Basic emotions: can conflicting criteria converge?

The authors discuss some of the key points raised by Ekman (1992), Izard (1992), and Panksepp (1992) in their critiques of Ortony and Turner's (1990) suggestion that there are and probably can be no objective and generally acceptable criteria for what is to count as a basic emotion. A number of studies are discussed that are relevant to the authors' contention that a more promising approach to understanding the huge diversity among emotions is to think in terms of emotions being assemblages of basic components rather than combinations of other basic emotions. The authors stress that their position does not deny that emotions are based on "hardwired" biological systems. On the other hand, the existence of such systems does not mean that some emotions (such as those that appear on lists of basic emotions) have a special status. Finally, the authors note that Ekman, Izard, and Panksepp, in adopting different starting points for their research, arrive at rather different conclusions as to what basic emotions are and which emotions are basic. It is concluded that converging resolutions of these questions are improbable.

What's basic about basic emotions?

A widespread assumption in theories of emotion is that there exists a small set of basic emotions. From a biological perspective, this idea is manifested in the belief that there might be neurophysiological and anatomical substrates corresponding to the basic emotions. From a psychological perspective, basic emotions are often held to be the primitive building blocks of other, nonbasic emotions. The content of such claims is examined, and the results suggest that there is no coherent nontrivial notion of basic emotions as the elementary psychological primitives in terms of which other emotions can be explained. Thus, the view that there exist basic emotions out of which all other emotions are built, and in terms of which they can be explained, is questioned, raising the possibility that this position is an article of faith rather than an empirically or theoretically defensible basis for the conduct of emotion research. This suggests that perhaps the notion of basic emotions will not lead to significant progress in the field. An alternative approach to explaining the phenomena that appear to motivate the postulation of basic emotions is presented.

The comprehension of metaphorical uses of English by deaf children.

Researchers and educators of the deaf often suggest that deaf children have a particular problem in understanding metaphorical uses of natural language. This paper reports two experiments whose results are incompatible with this view. Profoundly deaf children were presented with several short stories and were instructed to select (from a set of 4 alternatives) the sentence they thought best completed the story. In Experiment 1 deaf children ranging in age from 9 to 17 years clearly demonstrated their ability to understand novel metaphorical uses of English. In Experiment 2, 14-year-old deaf children who were given feedback on four initial practice items selected the correct metaphorical alternative significantly more often than those who saw no practice items. The conclusion is that deaf children probably do not suffer from some special deficiency uniquely associated with metaphor.

A context-sensitive representation of word meanings.

This study provides a numerical representation of contextual effects on the meanings of words, constructed from the order judgments of 19 subjects concerning the word "red" in 19 sentences. Subjects judged whether or not the red object mentioned in a sentence was redder than, less red than, or could be equally as red as the red object mentioned in each of the other sentences. These judgments were well described as an interval order. This means that the red ascribed in a sentence can be represented by a real interval with judgments of equally red corresponding to overlapping intervals. Semiorder axioms were not met, indicating that the width of the interval varied from sentence to sentence. Possible ways of incorporating the result into theories of semantic memory were discussed, as well as ways of accounting for the pronounced individual differences which were observed. The research described herein was supported by the National Institute of Education under Contract HEW NIE-G-74-0007.