Quote:
Originally Posted by Tina  John: I'm very interested in the study of Emotions. Now the current accepted view is that there are six basic human emotions (globally recognised facial expressions) thus we could almost say "instinctive" emotions. They are:
Fear
Saddness
Surprise
Disgust
Happiness
Anger
How would you regard the significance of these base 6 emotions in your outlined scheme? |
Hi Tina,
Thanks for your interest. I've seen this list before. It's just a list. It is wrong to call this list a list of basic emotions because this list is based on, as you say, facial expressions. I guess this is a psychology vs. philosophy issue. Facial expressions are of interest to psychology and emotion theory is of interest to philosophy.
Fear is not a basic emotion. Fear is one of the anxiety emotions on the unhappiness side. The others are concern, worry and terror. Concern is mild worry. Worry is the anticipation of unhappiness. Fear is excessive worry. Terror is extreme fear. These four emotions are interchangeable in language. They only differ in intensity. As you go through life and you keep this in your mind you will understand this. As for fear, because it is defined from worry, and worry is defined from unhappiness, fear is not a basic emotion.
Sadness, like fear, is also not a basic emotion. Sadness is extreme disappointment or embarrassment. Disappointment is antipathetically below standard or expectation. Embarrassment is empathetically below standard or expectation. Standard and expectation are temporal forms of contentment. Standard is past contentment and expectation is future contentment. These are all performance assessors. Sadness is merely another excessive emotion (as fear is) that is based on other emotions. There are no emotions that are based on sadness.
Surprise is almost a basic emotion but not quite. Surprise is above standard or expectation. It is just like disappointment and embarrassment but, of course, on the positive side. I can't explain why it doesn't come in antipathetic and empathetic forms. Emotion theory is mostly symmetric, this is an exception. Anyway, excessive surprise is ecstatic. Therefore, surprise is the basis of another emotion but I wouldn't call surprise a basic emotion. It is interesting to point out that one cries because one is sad or ecstatic.
Disgust is not a basic emotion. Disgust is the action toward pity. Pity is antipathetically below contentment. Although most people do believe disgust to be an emotion, really it's just an action toward an emotion. The other action toward another emotions are envy, admiration, honor and humility.
Happiness is most definitely a basic emotion. It is the basic emotion. Everything stems from happiness and unhappiness. The difficulty with happiness though is that there are five different types of it. I explained those in the main post but just to list them here they are: 1stC, 2ndC, 3rdC, leverage and contentment.
Anger is not a basic emotion. Anger is excessive frustration. It is based on frustration. Frustration is not getting what will give you contentment. Nothing is based on anger. If one wants to quell their anger, just change it to frustration.
I know all of this is quite deep. Really though, once you understand it, it is just something that is about a seventh grade intelligence level. The thing is that, they won't teach you this in school. It is not measureable.