Basic emotion theory,social constructionism,and the universal ethogram

Abstract

French

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.

Keywords

basic emotions emotion classification secondary emotions social constructionism social-relations models tertiary emotions

Introduction

Are emotions biologically-evolved adaptive reactions to prototypical problems of life shared by animals and humans, or have they emerged de novo in humans as enabled by language and culture as individuals engage in social relationships? This is a fundamental question for emotions theory, wherein these two approaches are broadly described as naturalistic, basic-emotion theory (BET), on the one hand, and social-constructionist theory (SCT), on the other. There have been continuing efforts to reconcile these two approaches, both on the part of social constructionists (e.g., Parkinson, 2012) and basic-emotion theorists (Camras, 1992; Scarantino, 2015). It is one thing to assert that emotions are both biological and sociorelational, another to specify how emotions are both. This paper proposes a way the two levels can be linked. To this end, we employ a theoretical model of primary emotions based on a fourfold ethological model of the everyday behaviors of reptiles, mammals, and humans. Positive and negative experiences of these four bipolar dimensions lead to a model of eight prototypical adaptive reactions of social communication, the universal ethogram, which defines the primary emotions. It is proposed that the four problems of life – temporality, identity, hierarchy, and territoriality – have evolved to support a parallel model of social relations, as specified in relational-models theory (RMT) (Fiske, 1991, 2004; Haslam, 1994; Bolender, 2010): communal sharing, equality matching, hierarchical ranking, and market pricing/exchanging. Situations involving a valenced social-relations model encountered in everyday social interaction elicit adaptive responses that include the corresponding primary emotion. For situations involving pairs (and triples) of valenced social relations, the responses can include the secondary (and tertiary) emotion. We begin with social constructionism.

Social constructionism

In the 1920s a Zeitgeist of cultural relativism and anti-universalism emerged, spearheaded by cultural anthropologists (e.g., Malinowski, 1927; Mead, 2014[1928]), linguists (e.g., Whorf, 2012[1956]), and perception psychologists (Brown, 1991). In the social sciences, a resultant theoretical paradigm saw social realities as socially constructed texts. Berger and Luckmann (1966: 49, 51) conceptualized social constructions as ‘objectifications’, as ‘products of human activity [. . .] available both to their producers and to other[s] [. . .] as elements of a common world’, which are ‘maintained primarily by linguistic signification’. SCT asserts that social reality is always relative to the human condition in a specific time and place, and is largely shaped by means of language.

SCT emerged as one expression of a broader postmodernist philosophy, which included a turn toward biographical methods and the primacy of text (Chamberlayne et al., 2000). In theorization of language, discursive or social constructionist approach led to research with an expanding influence, not only in social psychology but across the social sciences and humanities. Society itself came to be viewed as text (Brown, 1987). Applied to emotion, SCT emerged in part as a critique of affective states as innate biological response patterns, rather focusing on emotion as ‘lived and enacted in practical settings, as cultural and historical objects’ (Parkinson, 2012: 291). In the earliest formulations of SCT applied to emotion, this perspective was undoubtedly taken too far, as Averill (1980), Harré (1986), and others saw emotions as generated through language use, while gratuitously suggesting that emotions have no basis in biology. There has, however, never been a logical basis for SCT to exclude the possibility of biologically-based basic emotions, or for BET practitioners to deny emotions are embedded in the social. Social constructionism has an important role to play in understanding emotion, and most practitioners of SCT today would agree that emotions are both constructed and based in biology and evolution.

Applied to emotion, SCT’s central premise holds that the experience of feeling, sentiment, and emotion is structured, and made meaningful, through language use in the midst of social interactions. For Harré, the meanings of words such as ‘angrily’, ‘enjoying’, and ‘proudly’ are constructed out of bodily agitation, cognitive evaluation, social situation, and perhaps a moral order governing behavior, under the constraint that these linguistic items are properly used (Harré, 1986). For Averill (1980), emotions, or ‘emotional syndromes’, are ‘transient’ social roles, within which individuals’ social behavior is the acting out of socially-defined categories with specific functions within the social system (Berger and Luckmann, 1966; Hindin, 2007). Averill sees ‘emotional syndromes’ not as adaptive reactions involving human agency but rather as passions over which we have little control. These passions can have physiological, cognitive, and behavioral components, with no one component ‘essential to the whole’ (Averill, 1980). Within Averill’s perspective of an indefinite number of emotions, it is not possible to reduce the diversity of emotions recognized in ordinary language to a limited set of ‘basic’ emotions (Aranguren, 2017).

