Psychology
Primary Emotions
Primary emotions are the basic, universal emotions that are considered to be innate and experienced by all humans. These emotions include happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust. They are thought to have a direct and immediate impact on behavior and are often the foundation for more complex emotions.
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12 Key excerpts on "Primary Emotions"
eBook - PDFSpeaking of Emotions
Conceptualisation and Expression
- Angeliki Athanasiadou, Elzbieta Tabakowska, Angeliki Athanasiadou, Elzbieta Tabakowska(Authors)
- 2010(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
(1994: 57) In justifying the claim that emotions such as fear, anger, or sadness are innate and universal, many scholars appeal to the (alleged) fact 4 Anna Wierzbicka that these particular emotions are found in all cultures. As Plutchik (1994) reports: Kemper (1987: 57) believes that there are at least four physiologically based Primary Emotions: fear, anger, sadness, and satisfaction. He argues that the rationale for considering them as primary is that they can be observed (or in-ferred) in most animals, that they are universally found in all cultures, that they appear early in the course of human development, that they are out-comes of power and status interactions, and that they are associated with dis-tinct autonomic patterns of physiological changes. These are important points in that they represent an explicit justification for considering certain emotions as primary. (Emphasis added) Similarly, Ortony and Turner (1990) point out that the usual rea-sons that theorists give for assuming the existence of primary emo-tions are that: (1) some emotions appear to exist in all cultures', (2) some can be identified in higher animals; (3) some have characteristic facial expressions; and (4) some seem to increase the chances of sur-vival. (Emphasis added). Some of the claims which have been made in recent literature about the alleged basic emotions are bizarre. Thus for example Plutchik suggests that joy (or near equivalents such as love, pleasure, elation, happiness, or satisfaction) appears on every list. If emotions as dif-ferent as joy, love, pleasure, elation, happiness, or satisfaction can be regarded as near equivalents, then the whole idea of trying to iden-tify some universal emotions and to draw specific lists of such emo-tions, seems pointless.
eBook - PDF- Penzo, Jeanine, Harvey, Pat(Authors)
- 2009(Publication Date)
- New Harbinger Publications(Publisher)
Primary Emotions Happen Primary Emotions (such as fear) are usually hardwired. They are your initial reaction, or the first emotion you feel, to situations that affect you. They are experienced physiologically within your body. Usually these emo- tions come and go, much as waves come and go on the shore (Linehan 1993b). To help you to understand Primary Emotions, let’s look at a situation that might cause you to experience one. EXERCISE: Primary Emotions Imagine that you’ve just been called to the principal’s office at your child’s school. You know only that your child has been involved in a fight. You think about this as you drive to the school. List the feelings that you might experience as you drive: Secondary Emotions Are Created Let’s continue with our example of being called to the office of your child’s principal. You listed some of the initial, or primary, emotions in the preceding exercise. Your Primary Emotions may have been alarm, fear, or Emotional Intensity and Your Child’s Feelings 11 anger, especially if your child has been guilty of starting fights in the past. When you get to the principal’s office, she tells you that your child was hit by another child and was not the instigator. Now you begin to think about your initial anger and the erroneous conclusion that you jumped to. These thoughts create the secondary emotion of guilt. Secondary emotions are reactions to your Primary Emotions and result from beliefs and assumptions that you’ve learned throughout your life. For example, if your parents often showed disapproval when you were angry as a child, you may continue to experience guilt whenever you feel anger, espe- cially when the anger is not justified by someone else’s actions. It’s possible to have several secondary emotions as responses to one primary emotion. In fact, you or your child may have so many secondary emotions that you cannot remember the primary emotion that triggered them.
