Basic Emotion Theory Research Articles

Emotions and Modern Psychology Studies: Development and Application of Traditional Chinese Medical Theories in Seven Emotions

Objective — To summarize the concept of the Seven Emotions Theory in Traditional Chinese Medicine (TCM), the characteristics of the disease, and the influence on the viscera, combined with the research results of modern psychology, this paper studies the etiology and pathogenesis of the Seven Emotions from the perspective of psychology to achieve the purpose of guiding clinical practice. Methods — Through consulting a large number of documents, analyze and understand the meaning of Seven Emotions Theory. By analyzing the emotion-related arguments of the mainstream schools of modern psychology, the basic emotion theory and the relationship between the Seven Emotions of TCM, the concept of TCM sentiment, and the relationship between TCM sentiment and basic emotions are explained. Through the systematic analysis of emotions, explore the relationship between the seven emotions of Chinese medicine. Results — Through research on the development of the Seven Emotions Theory and its etiology, pathogenesis, emotional disease syndromes, and emotional therapy in Yellow Emperor’s Classic of Internal Medicine (Huangdi Neijing) and other historical documents, we can discuss the significance of the Seven Emotions theory systematically comb the theory, and hope to guide clinical practice.Conclusion — In clinical diagnosis and treatment of diseases caused by emotions, it is advisable to consider the mutual influence of multi-emotional factors, whether it is a disease with other emotions, and whether multiple organs are injured, so as to better diagnose and treat disease syndromes.

The Psychological Construction of Emotion – A Non-Essentialist Philosophy of Science

Advocates for the psychological construction of emotion view themselves as articulating a non-essentialist alternative to basic emotion theory's essentialist notion of affect programs. Psychological constructionists have also argued that holding essentialist assumptions about emotions engenders misconceptions about the psychological constructionist viewpoint. If so, it is important to understand what psychological constructionists mean by “essentialism” and “non-essentialism.” To advance the debate, I take a deeper dive into non-essentialism, comparing the non-essentialist views of the early empiricists with those of the psychological constructionists, focusing on the theories of James Russell and Lisa Barrett. Using Lakatos’ notion of scientific research programs, I also describe how Russell's and Barrett's views have evolved into different and potentially competing research programs under the psychological constructionist banner.

Basic emotion theory, social constructionism, and the universal ethogram

While emotion researchers with an evolutionary and biological orientation increasingly agree that small sets of discrete emotions are basic or primary, other researchers – particularly social constructionists – instead argue that all emotions are expressions of language and culture largely unconstrained by biology. Emotions are indeed socially and psychologically constructed, but not from scratch, for the basic emotions have evolved as biologically-structured adaptive reactions to the most fundamental problems of life, and have a deep evolutionary history. These life-problems were first identified in herpetology, and elaborated in Plutchik’s universal ethogram, a behavioral profile of four problems of life – identity, temporality, hierarchy, and territoriality – shared by a wide range of animal species. Plutchik proposed that the opposite poles of each of these dimensions can represent prototypical life-situations requiring rapid adaptive reactions; these reactions comprise the eight primary emotions. By hypothesizing that these dimensions have evolved into elementary social-relations models, we establish a continuity between the sociorelational and biological levels of emotional experience. Identification of eight basic emotions enables a classification of 24 secondary and 56 tertiary level emotions.

What basic emotions really are: modularity, motivation, and behavioral variability

While there is ongoing debate about the existence of basic emotions and about their status as natural kinds, these debates usually carry on under the assumption that basic emotions are modular and therefore cannot account for behavioral variability in emotional situations. Moreover, both sides of the debate have assumed that these putative features of basic emotions distinguish them as products of evolution rather than products of culture and experience. I argue that these assumptions are unwarranted, that there is empirical evidence against them, and that evolutionary theory itself should not lead us to expect that behavioral invariability and modularity mark the distinction between evolved emotions and higher cognitive emotions. I further suggest that claims about behavioral invariability and modularity have functioned as defeasible conjectures aimed at helping test basic emotion theory. Finally, I draw out the implications of these claims for debates about the existence of basic emotions in humans.

