Defining Basic Emotions

Emotions, according to Johnson-Laird and Oatley (Stein and Oatley, 1992), are in response to fundamental life tasks, or "fundamental human predicaments." The emotions are distinguished by having distinctive universal signals, physiology, and antecedent events (and emotions are separate from other affective phenomena like moods or attitudes). The five "basic" or most fundamental emotions found by these researchers in 1989, based on analysis of emotion words, are: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, and disgust. These categories correlate with many of the categories mentioned in previous posts about categorical analysis of the IAPS, IADS, and ANEW stimuli.

The strongest universal signals distinguishing between emotions are in facial expressions (Johnson-Laird et al 1992). I can consider it a variable to have or not have facial expressions in my dance. I would like to see the differences between showing expressions related to particular basic emotions, other kinds of facial use, and no expression. Tomkins (1962) also sought unique vocals for each emotion, and I may be able to look into that for use of vocalization in my dance.

The physiology of specific emotions is interesting, in that we seem to have common action plans for the different emotions. Though our actual behavioral responses may vary, it is common for blood to go to the hands in anger (in order to attack), or in fear, for us to freeze for concealment and also have blood sent to the large skeletal muscles as we become ready to flee. These specific Autonomic Nervous System patterns distinghs anger, fear, disgust, and maybe sadness (Ekman, Levenson, and Friesen, 1983; Levenson, Ekman, and Friesen, 1990 and 1991). I can consider this flow of energy to different body parts when creating movement; I imagine if I wanted to illustrate anger using hand movements, and freezing of large whole-body flight to help illustrate this aspect of the experience of fear.

Universality of antecedent events is found on a more abstract level (for example, loss of a significant other can trigger sadness, but who is considered significant varies across cultures and people). I may look into Ekman and Frieen (1975) to find out more about their prototypic interpersonal events that supposedly can universally cue certain emotions. It should be noted that different emotions can come of the same antecedent event (Stein and Trabasso, 1992). I hope to demonstrate the social nature of the emotions by the relationships of multiple dancers within each piece, and this will tie in with antecedent events as well as other emotional components.


There is a problem of distinguishing positive emotions in defining basic emotions; in this study, happiness is the only category outside the negative realm, making it a very broad category. As I have regularly found in my sources, the positive emotions tend to have less distinction (which may tie in with the Alarm Hypothesis, by which it is only necessary to survival to have distinction among the negative emotions). There are no distinctive signals between emotions of enjoyment, but collectively they do all demonstrate the genuine "Duchenne" smile. It is possible that they differ in vocal signals.

Other possible basic emotions (having significant distinction from other emotions in the earlier-listed ways) include embarrassment, awe, and excitement- each featuring its own research difficulties.

Resource:
Stein and Oatley (1992).