eBook - PDF- Spradlin, Scott A.(Authors)
- 1010(Publication Date)
- New Harbinger Publications(Publisher)
We can also say that while thoughts affect emotions, they aren’t necessarily mediating every emotional response, at least at a conscious level. Emotions can get us going efficiently, and this works in some circumstances but not in others. In this chapter, we discussed the important things emotions do for us: preparing for action, gathering information, and communicating with other people. In the next chapter you’ll learn about the difference between primary and secondary emotions, and you’ll have an opportunity to practice your awareness of the function of your emotions. 22 Don’t Let Your Emotions Run Your Life CHAPTER 3 Primary and Secondary Emotions When emotions do what they’re supposed to do, they’re referred to as Primary Emotions. They’re uncomplicated, unlearned responses that are fundamental to human functioning. Primary Emotions aren’t complicated mixtures of various emotions, and they don’t neces- sarily require that we “think things through.” They are part of the hard-wired biological component of emotions, and most researchers agree that they are related to survival. When you hear a loud noise and you jump or duck to the ground, your body reacted with a primary fear reaction in order to protect you from a perceived threat. Someone you like asks you out to lunch, and you feel elated and joyful. Your beloved pet dies, and you cry because you have lost something dear to you. None of these are dysfunctional, and nearly all people feel emotions and feel a range of intensity of these emotions. Emotion researchers aren’t unanimous on how many Primary Emotions exist or exactly how to define them, but most recognize nine Primary Emotions: ! Joy ! Love ! Interest ! Sorrow
eBook - PDFFeeling, Thinking, and Talking
How the Embodied Brain Shapes Everyday Communication
- L. David Ritchie(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
5 Emotion Theorists generally agree that emotions are important both to mental function- ing and to social interaction, but the nature of emotions is still subject to vigorous debate. 1 Adherents to the “natural kind” approach argue that emotion categories such as anger, sadness, and fear are biologically given categories that have evolved as behavioral adaptations and cannot be reduced to more basic psychological concepts. Some natural kind theorists further argue that each basic emotion category (e.g. anger or fear) is associated with a particular locale or network in the brain and with a particular set of facial muscles that combine to express it. Much of the research on display and recognition of nonverbal emotional expression 2 assumes that all humans experience, express, and perceive the same basic set of emotions, although emotional display in certain contexts is influenced by cultural norms. In contrast, psychological constructionist approaches assume that emotion categories such as anger, fear, happiness, and sadness are socially learned categories, based on a set of basic psychological operations common to all mental states. 3 Sensory signals from the body are experienced as “core affect,” a mental representation of changes in the current state of the body that are sometimes experienced as pleasure or displeasure (e.g. pain or discomfort), and associated with some degree of arousal. Core affect is interpreted – made meaningful – through a process of conceptual categorization based on cultur- ally learned concepts and on knowledge and memories of past experiences. In this chapter, I begin with a discussion of the classic view of “basic emotions” as innate and universal, which still dominates the discussion of emotion in communication, then review some recent critiques of the classic view and several alternative views that have been recently advanced.
eBook - PDF- David Matsumoto, Linda Juang(Authors)
- 2016(Publication Date)
- Cengage Learning EMEA(Publisher)
They are different from moods, which last longer—for hours or days. Emotions are functional; when they occur, they tell us something important about our relationship to the event that elicited it, they help prepare our bodies for action, and they communicate our states and intentions to others (e.g., watch out when the boss is angry). All humans in all cultures have emotions, and for the most part we all have mainly the same types of emotions. Thus emotion is a human universal. affect Feelings, or subjec-tive experience. emotions Transient, neurophysiological reactions to events that have conse-quences for our welfare, and require an immediate behavioral response. They include feelings, but also physiological reactions, expressive behaviors, behav-ioral intentions, and cogni-tive changes. Copyright 2017 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s). Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it. 204 Chapter 9 Different Categories of Emotion Not all emotions are the same. As we will learn below, humans share a small set of emotions, known as basic emotions (Ekman, 1999; Izard, 2007), with other nonhuman primates. Basic emotions are triggered by a biologically innate system in our brains. They evolved originally to help us adapt to our natural and social environments in order to live. From an evolutionary standpoint, it’s very difficult to consider how survival could have occurred without basic emotions helping us adapt our behaviors quickly and reliably.