Express yourself: Facial expression of happiness, anger, fear, and sadness in funding pitches

We build upon theory from evolutionary psychology and emotional expression, including basic emotion theory and the dual threshold model of anger in organizations, to extend knowledge about the influence of facial expressions of emotion in entrepreneurial fundraising. First, we conduct a qualitative analysis to understand the objects of entrepreneurs' facial expressions of four basic emotions in their pitches: happiness, anger, fear, and sadness. This provides a base for our theorizing that the frequency of entrepreneurs' facial expression of each of these emotions exhibits an inverted U-shaped relationship with funding. We also argue that the frequency of changes in entrepreneurs' facial expressions is positively related to funding. We test our predictions with a sample of 489 funding pitches using computer-aided facial expression analysis. Results support inverted U-shaped relationships of the frequency of facial expression of happiness, anger, and fear with funding, but show a negative relationship of sadness with funding. Results further support that the frequency of change in entrepreneurs' facial expressions promotes funding.

EMOTIONAL AND SEMANTIC DOMINANT IN THE POETRY OF THE PARTICIPANTS IN JOINT FORCES OPERATION

The aim of this article is to identify the emotional and semantic dominant in the poetry of the participants in the Joint Forces Operation. Materials & Methods. The study is carried out from the standpoint of a comprehensive psycholinguistic approach based on the integration of discourse analysis and psychoanalytic interpretation. To recognize the emotional and semantic dominant in the poetry of the participants in the Joint Forces Operation, the basic emotion theory is important. Decomposing complex emotions into simpler pieces of basic emotions makes it possible to determine the emotional and semantic dominant of a text. Materials to conduct this research are poetry of the participants in the Joint Forces Operation that is posted on Facebook social media accounts “Poems of ATO. Soldier”, “Songs created in the zone of Anti-Terrorist Operation”. Results & discussions. The poetry is characterized by paired combinations of the emotion of anger with emotions of fear, disgust, sadness, grief and joy. Anger also becomes the main element of complex emotions consisting of several components. The semantic dominant in the poetry from the perspective of the emotion of anger can be expressed as “I hate war”. Expression of intensity of combatants’ suffering is achieved in poetry by conveying sthenic emotion resulting in increased activity, which we denote as grief, and asthenic emotion which doesn’t encourage further action, which we denote as sadness. The semantic dominant in the poetry from the perspective of grief and sadness can be considered as a cry for help. Emotion of fear in the poetry can be associated with the emergence of “existential anxiety”, a core of which lies in a person’s perception of the threat of non-being (mortality). In the poetry the emotion of fear often adjoins the emotion of guilt. The semantic dominant in the poetry from the perspective of the emotions of fear and guilt is understanding of death and immortality in the philosophical and religious context. In contrast to negative emotions associated with the past or present, the emotion of joy refers to the future tense. The semantic dominant in the poetry from the perspective of the emotion of joy is the idea of peace. Conclusions. Basic emotions of anger, grief, sadness prevail in the poetry of the participants in the Joint Forces Operation. However, any emotion is not in its own right, it exists in manifold combinations with other basic emotions creating different conglomerates. The general semantic dominant in the poetry of the participants in the Joint Forces Operation is “No to war”.

The Emotional Experiences of Paralympic Swimming Medalists: Not All Wins and Losses Are Equal.

The goal of this study was to determine if emotional expressions at the end of swimmers' 2016 Paralympic races varied according to medal won and if their race wins and losses were close or not close. Using FaceReader software, videos of 46 races of medal-winning Paralympic (M age = 24.6; SD = 5.4) swimmers' faces (78 males and 60 females) from 22 countries were analyzed. Silver medalists were angrier and sadder than gold medalists and angrier and more disgusted than bronze medalists. Swimmers who swam slower than their 2015 best time were angrier than Paralympians who swam faster. Paralympians who finished lower than their 2015 world ranking had more neutral emotions and were less happy than Paralympians who finished higher. Gold medalists who narrowly defeated silver medalists were less happy and more fearful than gold medalists who won easily. Bronze medalists with close wins had fewer neutral emotions and were happier, less angry, and more surprised than bronze medalists with not-close wins. All medalists with close wins were more surprised than medalists with easier wins. Bronze medalists with close losses to silver medalists were happier and less angry than bronze medalists who lost more easily. Effect sizes ranged from d = 0.27 to 1.01. These results provide theoretical support to basic emotion theory and confirm the anecdotal observations that Paralympic competition generates wide-ranging and diverse emotions.

The Study of a Five-Dimensional Emotional Model for Facial Emotion Recognition

Based on basic emotion theory and the PAD emotion model that can describe continuous emotion changes, we first propose a more general concept of a five-dimensional emotion model to better meet the needs in the area of emotion recognition. We determined the relationship between its dimensions and basic emotions and used a Pearson correlation analysis, multilayer perceptron, and other methods to compare and verify it with volunteer human identifiers. The results demonstrated that the five-dimensional emotion model was better than human identification in the field of emotion recognition. We also compared it with the PAD emotion model. The results demonstrated that the five-dimensional emotion model performed better. Finally, using the proposed model, we designed a technology prototype of a mood adaptive interface to demonstrate its potential application.