Consistent with SCT, it has been demonstrated that the experience of emotions can take on very different forms in different cultures (Lutz, 1988; Elfenbein and Ambady, 2002; Boiger et al., 2018; Leersnyder et al., 2011; Boiger and Mesquita, 2012). Human culture provides a set of guidelines for feeling and affect that change and develop over time, creating new social roles and social norms of emotional experience (Averill, 1980; Hochschild, 1983). Most experiences of emotion emerge in the midst of social events, social situations, and social relations, and involve social communication. Accordingly, the experience of affective phenomena – such as anger, pride, and resentment – can in different settings take on very different forms, as they can vary in attribution of responsibility, in situational appraisal, and in rules and norms for their expression.

Social constructionism is far from a unified theory, but in broad outline it holds that the elicitation and differentiation of emotions is based on a process of cognitive evaluation, enabling individuals to determine which social stimuli are relevant for their personal, physical, and psychological well-being, and what range of responses are called forth. In SCT, emotions function as signals that something of importance is happening, with the affective state arising depending largely on how the situation is cognitively appraised (Scherer, 2001, 2009; Wranik and Scherer, 2010). SCT holds that emotional experiences are so nuanced, fluid, and cognitively sophisticated that they cannot be reduced to a set of discrete compartments. Complex emotions such as indignation and resentment are seen as products of ‘cultural conceptions concerning the notions of identity, guilt, property, sexual and sentimental interactions’ (as described, but not endorsed, by Williams, 2017: 2). Accordingly, emotions are seen as improvised interpretations of ongoing social situations, existing as cognitive structures or schemata used to appraise social experiences and organize appropriate behavioral responses in ongoing social interactions.

Notwithstanding pronouncements of postmodernist philosophers such as Derrida’s (1976: 158) claim that ‘there is nothing outside of the text’, practitioners of SCT need not, and generally do not, deny the existence of phenomena exterior to language. SCT adopts no metatheoretical postulate which excludes the possibility that emotional categories ‘are not graspable merely as individual feelings or expressions’ (Edwards, 1997: 187, emphasis added; cited in Edley, 2001: 437). What is socially constructed is not our emotions experienced as a biological actuality, but as subject only to the rules of discourse. In such discourse, epistemologically (but not ontologically) speaking, it is the socially-constructed reality of emotions which cannot exist outside of language, for this reality is ‘the product of discourse’ as generated in accounts, stories, more generally in talk about feelings, passions, and emotions. Our talk about emotions, in this view, is ‘constitutive of how we understand ourselves as emotional beings’ (Edley, 2001: 438).

Psychological constructionists situated within the neurosciences have compiled impressive evidence – largely based on studies using various neurometric methods of functional brain scanning – indicating that emotions are enabled by general brain networks that are involved in both emotion-laden and non-emotional operations, not by localized brain mechanisms dedicated to particular emotions (Lindquist et al., 2012). The advent of brain scanning and related neurometric methodologies has undermined localization theory, for it has been found that not only emotions but a wide variety of complex mental functions are governed by widely distributed neural networks involving a multiplicity of structures. This is clearly the case, for example, for anger (Panksepp, 1998: ch. 10; Panksepp and Biven, 2012: ch. 4; Alia-Klein et al., 2020) and happiness (Cerqueira et al., 2008). The failure to find localized ‘centers’ or ‘structures’ for specific emotions has led Barrett (2006, 2017) and others (e.g., Adolphs and Anderson, 2018: 6–12) to conclude that the generation of emotional meaning develops from a mental construction process including cognition, perception, attention, and memory. Emotions are hypothesized to emerge from core affect (raw bodily sensations) and a multi-level categorization process based on prior, present, and possible futural experience mediated by conceptual and linguistic factors. It is further inferred that mental states and processes classified under the vernacular category of emotions are not sufficiently similar to allow a unified theory of the emotions. Theories that explain a subset of emotions, it is further claimed, will accordingly not be adequate to explain the whole range of human emotions, so that a full understanding even of single affective states such as anger might require multiple theories (Griffiths, 2004). In Barrett (2006, 2017) and colleagues’ (Lindquist et al., 2012) theory of constructed emotions, emotional episodes emerge as individuals apply emotional concepts to categorize interoceptive sensations involved in allostasis together with cues from the social environment. The emotions we experience are, accordingly, a function of how and what we cognize to have caused the situations or events we experience, and on how we interpret and appraise these events. The resulting emotion-laden episodes are seen as highly idiosyncratic, as they are socially constructed in varying cultural settings, using different languages by individuals with varying levels of skill in interpreting their own affect. The result, it is inferred, is that emotional episodes are too heterogeneous and nonspecific, and their boundaries too ‘fuzzy’ (Russell and Fehr, 1992), to have resulted from specialized neurocognitive emotional programs, and therefore lack a biological foundation.

