#basic emotions

As Fridlund has pointed out in this regard, “[A]ny reasonable account of signaling must recognize that signals do not evolve to provide information detrimental to the signaler. Displayers must not signal automatically, but only when it is beneficial to do so, that is, when such signaling serves its motives. Automatic readouts or spill-outs of drive states (i.e., ‘facial expressions of emotion’) would be extinguished early in phylogeny in the service of deception, economy, and privacy. Thus, an individual who momentarily shows a pursed lip on an otherwise impassive face is not showing ‘leakage’ of anger but conflicting intentions . . . for example, to show stolidity and to threaten” (HFE, 131-32). In short, what if deception is widespread in nature and can be advantageous for the displayer? Wouldn’t this imply that Wicker and his research team were wrong to take for granted the meaning of the posed facial expressions used in the experiment because they ignored the potential for a mismatch between facial displays and their subjects’ actual emotional experiences?

Why in their own experiment did these investigators use not ordinary persons but precisely actors to perform expressions in front of the camera for the purposes of making portraits of disgusted, neutral, or pleased facial expressions to show to the participants in the experiment? If disgusting smells are disgusting to everyone and automatically induce the experience (or “sensation”) of disgust, then ordinary volunteers could have served the investigators’ purposes just as well. The fact that professional actors were used and that they were asked to display expressions in a “natural but clear way” (“BUD,” 661) suggests that some degree of acting skill and “stage direction” was necessary to produce the required disgust display, or at any rate that Wicker and his team believed that to be the case—in other words, they believed, or proceeded as if they believed, that ordinary people are not very good at portraying such emotional expressions in the way scientists require. We might put it that in their experiment, Wicker and his colleagues functioned in part as directors of the facial displays, although it remains an open question whether the performers slipped into their role so deeply that, like good “method” actors, they really felt the emotion or “sensation” of disgust the investigators attributed to them—as I say, the actors were not asked.

State-Trait Anger theory

The Hard Problem of Consciousness (2021) & The Neurobiological Underpinnings of Psychoanalytic Theory and Therapy (2018) | Prof Mark Solms

#Six Basic Emotions. There are many different types of emotions. But during the 1970s, psychologist Paul Eckman identified six basic emotions that he suggested were universally experienced in all human cultures.

What are Emotions? How to Control Emotions and Feelings | 8 Basic Emotions

Quick change from excitement to depression? Read this!

Why is Fear so Important?