Semantic Space Theory: A Computational Approach to Emotion

Within affective science, the central line of inquiry, animated by basic emotion theory and constructivist accounts, has been the search for one-to-one mappings between six emotions and their subjective experiences, prototypical expressions, and underlying brain states. We offer an alternative perspective: semantic space theory. This computational approach uses wide-ranging naturalistic stimuli and open-ended statistical techniques to capture systematic variation in emotion-related behaviors. Upwards of 25 distinct varieties of emotional experience have distinct profiles of associated antecedents and expressions. These emotions are high-dimensional, categorical, and often blended. This approach also reveals that specific emotions, more than valence, organize emotional experience, expression, and neural processing. Overall, moving beyond traditional models to study broader semantic spaces of emotion can enrich our understanding of human experience.

Network level characteristics in the emotion recognition network after unilateral temporal lobe surgery.

The human amygdala is considered a key region for successful emotion recognition. We recently reported that temporal lobe surgery (TLS), including resection of the amygdala, does not affect emotion recognition performance (Journal of Neuroscience, 2018, 38, 9263). In the present study, we investigate the neural basis of this preserved function at the network level. We use generalized psychophysiological interaction and graph theory indices to investigate network level characteristics of the emotion recognition network in TLS patients and healthy controls. Based on conflicting emotion processing theories, we anticipated two possible outcomes: a substantial increase of the non-amygdalar connections of the emotion recognition network to compensate functionally for the loss of the amygdala, in line with basic emotion theory versus only minor changes in network level properties as predicted by psychological construction theory. We defined the emotion recognition network in the total sample and investigated group differences on five network level indices (i.e. characteristic path length, global efficiency, clustering coefficient, local efficiency and small-worldness). The results did not reveal a significant increase in the left or right temporal lobectomy group (compared to the control group) in any of the graph measures, indicating that preserved behavioural emotion recognition in TLS is not associated with a massive connectivity increase between non-amygdalar nodes at network level. We conclude that the emotion recognition network is robust and functionally able to compensate for structural damage without substantial global reorganization, in line with a psychological construction theory.

For Now We See through an AI Darkly; but Then Face-to-Face: A Brief Survey of Emotion Recognition in Biometric Art

Our knowledge about the facial expression of emotion may well be entering an age of scientific revolution. Conceptual models for facial behavior and emotion phenomena appear to be undergoing a paradigm shift brought on at least in part by advances made in facial recognition technology and automated facial expression analysis. And the use of technological labor by corporate, government, and institutional agents for extracting data capital from both the static morphology of the face and dynamic movement of the emotions is accelerating. Through a brief survey, the author seeks to introduce what he terms biometric art, a form of new media art on the cutting-edge between this advanced science and technology about the human face. In the last ten years, an increasing number of media artists in countries across the globe have been creating such biometric artworks. And today, awards, exhibitions, and festivals are starting to be dedicated to this new art form. The author explores the making of this biometric art as a critical practice in which artists investigate the roles played by science and technology in society, experimenting, for example, with Basic Emotions Theory, emotion artificial intelligence, and the Facial Action Coding System. Taking a comprehensive view of art, science, and technology, the author surveys the history of design for biometric art that uses facial recognition and emotion recognition, the individuals who create such art and the institutions that support it, as well as how this biometric art is made and what it is about. By so doing, the author contributes to the history, practice, and theory for the facial expression of emotion, sketching an interdisciplinary area of inquiry for further and future research, with relevance to academicians and creatives alike who question how we think about what we feel.

Loud and unclear: Intense real-life vocalizations during affective situations are perceptually ambiguous and contextually malleable.

A basic premise of emotion theories is that experienced feelings (whether specific emotions or broad valence) are expressed via vocalizations in a veridical and clear manner. By contrast, functional-contextual frameworks, rooted in animal communication research, view vocalizations as contextually flexible tools for social influence, not as expressions of emotion. Testing these theories has proved difficult because past research relied heavily on posed sounds which may lack ecological validity. Here, we test these theories by examining the perception of human affective vocalizations evoked during highly intense, real-life emotional situations. In Experiment 1a, we show that highly intense vocalizations of opposite valence (e.g., joyous reunions, fearful encounters) are perceptually confusable and their ambiguity increases with higher intensity. In Experiment 1b, we use authentic lottery winning reactions and show that increased hedonic intensity leads to lower, not higher valence. In Experiment 2, we demonstrate that visual context operates as a powerful mechanism for disambiguating real-life vocalizations, shifting perceived valence categorically. These results suggest affective vocalizations may be inherently ambiguous, demonstrate the role of intensity in driving affective ambiguity, and suggest a critical role for context in vocalization perception. Together, these findings challenge both basic emotion and dimensional theories of emotion expression and are better in line with a functional-contextual account which is externalist and by definition, context dependent. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Robotic affective abilities