The general conclusion drawn from these arguments, taken to its limit by Barrett (2006), is that emotions are not natural kinds. To be considered natural kinds, a set of objects must exist as a natural ‘group’ or ‘order’, a ‘real set’, that has not been placed together as an artificial exercise of human classification. A kind is natural if it corresponds to a grouping that reflects the structure of the world, existing independently of human linguistic categorization. In this constructionist view, emotions such as fear, anger, sadness, and joy are not natural kinds, both because they lack specific causal mechanisms in the brain and because they are lacking boundaries ‘carved in nature’. Because emotions are not genuine natural kinds, this argument continues, they should be ‘eliminated from scientific vocabulary’ (Barrett, 2006: 28; see also Adolphs and Anderson, 2018: 6–12). This theory is undermined, however, by the fact that, in addition to emphasized differences, there are similarities and continuities in the experience and expression of emotions across situations, languages, and cultures, and spanning animal species (Darwin, 1872; Panksepp, 1998), small scale and industrial societies (Sell et al., 2017) and stretching across human history (Sznycer and Patrick, 2020; Sznycer and Cohen, 2021).

In summary, in the ‘classical’ SCT of Harré, Averill, and many others, emotions are social and psychological constructs but are not also ‘arising from coherent brain operating systems that [. . .] orchestrate and coordinate a large number of output systems in response to specific inputs’ (Panksepp, 1994: 23–24). We next consider basic emotion theory, and in so doing examine the issue of universalism versus relativism in the cross-cultural study of putatively basic emotions.

Basic emotion theory

The finding that the expression, recognition, and meaning of emotions such as anger, joy, disgust, and surprise are shared by a wide range of non-human animal species suggests they might exist as a biologically-evolved natural kind. Beginning with Plato and Aristotle, there have been countless efforts to identify the basic emotions, with most inventories listing from 4 to 10 candidate emotions (TenHouten, 2013: 14–15; Turner and Stets, 2005: 10–25). BET holds that these emotions involve both ancient, subcortical brain structures, and, in humans, have become elaborated through the evolutionary advent of the cerebral cortex – the basis of cognition and intention. The most basic of emotions have survival value, as they have evolved as ‘modes of action readiness’ (Frijda et al., 1989). These function to motivate adaptive reactions which animals, including humans, have developed in order to quickly respond to events, emergencies, interruptions, and various threats and opportunities in their environments (Darwin, 1965[1872]; MacLean, 1990; Panksepp, 1994, 1998; Panksepp and Biven, 2012).

