tusculan Disputations, iv: 14-15).
- René Descartes: Wonder, love, hatred, desire, joy and sadness (Passions, 353).
- Baruch Spinoza: Pleasure, pain and desire (Ethics, pt. III, prop. 59).
- Thomas Hobbes: Appetite, desire, love, aversion, hate, joy and grief (Leviathan, pt. I, ch. 6).
- Silvan Tomkins: Enjoyment/Joy, Interest/Excitement, Surprise/Startle, Anger/Rage, Contempt/Disgust, Distress/Anguish, Fear/Terror, Shame/Humiliation.
- Paul Ekman (1972): Anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise.
- Paul Ekman (1999): Amusement, anger, contempt, contentment, disgust, embarrassment, excitement, fear, guilt, happiness, pride in achievement, relief, sadness/distress, satisfaction, sensory pleasure, shame, and surprise.
- Jesse Prinz (2004): Frustration, panic, anxiety, physical disgust, separation distress, aversive self-consciousness, satisfaction, stimulation, and attachment.
Read more about this topic: Emotion Classification
Famous quotes containing the words emotions, discrete and/or categories:
“The best emotions to write out of are anger and fear or dread.... The least energizing emotion to write out of is admiration. It is very difficult to write out of because the basic feeling that goes with admiration is a passive contemplative mood.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“The mastery of one’s phonemes may be compared to the violinist’s mastery of fingering. The violin string lends itself to a continuous gradation of tones, but the musician learns the discrete intervals at which to stop the string in order to play the conventional notes. We sound our phonemes like poor violinists, approximating each time to a fancied norm, and we receive our neighbor’s renderings indulgently, mentally rectifying the more glaring inaccuracies.”
—W.V. Quine (b. 1908)
“All cultural change reduces itself to a difference of categories. All revolutions, whether in the sciences or world history, occur merely because spirit has changed its categories in order to understand and examine what belongs to it, in order to possess and grasp itself in a truer, deeper, more intimate and unified manner.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)