eBook - PDF- Hichem Naar, Fabrice Teroni(Authors)
- 2017(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
Neuroscientist Antonio Damasio (1994) distinguishes between “pri- mary” emotions, i.e., relatively “primitive” emotions that can be explained by James’s “preorganized mechanism,” and “secondary” emotions, i.e., emotions that rely on learning and individual experience, which are built upon the mechanisms for Primary Emotions. Whereas Primary Emotions are pre-wired, secondary emotions are the result of learning and individual experience; they depend on learned associations between certain types of individual experience and certain emotional responses, connections which are underpinned by circuits in the prefrontal cortex. As a result of these learned associations, a cognitively complex thought or memory can set off the very same reactions in the amygdala (and elsewhere) as primitive emotional triggers. Damasio’s evidence for this hypothesis is largely drawn from studying patients with damage to the ventromedial sectors of the prefrontal cortices, who are unable to “generate emotions relative to the images conjured up by certain categories of situation and stimuli” (1994: 138), and thus cannot mark these situations and stimuli somatically. Such people can tell you that a particular picture of a horrific road accident is “disturbing,” but they are not disturbed by it; their bodies do not react to it. They show no change in skin conductance, for example (209–10). Interestingly, although these patients have intact Primary Emotions and also intact intelligence and powers of abstract thinking, they show marked deficiencies in everyday reasoning tasks. In the famous gambling experi- ments developed in Damasio’s lab, patients with damaged frontal lobes recognized “intellectually” that two of the four packs of cards in the game were untrustworthy or “dangerous” (giving larger payouts but also demanding much larger payments than the other two packs), but they continued to take from these two packs, despite mounting losses as a result of this strategy.
eBook - PDFEmotional Imprints of War
A Computer-Assisted Analysis of Emotions in Dutch Parliamentary Debates, 1945-1989
- Milan van Lange(Author)
- 2023(Publication Date)
- Bielefeld University Press(Publisher)
2. Emotions 2.1 Defining Emotion ‘Emotion’ is like ‘language’ or ‘freedom’: These concepts are supposedly well known to the extent that their everyday use is often taken for granted. 1 As human beings, we are quite familiar with emotional states, ranging from negative ones associated with anger, fear, disgust, and sadness to positive states like joy, trust, and love. Yet what is emotion? Some people say that football is emotion. Defining emotion more precisely is however difficult. If there is one thing that the many attempts to arrive at a definition of emotion in various academic disciplines show, it is that definitions of the words ‘emotion’, ‘emotions’, and ‘emotionality’ are subject to disagreement, changing perspectives, and cultural and linguistic differences. Debates about emo- tions are complex and filled with ambiguities and diverging nuances. In addition, it remains difficult to distinguish between emotion and feeling, or between emotion and mood, affect, passion, or sentiment. These distinctions are discussed within a wide range of disciplines, and show how difficult it is to provide a fixed definition. 2 Before investigating the role of emotions in historical sources, this chapter explores the definition of emotion as an object of research in more detail. Emotions are triggered by external or internal stimuli. On the individual level, emotional responses and expressions result from appraisals of these stimuli. 3 Per- sonal emotions are a complex of neuro-physical, social, and cultural actions and re- actions. 4 In psychology,‘affect’ is often considered as unconscious and embodied (in facial expressions, for example), whereas ‘emotion’ is more consciously anchored in 1 Lucia Omondi, ‘Dholuo Emotional Language: An Overview’, in The Language of Emotions, ed. Susanne Niemeier and René Dirven (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1997), 88; Gregory and Åhäll, ‘Introduction: Mapping Emotions, Politics and War’, 3.