Abundant evidence suggests that the most basic emotions have evolved through natural selection across a wide variety of animal species. The basic emotions are biologically programmed, goal-directed, motivational systems; they are expressive, adaptive bodily reactions that occur rapidly in response to important, prototypical environmental stimuli. Emotions function as messengers for the self, as they signal problematic situations; they connect goals to motives, lead behavior, and create meaning in the everyday world. In humans, these basic responses are cognitively interpreted, and are crucial to the process of sharing important information with conspecifics for appraising pressing problems of life (MacLean, 1990; LaFrenière, 2000; Panksepp and Biven, 2012). Emotions evolved because they reliably solve adaptive problems: fear limits the threat of being preyed upon (Öhman and Mineka, 2001); jealousy stimulates mate protection (Buss, 2011); anger bargains for better treatment by conspecifics (Sell et al., 2017); resentment reinforces fairness and thereby reduces conflict (de Waal, 2005: 220). These and related adaptive reactions are widespread in the animal kingdom. They remain essential for humans’ ability to meet universal survival needs, reproduce, engage the social world, and flourish. In the course of an individual’s development, interpersonal relations and cultural meanings can modify and elaborate the early interactive representations pertaining to emotions as goal-oriented motivational systems, but their affective core remains unchanged. The specific affective states of the primary emotions link the goals fixed by our evolutionary history to the individual’s mental experience. ‘In this perspective, basic emotions are what, in fact, connect evolutionary set goals to individual motives leading behavior and creating personal meaning in everyday lives’ (Williams, 2017: 3).

The weight of contemporary evidence, much of it from affective neuroscience, suggests that all humans work from a common palette of affective responses (Delgado, 2004). Emotions researchers with ecological, psychoevolutionary, and affective-neuroscientific orientations (Plutchik, 1958, 1991[1962], 1980a: 27–31, 1980b: 141–151, 1983; Tomkins, 1962, 1963; Izard, 1977, 2007; Nelson, 1987; Lichtenberg, 1989; Levenson, 1994; Panksepp, 1994, 1998) have adduced impressive evidence indicating that a small subset of emotions are basic or primary. A wealth of findings indicate that emotions are innate capabilities which develop without exposure to the information that would be required to learn them through general-purpose cognitive systems, including human languages: (i) Specific, simple emotions emerge in infancy while infants are still relying on subcortical behavioral mechanisms and before the onset of language (Izard et al., 2010). (ii) Human babies born without cerebral hemispheres (anencephalic) cannot become intellectually developed but can grow up to be affectively vibrant if raised in nurturing and stimulating social environments (Shewmon et al., 1999). (iii) Deaf and blind children make facial expressions similar to those of non-impaired children. For example, congenitally blind children produce normal facial expressions of anger (Galati et al., 2003). And (iv), The first emotions of the child unfold through epigenetic programs according to precise, universal timetables (Sroufe, 1997; LaFrenière, 2000) and persist throughout the life-span (Demos, 2007).

Criteria for basic emotions

One criterion for regarding an emotion as primary is that it must have a deep evolutionary history, meaning that as a proto-emotion it is present in a wide variety of animals species, including amphibians, reptiles, birds, and mammals. Darwin (1872) realized that evolution governs not only anatomy and morphology but also the animal’s mind and its expressive behavior: Behavioral patterns and mental activities are as reliably characteristic of species as are bodily systems and structures. It followed that human intelligence, and emotions as well, have a deep evolutionary history and can therefore be conceptualized in terms of natural selection.

Our second criterion for an emotion to be considered basic is that it must have a basis in brain organization. It is in this sense innate, because the same brain structures operate in similar ways for all individuals with ‘normal’, that is, largely undamaged, brains. This does not require, however, that a primary emotion can be seen as a single neural event taking place in a single brain region (Celeghin et al., 2017), for emotions involve complex processes that implicate an interactive network with its activities distributed in time and space, involving memory, social cognition (including the perception of the speech, gestures, and facial expressions of other social actors), executive processes, intentionality, and rationality (Cerqueira et al., 2008). There is no doubt that the brainwork involved in emotion is more complex in humans than in all other terrestrial animals, but these species share with humans a small set of existential problems for which they have developed, through an evolutionary process, a set of distributed and interactive brain mechanisms. Emotions such as joy/happiness (Cerqueira et al., 2008), anticipation (Brunia and van Boxtel, 2001), and anger (Panksepp, 1998: ch. 10; Panksepp and Biven, 2012: ch. 4) involve widespread, and highly complex cortical networks spanning ancient brain structures, limbic structures, and the neocortex.