Within both popular media and (some) scientific contexts, affective and ‘emotional’ machines are assumed to already exist. The aim of this paper is to draw attention to some of the key conceptual and theoretical issues raised by the ostensible affectivity. My investigation starts with three robotic encounters: a robot arm, the first (according to media) ‘emotional’ robot, Pepper, and Mako, a robotic cat. To make sense of affectivity in these encounters, I discuss emotion theoretical implications for affectivity in human-machine-interaction. Which theories have been implemented in the creation of the encountered robots? Being aware that in any given robot, there is no strict implementation of one single emotion theory, I will focus on two commonly used emotion theories: Russell and Mehrabian’s Three-Factor Theory of Emotion (the computational models derived from that theory are known as PAD models) and Ekman’s Basic Emotion Theory. An alternative way to approach affectivity in artificial systems is the Relational Approach of Damiano et al. which emphasizes human-robot-interaction in social robotics. In considering this alternative I also raise questions about the possibility of affectivity in robot-robot-relations.

What Basic Emotion Theory Really Says for the Twenty-First Century Study of Emotion

Basic emotion theory (BET) has been, perhaps, the central narrative in the science of emotion. As Crivelli and Fridlund (J Nonverbal Behav 125:1-34, 2019, this issue) would have it, however, BET is ready to be put to rest, facing "last stands" and "fatal" empirical failures. Nothing could be further from the truth. Crivelli and Fridlund's outdated treatment of BET, narrow focus on facial expressions of six emotions, inattention to robust empirical literatures, and overreliance on singular "critical tests" of a multifaceted theory, undermine their critique and belie the considerable advances guided by basic emotion theory.

Inside-Out: From Basic Emotions Theory to the Behavioral Ecology View

Basic emotions theory (BET) is the most popular and deeply rooted psychological theory of both emotion and the facial behavior held to express it. We review its Western foundations and the key developments in its evolution, focusing on its parsing of facial expressions into two kinds: biological, categorical, iconic, universal “facial expressions of emotion,” versus modified, culturally diverse versions of those iconic expressions due to intermediation by learned “display rules.” We suggest that this dichotomy and its many corollaries are oversimplified, and that many of BET’s recent modifications are inconsistent in ways that may render it impossible to test and immune to falsification. In contrast, we suggest that the behavioral ecology view of facial displays, as an externalist and functionalist approach, resolves the quandaries and contradictions embedded in BET’s precepts and extensions.

Naturalized Aesthetics and Emotion Theory

Murray Smith’s proposal in Film, Art, and the Third Culture for a naturalized aesthetics is of interest to both film theorists and psychologists: for the former, it helps to elucidate how films work; for the latter, it provides concrete application cases of psychological theories. However, there are reasons for believing that the theory of emotions that Smith has adopted from psychology to ground his case studies—an extended version of basic emotions theory—is less well supported than he suggests. The available empirical evidence seems more compatible with the assumption that the different emotions are outputs of a single, integrated system.

A New, Better BET: Rescuing and Revising Basic Emotion Theory.

Basic Emotion Theory, or BET, has dominated the affective sciences for decades (Ekman, 1972, 1992, 1999; Ekman and Davidson, 1994; Griffiths, 2013; Scarantino and Griffiths, 2011). It has been highly influential, driving a number of empirical lines of research (e.g., in the context of facial expression detection, neuroimaging studies and evolutionary psychology). Nevertheless, BET has been criticized by philosophers, leading to calls for it to be jettisoned entirely (Colombetti, 2014; Hufendiek, 2016). This paper defuses those criticisms. In addition, it shows that we have good reason to retain BET. Finally, it reviews and puts to rest worries that BET’s commitment to affect programs renders it outmoded. We propose that, with minor adjustments, BET can avoid such criticisms when conceived under a radically enactive account of emotions. Thus, rather than leaving BET behind, we show how its basic ideas can be revised, refashioned and preserved. Hence, we conclude, our new BET is still a good bet.

Music Communicates Affects, Not Basic Emotions - A Constructionist Account of Attribution of Emotional Meanings to Music.