eBook - PDFPsychopathology
A Social Neuropsychological Perspective
- Alison Lee, Robert Irwin(Authors)
- 2018(Publication Date)
- Cambridge University Press(Publisher)
necessary to protect the individual and to encourage behaviours such as exploration and attachment to others. The use of brain scanning supports the idea of the six discrete emotions (Barrett and Wager, 2006). Izard (1984, 2007) argues that emotions are innate and that the individual learns the bodily feeling of each emotion, which is subjectively invariant. The support for this comes from the observation that it seems to be impossible to teach people to be happy or sad (Izard, 2007); these emotions just emerge naturally during development. As mentioned earlier, anxiety and excitement seem to be subjectively qualified depending on context. Sometimes you can feel the physio- logical sensations (like a racing heart), think about it and decide that you are either anxious or excited. This is mostly a philosophical episode; the body is geared for a specific behaviour and is in a specific state of arousal regardless of the label the perceiver attaches to it. 3.2.1 How are Emotions Experienced? Theorists debate the extent to which emotions are contextual and different from non-emotional states. The earliest Darwinian theories of emotion suggest there is an emotional baseline where we are centred until a stimulus is perceived to trigger a discrete emotion. After which, the individual reverts to the baseline state. These theories see emotion as something akin to homeostasis – a bodily sensation (‘goosebumps’) makes you get up and act (reach for a jumper). Like- wise, seeing a knife-wielding murderer creeping up behind your favourite televi- sion character could provoke an emotional behaviour, making you look away or shout out, for example. This is a neat theory but is perhaps a little simplistic. Emotions are multifaceted and complex, and a simple stimulus–response rela- tionship does not seem to be nuanced enough.
eBook - PDF- Ronald Comer, Elizabeth Gould, Adrian Furnham(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- Wiley(Publisher)
As we observed earlier, Paul Ekman and his colleagues have conducted a series of studies on facial expressions of emotion (Cohn et al., 2007; Ekman, 2003; Ekman & Friesen, 1971). They have found that individuals from many different cultural and language backgrounds, when presented with photographs of differ- ent facial expressions, are fairly accurate at selecting the emotions being expressed. Individuals from places such as Estonia, Ethiopia, Turkey and Japan, for example, similarly recognize facial expressions of happiness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise and sadness (Ekman et al., 1987). One study even found that the inhabitants of isolated villages in Papua New Guinea – who had never seen a photograph, magazine, film or television – recognized facial expressions of emotion with the same degree of accuracy as individuals from countries exposed to Western media (Ekman & Friesen, 1971). Based on such research, a number of theorists have sug- gested that some innate, basic emotions are pre-programmed into all people. Tomkins (1962) proposes that there are eight basic emotions: surprise, interest, joy, rage, fear, disgust, shame and anguish. Indeed, it appears that infants typically display the facial expressions of such fundamental emotions very early in life (Izard, 1994). Even children who are born without sight dis- play facial expressions similar to those of sighted children of the same age (Galati et al., 2003; Goodenough, 1932). Emotional Development We have discussed ideas about how emotions evolved in the human species. What about how emotions develop in each individual as that person grows from infant to adult? Let’s look at two contrasting theories of emotional development. One holds that emotions unfold as a consequence of neu- ral and cognitive development. The other argues that emo- tions themselves help spur (i.e. cause) neural growth and the development of cognitive processes.
- Andrej Démuth(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- Peter Lang Group(Publisher)
In the introductory chapter, we provided several theories, which suggest that the key feature of the existence of subjectively felt experience is that being aware of it (or rather being aware of its content) enables us to re- act to negative or life-threatening impulses. Supporters of folk psychology assumed that emotions are reactions to impulses that trigger changes in our physical state. According to this theory, e.g. excitement provokes an in- creased heart rate, change of the rate and depth of breathing or a galvanic skin response – skin hyperaemia. W. James and C. Lange pointed out that they are rather the consequence of a change in bodily state, not their cause. The change in physical state – heart rate, breathing etc. allows us to recog- nize this complex of changes as an individual emotion. Each specific emotion therefore refers to a specific physical state, which it triggers. It is assumed that this causal effect (change in physical state triggering an emotion) may be unidirectional, despite the fact that evidence supporting a plausible bi- directional relationship has appeared (purposeful smiling may eventually trigger real feelings of happiness – Kahneman 2011). The given physical state therefore always inevitably provokes a specific emotion, which it is re- lated to, regardless of whether it was naturally incited or not. 152 A N AT T E M P T T O S U M M A R I Z E T H E M E A N I N G O F E M O T I O N A N D A N O U T L I N E O F T H E P H I L O S O P H Y O F E M O T I O N A L I T Y F R O M A S E C O N D P E R S O N P O I N T O F V I E W Feelings of pain, which belong to the most basic of feelings, is caused by distress to the A-alpha, -beta, -delta or unmyelinated C-fibres in the body.