Neuroimaging research using PET, fMRI, and related brain scanning methods have shown that putatively basic emotions such as disgust and anger do not have strictly localized brain-structure bases. Given that innumerable neural structures fulfill multiple functions – depending on the functional networks and patterns of co-activation displayed at any given moment of time – the structural-functional relationship between brain activation can be described not as a one-to-one correspondence but rather as pluripotential, so that single structures are involved in a multiplicity of functions. As an overall assessment, it would appear that ‘neuroimaging data are not sufficient to disconfirm the concept of basic emotions’, such that ‘the neurobiological existence of basic emotions is still tenable’ (Celeghin et al., 2017: 8).

Third, an emotion can be considered primary only if it is irreducible, not a combination of two or more other emotions.

The fourth criterion for regarding emotions as basic, or primary, is that they can combine, in pairs and triples, to form secondary and tertiary emotions. This is indeed the ‘main theoretical benefit’ that results from the notion of basic emotions, as it potentially provides ‘an account of the full array of emotional experiences’ (Ortony and Turner, 1990: 326). The utility of the concept of primary emotions depends to a great extent on whether it enables emotions classification, that is, the substantive interpretation of the complex emotions whose constituent elements are primary emotions. If identification of the primary emotions could not yield a classification, then the existence or nonexistence of basic emotions would be of little scientific interest.

Fifth, an emotion can be considered primary if it addresses a fundamental problem of life. Such a life problem must concern acquisition of life’s necessities, such as the capability of reproducing, and thereby perpetuating, one’s genetic information.

The problem of facial recognition

A possible sixth criterion for considering an emotion primary is that it is universally expressed and recognized across human cultures. Darwin (1872) focused on emotions common to animals and humans (joy–happiness, anger–rage, disgust, grief–dejection, fear–horror, surprise–astonishment). These six emotions have subsequently been linked to a wide variety of human cultures on the level of facial expression. Darwin (1872) posited the likely universality of facial expressions, inferring on the basis of his own cross-cultural observations that they must be biologically innate and evolutionarily adaptive. Confirming Darwin’s astute observations, Tomkins and McCarter (1964) found that facial expressions were associated with certain emotional states. Tomkins then recruited Ekman and Izard to conduct ‘universality studies’, which demonstrated agreement in judgments of emotions in facial expression by people in both literate and preliterate cultures. A program of research carried out from 1969 to 1975, led to the conclusion that at least six discrete emotions – joy, anger, disgust, sadness, fear, and surprise – are recognized cross-culturally beyond chance levels and, it was inferred, must therefore be basic emotions (Ekman et al., 1969; Ekman, 1972). But while the 'big-six' emotions might indeed be universal and basic, cross-cultural face-recognition does not mean that facial recognition is either a sufficient or a necessary condition for regarding emotions as basic, for at least two reasons.

First, since 2008, additional studies of cross-cultural face recognition have been carried out, using a greater diversity of cultures, and based on more transparent and rigorous research methodologies (reviewed in Gendron et al., 2018). The results of these studies suggest continuing statistically significant support for the universality thesis, but these studies generally also point to the likely conclusion that facial expressions are largely perceived using culturally-learned emotion concepts (Barrett et al., 2007).

And second, other research suggests that, just as the 'big six' putatively primary emotions can be recognized above chance level, so also can more complex, secondary-level combinations of facial expression be so recognized. Du et al., (2014) have studied the fifteen ‘secondary’ pairings of the six emotions that Ekman and colleagues found cross-culturally recognizable. In a study of 230 subjects, they found that the facial muscles involved in these secondary-level pairings were essentially subsets of the same facial muscles involved in the component primary emotions. For the 21 (6 primary, 15 secondary) defined categories, a computational model of face perception was used to produce facial expressions. It was found that the second-order mixed emotional expressions were visually discriminated above chance level by the subjects. For example, in the facial expression for a happy surprise (interpretable as delight) muscle movements were observed in happy and surprised facial expressions.

These results lend evidentiary support for the conceptual distinction between primary and second-order emotions; they also reinforce the view that universal facial recognition is not a sufficient criterion for regarding an emotion as primary. Universally-recognized facial recognition is also not a necessary condition for regarding an emotion primary, as no logical reason precludes the existence of primary emotions that do not have recognizable facial expressions. This does not mean that Ekman et al. have misidentified primary emotions, for it is possible that all six of their emotions are primary. What we need, then, is a conceptual basis other than facial recognition for identifying primary emotions. To this end, we turn to comparative ethology.