Basic Emotion theory has had a tremendous influence on the affective sciences, including music psychology, where most researchers have assumed that music expressivity is constrained to a limited set of basic emotions. Several scholars suggested that these constrains to musical expressivity are explained by the existence of a shared acoustic code to the expression of emotions in music and speech prosody. In this article we advocate for a shift from this focus on basic emotions to a constructionist account. This approach proposes that the phenomenon of perception of emotions in music arises from the interaction of music’s ability to express core affects and the influence of top-down and contextual information in the listener’s mind. We start by reviewing the problems with the concept of Basic Emotions, and the inconsistent evidence that supports it. We also demonstrate how decades of developmental and cross-cultural research on music and emotional speech have failed to produce convincing findings to conclude that music expressivity is built upon a set of biologically pre-determined basic emotions. We then examine the cue-emotion consistencies between music and speech, and show how they support a parsimonious explanation, where musical expressivity is grounded on two dimensions of core affect (arousal and valence). Next, we explain how the fact that listeners reliably identify basic emotions in music does not arise from the existence of categorical boundaries in the stimuli, but from processes that facilitate categorical perception, such as using stereotyped stimuli and close-ended response formats, psychological processes of construction of mental prototypes, and contextual information. Finally, we outline our proposal of a constructionist account of perception of emotions in music, and spell out the ways in which this approach is able to make solve past conflicting findings. We conclude by providing explicit pointers about the methodological choices that will be vital to move beyond the popular Basic Emotion paradigm and start untangling the emergence of emotional experiences with music in the actual contexts in which they occur.

The Emotional Modulation of Facial Mimicry: A Kinematic Study

It is well-established that the observation of emotional facial expression induces facial mimicry responses in the observers. However, how the interaction between emotional and motor components of facial expressions can modulate the motor behavior of the perceiver is still unknown. We have developed a kinematic experiment to evaluate the effect of different oro-facial expressions on perceiver's face movements. Participants were asked to perform two movements, i.e., lip stretching and lip protrusion, in response to the observation of four meaningful (i.e., smile, angry-mouth, kiss, and spit) and two meaningless mouth gestures. All the stimuli were characterized by different motor patterns (mouth aperture or mouth closure). Response Times and kinematics parameters of the movements (amplitude, duration, and mean velocity) were recorded and analyzed. Results evidenced a dissociated effect on reaction times and movement kinematics. We found shorter reaction time when a mouth movement was preceded by the observation of a meaningful and motorically congruent oro-facial gesture, in line with facial mimicry effect. On the contrary, during execution, the perception of smile was associated with the facilitation, in terms of shorter duration and higher velocity of the incongruent movement, i.e., lip protrusion. The same effect resulted in response to kiss and spit that significantly facilitated the execution of lip stretching. We called this phenomenon facial mimicry reversal effect, intended as the overturning of the effect normally observed during facial mimicry. In general, the findings show that both motor features and types of emotional oro-facial gestures (conveying positive or negative valence) affect the kinematics of subsequent mouth movements at different levels: while congruent motor features facilitate a general motor response, motor execution could be speeded by gestures that are motorically incongruent with the observed one. Moreover, valence effect depends on the specific movement required. Results are discussed in relation to the Basic Emotion Theory and embodied cognition framework.

Studying emotion theories through connectivity analysis: Evidence from generalized psychophysiological interactions and graph theory

Psychological construction models of emotion state that emotions are variable concepts constructed by fundamental psychological processes, whereas according to basic emotion theory, emotions cannot be divided into more fundamental units and each basic emotion is represented by a unique and innate neural circuitry. In a previous study, we found evidence for the psychological construction account by showing that several brain regions were commonly activated when perceiving different emotions (i.e. a general emotion network). Moreover, this set of brain regions included areas associated with core affect, conceptualization and executive control, as predicted by psychological construction models. Here we investigate directed functional brain connectivity in the same dataset to address two questions: 1) is there a common pathway within the general emotion network for the perception of different emotions and 2) if so, does this common pathway contain information to distinguish between different emotions? We used generalized psychophysiological interactions and information flow indices to examine the connectivity within the general emotion network. The results revealed a general emotion pathway that connects neural nodes involved in core affect, conceptualization, language and executive control. Perception of different emotions could not be accurately classified based on the connectivity patterns from the nodes of the general emotion pathway. Successful classification was achieved when connections outside the general emotion pathway were included. We propose that the general emotion pathway functions as a common pathway within the general emotion network and is involved in shared basic psychological processes across emotions. However, additional connections within the general emotion network are required to classify different emotions, consistent with a constructionist account.