eBook - PDF- Jamie Ward(Author)
- 2022(Publication Date)
- Psychology Press(Publisher)
Some researchers have endorsed the posi- tion that the scientific community should avoid using emotion words (e.g. ‘fear’) to describe situations such as a rodent’s expectation of an electric shock (LeDoux & Hofman, 2018). Others have defended the idea of emo- tions being multi-faceted and with many animals sharing key elements with humans (Anderson & Adolphs, 2014; de Waal, 2019). Defining emotions in terms of concepts may also tend to skew the evidence base. It may orient researchers to rely on evidence from asking people to name or categorize emotions, whereas much of our emotional knowledge is unconscious and effectively hidden from these language systems. Whilst we might explicitly categorize a smile as ‘happiness’, a smile can hide a multitude of emotions such as enjoyment, bonding, or dominance; and humans are capable of perceiving these nuances in smiling even if they are not an integral part of our emotion vocabulary (Rychlowska et al., 2017). De Waal (2019) has argued that similar distinctions are found in primates, with the human bare-toothed grin smile evolving from primate bonding behavior that signals anxiety in the presence of a higher-ranking animal (as opposed to a simple category label of ‘happy’). By contrast, Barrett (2017) claims that because there is no Latin word for ‘smile’ that this gesture had little or no role in the emotional lives of the Romans. In this account smiles are social constructs with no biological evolutionary heritage. In summary, there is general agreement on the notion that some stim- uli are innately rewarding and punishing stimuli (primary reinforcers). This provides a foundation for widening our emotional repertoire. There is less consensus on whether emotional categories (e.g. disgust, fear) are innate or learned, and this debate extends to facial expressions. Some emotions (e.g. moral emotions) depend strongly on contextual appraisals, and arguably this may apply to all emotions.
eBook - PDFWhat Emotions Really Are
The Problem of Psychological Categories
- Paul E. Griffiths(Author)
- 2008(Publication Date)
- University of Chicago Press(Publisher)
Emotion is like the category of “superlunary” objects in ancient astronomy. There is a well-defined category of “every- thing outside the orbit of the moon” but it turns out that superlunary ob- jects do not have something specially in common that distinguishes them from other arbitrary collections of objects. In the same way, a social and historical account can be given of why various aspects of human psychol- ogy and physiology have been brought together under the single heading of “emotion.” However, what we know about these phenomena suggests that there is no rich collection of generalizations about this range of phe- nomena that distinguishes them from other psychological phenomena. They do not constitute a single object of knowledge. Current knowledge suggests that the domain of emotion fractures into three parts. The best understood emotional responses are the short-term, salient 15 Introduction cases of anger, fear, disgust, sadness, joy, and surprise. The affect program approach gives a reasonable account of these states. The social constructionist approach also gives a good account of a limited range of emotions. These emotional responses are socially sustained pretenses, akin to socially constructed illnesses like ghost possession or “the vapors.” They have no more in common with other emotions than a piece of playacting has in common with the behavior it imitates. Many of these pretenses are instances of types like anger which have other, more substantial instances, but there may be emotion types all of whose in- stances are social pretenses. In addition to these pretenses, social constructionist literature discusses a much larger range of emotions which are at least somewhat variable across cultures. This variation suggests that cultural factors play some role in the construction of these emotional responses in each person. But these are the very same emotions-guilt, vengefulness, moral outrage-about which evolutionary psychologists have speculated.
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