The universal ethogram

Contemporary ethologists use a variety of terms in referring to a ‘behavioral profile’, including ‘display action patterns’, ‘biogram’, and ‘ethogram’ (Tinbergen, 1951: 7). A surprising result of studying various terrestrial animals is the discovery of how ‘relatively few kinds of behavior one can identify in each and how most of these are common to all’ (MacLean, 1990: 100). In his studies of blue spiny lizards, iguanas, and chameleons, Greenberg (1977; see also Greenberg and MacLean, 1978) identified four display-action patterns necessary for social communication: an assertive signature display (identified by Carpenter, 1961), courtship displays, submissive displays, and territorial displays. Paul MacLean (1990: 112–134) utilized, and elaborated, this fourfold model in describing the daily lives of rainbow lizards and giant Komodo dragons, which primarily rely on visual and chemical–olfactory sensing, respectively.

The exact identification of the basic emotions remains an unsolved problem. The strategy adopted here is to focus on identifying the most fundamental problems of everyday life, hypothesizing that the fast-acting prototypical behavioral adaptive reactions to these problems will point to the basic emotions. In searching for a behavioral profile widely shared by terrestrial animals, we are following Darwin’s (1972) insight that, at their most primordial level, the emotions shared by animals and human animals arose as adaptive reactions to the most fundamental problems of life. Yet Darwin did not systematically identify prototypical problematic situations, and made no effort to classify the many emotions he considered. Plutchik (1980a: 27–30, 1980b: 146–9; 1983), however, developed a psychoevolutionary model of the emotions that generalizes the Carpenter–Greenberg–MacLean ethogram: rather than signature, courtship, submission, and territory, Plutchik referred to social identity, temporality (the cycle of life and death, of reproduction and reintegration of the group following loss of a member), hierarchy, and territoriality.

All four of these problems of everyday life can involve either an opportunity, or a danger or threat. Each of the resulting eight situations can motivate a distinct subjective state of mind which activates an intention, together with a motor plan, to carry out an adaptive behavioral reaction. Plutchik (1980b: 144) held that these ‘eight basic adaptive behavioral patterns’ can be ‘found in some form at all levels of evolution, [. . .] and are defined in terms of gross behavioral interactions between organism and environment’. The resulting psychoevolutionary model is summarized in figure 1. Plutchik (1991[1962]: 117–18) designed his circumplex or ‘wheel’ of primary emotions (figure 1B) so that the distances between emotions reflected their dissimilarity. Pairs of adjacent emotions are called ‘primary dyads’; emotions two positions apart, ‘secondary dyads’; and those three positions apart, ‘tertiary dyads’. Plutchik did not define the pairs of emotions four positions apart.

Figure 1.

(A) Models of social relations and primary emotions.

Two decades before first naming these problems of everyday life, Plutchik (1958) had hypothesized that the eight adaptive reactions to four existential problems constitute the basic or primary emotions. These pairings of existential problems and emotions/functions are: for temporality, joy–happiness/reproduction and sadness–grief/reintegration (of the group following loss of a member); for identity, acceptance/incorporation and disgust/rejection; for hierarchy, anger/destruction and fear/protection; and for territoriality, anticipation/exploration and surprise/boundary-defense.

Plutchik’s psychoevolutionary theory of emotions followed Darwin’s conceptualization of emotions as adaptive reactions to pressing problems of life. For example, Darwin 1965[1872]: 74) described anger–rage as providing motivation to retaliate: ‘Unless an animal does thus act, or has the intention, or at least the desire, to attack its enemy, it cannot properly be said to be enraged’. Emotions have evolved precisely because they function to motivate rapid adaptive behavioral reactions, meaning that, through automatic mechanisms, species are capable of regulating their interactions with the proximal environment, while also providing effective responses, both communicative and instrumental, in relation to situations relevant for survival (Tooby and Cosmides, 1990).

