Basic emotions

Basic emotions are a small set of emotions that, according to certain psychological theories, all human beings experience innately and recognize in similar ways across different cultures. Discrete emotion theory holds that each of them can be distinguished from the others by a characteristic facial expression, by its own biological processes, and by a specific adaptive function, such as anger in the face of an obstacle or fear in the face of a threat.

The effort to classify emotions into basic categories has a long history, reaching back to philosophical reflections on the passions. One of the most influential works of the twentieth century was that of Paul Ekman and his colleagues, who concluded in 1992, on the basis of cross-cultural studies, that anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise are recognized in very similar ways in very different societies. This finding supported the idea of a shared biological origin. Other authors, such as Robert Plutchik, proposed models with a different number of primary emotions, which shows that the list is far from unanimous.

The existence of basic emotions is, however, a matter of debate. Constructionist theories argue that emotions have no specific physiological signatures or distinct locations in the nervous system; instead, they are built from more elemental ingredients, such as core affect (pleasure or displeasure and degree of arousal) and conceptual knowledge, and context plays a decisive role. Dimensional models, such as James Russell's circumplex model or the PANA model, describe emotions in terms of continuous dimensions, such as valence and arousal, rather than discrete categories.

In practice, the notion of basic emotions remains useful in research on facial expression, evolutionary psychology and the design of measurement instruments, although its scope and its claim to universality are actively discussed in contemporary psychology.