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Key points
- The most popular theory proposes there are seven basic emotions.
- The richness of our emotional experience relies on the size of our emotional vocabulary.
- Limited emotional vocabulary is an easy challenge to overcome.
Early in my career, a client of mine told me that she heard somewhere that there are three basic emotions—joy, anger, and fear—and wanted to confirm with me that the information was correct. I paused for a few seconds. I didn’t know how to respond.
My reflex was to say no. I had no such knowledge. In no course that I had taken was it ever mentioned that these are the three basic emotions from which all other emotions derive.
When I tried to answer, I fumbled. I knew that the information was wrong, but I had no idea what the right answer was. I felt embarrassed not knowing what to say, so I relied on the answer that any good scientist-practitioner tends to give in these moments: it depends.
And it really does depend. From the perspective of a person who is not a specialist in this field, the answer may be "Who cares?" It makes no difference in one’s life whether there are three, five, or 11 basic emotions.
If anger is a basic emotion and fury or spite are varieties of anger, what would that knowledge add to your daily life? And even more importantly, how would knowing the number, if such an accurate number existed, affect how you deal with such emotions when they arise?
Researchers and scholars in the field have sought to find the answer to this question. The most popular idea regarding the number of basic emotions is Paul Ekman’s theory of universal emotions. This theory identifies seven basic and universal emotions. In alphabetical order, these emotions include anger, contempt, disgust, enjoyment, fear, sadness, and surprise.
The idea behind the theory is that our facial expressions convey our emotional states in the moment. Our faces reveal what emotion we are experiencing. More interestingly, these facial expressions are to a large extent similar across all humans, regardless of where on Earth they live.
To test the theory, researchers show participants from different parts of the world images of actors, and they ask participants to identify the emotion that each actor’s facial expression is portraying by choosing among a list of emotion words. The high degree of agreement among thousands of participants provides support for the theory, confirming the hypothesis that there are certain emotions that everyone on the globe can recognize by looking at a person’s face. Therefore, these must be basic, universal, hardwired emotions.
The theory has been hugely influential and has infiltrated pop culture in a variety of ways. It informed the five main characters of the 2015 Disney-Pixar movie "Inside Out." It has been used in clinical, organizational, and law enforcement settings. And most of us apply the theory in our daily lives each time we choose which emoji to use when we want to react to a friend’s post on social media. It is amazing how much information about what we feel in the moment is conveyed by an enlarged colored dot with differently arranged lines within its circumference.
Despite being widely accepted and substantiated by research, this theory has had its share of criticism. One of the main lines of criticism has also been its basic assumption: that facial expressions are a biologically hardwired mechanism of displaying an activated emotion. More recent theories have proposed that an emotion is a more complex experience that is part biology, part psychology, and part culture.
Moreover, the facial expressions in the images used in the studies are produced by actors who have been coached to pose in specific ways. This means that the actors are not experiencing the emotion they portray the moment their photo was captured; they are simply creating the facial expression that presumably corresponds to the emotion by moving their facial muscles in certain positions. So, what we are guessing correctly is what they show, not what they feel.
The merits and the drawbacks of the theory aside, it raises an interesting question. What makes an emotion basic? Is it how frequently we experience it? Probably not, because hopefully, we feel enjoyment more often than we feel disgust.
Is it that we can easily recognize them on someone’s face? Images of Marilyn Monroe or the Dalai Lama are also easily recognized but we wouldn’t call these individuals "basic." Is it that all other emotions are derivatives of these emotions? It would behoove us then to find which of these basic emotions is the source of love, pride, or nostalgia.
Is it that each basic emotion has distinct somatic, physiological, and neuroanatomical patterns, specific to each basic emotion? Research in that area has not really yielded much support. Painstaking approaches to identify distinct, unadulterated flavors of basic emotion in the brain’s architecture have resulted in some concepts that we don’t find on emotion checklists, like seeking, lust, and play.
As we begin to rethink the concept of emotions, the notion of basic emotions is falling out of favor. Which brings us back to the original question: How many emotions are there and where do we start the count?
There are two answers to this question. The theoretical answer is that there is a potentially infinite number of emotions. It all depends on how we conceptualize what an emotion is. The practical answer is that there are as many emotions as you can name.
How many emotions we experience may be closely related to how many words we know and use to identify and label them. The richness of our emotional experience is related to how expansive our emotional vocabulary is. This means that it also depends on the language we speak and the culture with which we identify. Emotion words that exist in one language may not exist in another, and they often do not translate well.
So, on the one hand, our emotions bank can be unlimited, and on the other hand, it can be restricted by the emotion words we have access to. From your own experience, think about how frustrating it can be when you want to express how you feel but you can’t find a satisfying word.
You may access the word that comes easily: “I’m mad at you.” You may in that instance share a lot of thoughts to let the other person guess what you are feeling: “You are so annoying; you don’t care about anyone but yourself; you never get it.” Or you may say nothing. If you took a moment and ran through your mental vocabulary of emotions, however, you may come up with more words to describe your feelings: hurt, undermined, insulted, belittled, neglected, or provoked.
We experience a range of emotional states each day, caused by a range of triggers and resulting in a variety of responses. Many of these states remain unnoticed because they are too fleeting or too muted to grab our attention and they fly under the radar. Many of these states remain unnamed because we do not have words to describe them… yet.
If you’d like to know where you stand, give yourself a short (really short) quiz. Set the timer for one minute and write down or say aloud as many emotion words as you can think. What does your list look like?
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