Are All “Basic Emotions” Emotions? A Problem for the (Basic) Emotions Construct

2021 ◽  
pp. 174569162098541
Author(s):  
Andrew Ortony

Despite decades of challenges to the idea that a small number of emotions enjoys the special status of “basic emotions,” the idea continues to have considerable influence in psychology and beyond. However, different theorists have proposed substantially different lists of basic emotions, which suggests that there exists no stable criterion of basicness. To some extent, the basic-emotions enterprise is bedeviled by an overreliance on English affective terms, but there also lurks a more serious problem—the lack of agreement as to what emotions are. To address this problem, three necessary conditions are proposed as a minimal requirement for a mental state to be an emotion. A detailed analysis of surprise, a widely accepted basic emotion, reveals that surprise violates even this minimal test, raising the possibility that it and perhaps other would-be basic emotions might not be emotions at all. An approach that combines ideas such as undifferentiated affect and cognitive appraisal is briefly proposed as a way of theorizing about emotions that is less dependent on the vagaries of language and incoherent notions of basic emotions. Finally, it is suggested that the perennial question of what an emotion is should be given more serious attention.

2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyn S. Turkstra ◽  
Sarah G. Kraning ◽  
Sarah K. Riedeman ◽  
Bilge Mutlu ◽  
Melissa Duff ◽  
...  

Recognition of facial affect has been studied extensively in adults with and without traumatic brain injury (TBI), mostly by asking examinees to match basic emotion words to isolated faces. This method may not capture affect labelling in everyday life when faces are in context and choices are open-ended. To examine effects of context and response format, we asked 148 undergraduate students to label emotions shown on faces either in isolation or in natural visual scenes. Responses were categorised as representing basic emotions, social emotions, cognitive state terms, or appraisals. We used students’ responses to create a scoring system that was applied prospectively to five men with TBI. In both groups, over 50% of responses were neither basic emotion words nor synonyms, and there was no significant difference in response types between faces alone vs. in scenes. Adults with TBI used labels not seen in students’ responses, talked more overall, and often gave multiple labels for one photo. Results suggest benefits of moving beyond forced-choice tests of faces in isolation to fully characterise affect recognition in adults with and without TBI.


2009 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
W. Gerrod Parrott

The term ur-emotion is proposed to replace basic emotion as a name for the aspects of emotion that underlie perceived similarities of emotion types across cultures and species. The ur- prefix is borrowed from the German on analogy to similar borrowings in textual criticism and musicology. The proposed term ur-emotion is less likely to be interpreted as referring to the entirety of an emotional state than is the term basic emotion. Ur-emotion avoids reductionism by indicating an abstract underlying structure that accounts for similarities between emotions without implying that the differences are unimportant. This article is dedicated to the memory of Bob Solomon, and is framed in terms of his decades-long analysis and critique of the concept of basic emotions.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Veena S ◽  
John Aravindhar

Abstract The human face is an important part of an individual’s body and plays an important role in knowing the individual’s mood. The face is where a human expresses all his basic emotions. In the existing system, they examine the mental state manually by assessing them but have many disadvantages like we cannot predict any accurate solutions based on the assessment score because we might be not sure what kind of emotions the human user would be all time. To overcome this problem, a novel system is proposed to suggest an effective solution for predicting the mental state dynamically, we propose a hybrid architecture invoking facial based emotion sequence, PEN test and IQ test. By consistent monitoring of a human’s emotion and subjecting to PEN and IQ tests, the human’s mental state is routed. Combination of the above three techniques provides promising results for mental state and self-control.


Mathematics ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (8) ◽  
pp. 680
Author(s):  
Yong Zhou ◽  
Bashir Ahmad ◽  
Ahmed Alsaedi

In this paper, we make a detailed analysis of the structure of non-oscillatory solutions for second order superlinear and sublinear dynamic equations on time scales. The sufficient and necessary conditions for existence of non-oscillatory solutions are presented.


2021 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Riho Nakajima ◽  
Masashi Kinoshita ◽  
Hirokazu Okita ◽  
Zhanwen Liu ◽  
Mitsutoshi Nakada

Basic emotions such as happiness, sadness, and anger are universal, regardless of the human species, and are governed by specific brain regions. A recent report revealed that mentalizing, which is the ability to estimate other individuals’ emotional states via facial expressions, can be preserved with the help of awake surgery. However, it is still questionable whether we can maintain the ability to understand others’ emotions by preserving the positive mapping sites of intraoperative assessment. Here, we demonstrated the cortical regions related to basic emotions via awake surgery for patients with frontal glioma and investigated the usefulness of functional mapping in preserving basic emotion. Of the 56 consecutive patients with right cerebral hemispheric glioma who underwent awake surgery at our hospital, intraoperative assessment of basic emotion could be successfully performed in 22 patients with frontal glioma and were included in our study. During surgery, positive responses were found in 18 points in 12 patients (54.5%). Of these, 15 points from 11 patients were found at the cortical level, mainly the premotor and posterior part of the prefrontal cortices. Then, we focused on cortical 15 positive mappings with 40 stimulations and investigated the types of emotions that showed errors by every stimulation. There was no specific rule for the region-emotional type, which was beyond our expectations. In the postoperative acute phase, the test score of basic emotion declined in nine patients, and of these, it decreased under the cut-off value (Z-score ≤ −1.65) in three patients. Although the total score declined significantly just after surgery (p = 0.022), it recovered within 3 months postoperatively. Our study revealed that through direct electrical stimulation (DES), the premotor and posterior parts of the prefrontal cortices are related to various kinds of basic emotion, but not a single one. When the region with a positive mapping site is preserved during operation, basic emotion function might be maintained although it declines transiently after surgery.


2009 ◽  
Vol 21 (9) ◽  
pp. 1736-1750 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephanie Burnett ◽  
Geoffrey Bird ◽  
Jorge Moll ◽  
Chris Frith ◽  
Sarah-Jayne Blakemore

In this fMRI study, we investigated the development between adolescence and adulthood of the neural processing of social emotions. Unlike basic emotions (such as disgust and fear), social emotions (such as guilt and embarrassment) require the representation of another's mental states. Nineteen adolescents (10–18 years) and 10 adults (22–32 years) were scanned while thinking about scenarios featuring either social or basic emotions. In both age groups, the anterior rostral medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) was activated during social versus basic emotion. However, adolescents activated a lateral part of the MPFC for social versus basic emotions, whereas adults did not. Relative to adolescents, adults showed higher activity in the left temporal pole for social versus basic emotions. These results show that, although the MPFC is activated during social emotion in both adults and adolescents, adolescents recruit anterior (MPFC) regions more than do adults, and adults recruit posterior (temporal) regions more than do adolescents.


Author(s):  
Sigerist J. Rodríguez ◽  
Pilar Herrero ◽  
Olinto J. Rodríguez

Today, realism and coherence are highly searched qualities in agent’s behavior; but these qualities cannot be achieved completely without incorporation of emotions. This chapter shows a model for emotional representations in intelligent agents. The model is based on the cognitive appraisal theory of emotions; this theory affirms that stimuli are processed by a cognitive mechanism that determines what emotion to feel. It is also based on the Aaron Sloman’s research where positively and negatively affective states are exposed, as well as, on the theory of basic emotions. The model tries to define an emotional representation data structure for intelligent agents. It also defines the emotional behavior mechanisms when a stimulus is processed, as well as, emotional interaction mechanisms. This chapter is presented in five sections: Introduction, where the topic is presented. State-of-the-Art, where it is introduced a review of emotional studies in psychological areas, as well as, computing areas. The Model Definition section, where a detailed model structure and mechanism are introduced. A fourth section describing the future trends and researches and finally the chapter conclusions.


2012 ◽  
Vol 35 (3) ◽  
pp. 172-202 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristen A. Lindquist ◽  
Tor D. Wager ◽  
Eliza Bliss-Moreau ◽  
Hedy Kober ◽  
Lisa Feldman Barrett

AbstractIn our response, we clarify important theoretical differences between basic emotion and psychological construction approaches. We evaluate the empirical status of the basic emotion approach, addressing whether it requires brain localization, whether localization can be observed with better analytic tools, and whether evidence for basic emotions exists in other types of measures. We then revisit the issue of whether the key hypotheses of psychological construction are supported by our meta-analytic findings. We close by elaborating on commentator suggestions for future research.


1942 ◽  
Vol 10 (4) ◽  
pp. 976-991 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arnold Kunst

A Detailed analysis of single statements corroborates more and more our conviction that the elements of Hindu mentality (viz. philosophy, religion, and fine arts) are subject to certain fixed and common rules of thinking. If we acknowledge any one analytical method—of course the most general possible—as sufficient and adequate, we can presume that whatever may at any time be the object of our analysis must follow the method adopted. If we accept as a principle for the veracity of all judgments that they must be subjected to the rule of sapakṣe sattva and vipakṣe asattva, then the analysis will show that in reality all statements are measurable under the aspect of those two criteria. The only breach in this principle was made by a Jaina logical school which, while anticipating the principles of our “implication”, admits the syllogism fulfilling the anyathānupapannatva condition, i.e. it accepts as true conditional sentences of which the protasis does not reach beyond the sphere of the predicated subject (pakṣa). In other words: the argument, when predicating a fact, forms a true sentence, even if it does not predicate the class to which the fact belongs. Whilst the Buddhist syllogism oscillates between class inference and sentence calculus (sapakṣa and vipakṣa being the necessary conditions), the Jaina syllogism advances exclusively the sentence calculus, and the validity of the predication is confined merely to the implication in question.


2010 ◽  
Vol 22 (12) ◽  
pp. 2864-2885 ◽  
Author(s):  
Katherine Vytal ◽  
Stephan Hamann

What is the basic structure of emotional experience and how is it represented in the human brain? One highly influential theory, discrete basic emotions, proposes a limited set of basic emotions such as happiness and fear, which are characterized by unique physiological and neural profiles. Although many studies using diverse methods have linked particular brain structures with specific basic emotions, evidence from individual neuroimaging studies and from neuroimaging meta-analyses has been inconclusive regarding whether basic emotions are associated with both consistent and discriminable regional brain activations. We revisited this question, using activation likelihood estimation (ALE), which allows spatially sensitive, voxelwise statistical comparison of results from multiple studies. In addition, we examined substantially more studies than previous meta-analyses. The ALE meta-analysis yielded results consistent with basic emotion theory. Each of the emotions examined (fear, anger, disgust, sadness, and happiness) was characterized by consistent neural correlates across studies, as defined by reliable correlations with regional brain activations. In addition, the activation patterns associated with each emotion were discrete (discriminable from the other emotions in pairwise contrasts) and overlapped substantially with structure–function correspondences identified using other approaches, providing converging evidence that discrete basic emotions have consistent and discriminable neural correlates. Complementing prior studies that have demonstrated neural correlates for the affective dimensions of arousal and valence, the current meta-analysis results indicate that the key elements of basic emotion views are reflected in neural correlates identified by neuroimaging studies.


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