Note that, of Plutchik’s (1958) inventory of eight primary emotions, six were identified by Ekman and his co-workers as having universally-recognized facial expression. No evidence of a universally-recognized facial expression has been found for the other two of Plutchik’s primary emotions – anticipation – expectancy and acceptance. If, as asserted by Plutchik, these two emotions are indeed primary, then there cannot be any one-to-one relationship between facial expressions and an underlying evolved neurophysiological substrate. In order to complete the inventory of basic emotions, we need only apply Darwin’s (1965[1872]: 54–55) principle of antithesis, which holds that, once a state of mind is accompanied by an associated habit (an emotional response), a contrary state of mind tends to evoke an opposite habit, performed involuntarily. Accordingly, if surprise and disgust are primary, then their opposite subjective-states/functions should also be primary. The opposite of surprise/boundary-defense is anticipation/exploration; the opposite of disgust/rejection, acceptance/incorporation; these two emotions can be seen as the positive reaction to having one’s social identity treated equitably, and being primed to anticipate (rather than being surprised by) an impending event; or motivated to explore territory in anticipation of securing resources or having new experiences. While anticipation and acceptance do not have recognizable facial expressions, they nonetheless can be seen as primary emotions.

Utilizing his model of eight primary emotions, Plutchik (1991[1962]: 117–118) attempted a classification of secondary emotions. Plutchik’s secondary-emotions classification did not interpret the four pairs of opposite primary emotions (anger–fear, joy–sadness, acceptance–disgust, anticipation–surprise) as secondary emotions. Plutchik (1991[1962]: 118) also presented no candidate for the combination of surprise and disgust, interpreted elsewhere as shock (TenHouten, 2017a, 2020: 180–181). Plutchik’s (1962) secondary-emotions classification, and the author’s present revision, are shown in Table 1.

Table 1.

Plutchik’s 1962 Classification of the secondary emotions, and a revision.

Pairs of primary emotions	Definitions of secondary emotions
	Plutchik 1962	Present Classification
Primary dyads
Joy & anger	pride	pride
Anger & anticipation	aggression, revenge, stubbornness	aggressiveness
Anticipation & Disgust	cynicism	cynicism
Disgust & sadness	misery, remorse, forlornness	loneliness
Sadness & fear	despair, guilt	shame, embarrassment
Fear & surprise	alarm, awe	alarm, awe
Surprise & acceptance curiosity	curiosity
Acceptance & joy	love, friendliness	love
Secondary dyads
Acceptance & anger	dominance (?)	dominance
Joy & anticipation	optimism, courage, hopefulness, conceit	optimism
Anger & disgust	scorn, loathing, indignation, contempt, hate, resentment, hostility	contempt
Anticipation & sadness	pessimism	pessimism
Disgust & fear	shame, prudishness	repugnance, abhorrence
Fear & acceptance	submission, modesty	submissiveness
Sadness & surprise	embarrassment, disappointment	disappointment
Surprise & joy	delight	delight
Tertiary dyads
Acceptance & anticipation	fatalism	fatalism
Joy & disgust	morbidness (?)	derisiveness
Anger & sadness	envy, sullenness	sullenness, balefulness
Anticipation & fear	anxiety, caution dread, cowardliness, distrust	anxiety
Disgust & surprise	?	shock
Sadness & acceptance	resignation, sentimentalism	resignation
Fear & joy	guilt	guilt
Surprise & anger	outrage, resentment, hate	outrage
Quaternary dyads
Acceptance & disgust	–	ambivalence
Joy & sadness	–	bittersweetness
Anger & fear	–	frozenness, attentive immobility
Anticipation & surprise	–	confusion, discombobulation

From ethogram to sociogram

As the social-scientific study of emotions emerged as a field of inquiry in the mid-1970s, it became apparent that emotions, moods, feelings, sentiments and other affective phenomena play a role in many kinds of social behavior and social relationships (Jasper, 2011). It was recognized that emotions are intrinsically social, and that social phenomena have an emotional nature. The subject of emotions cannot be isolated from the environment; it is a subject that ‘must by necessity achieve its goals in relationship with others’ (Bericat, 2016: 493).

There is an isomorphism between the Carpenter–Greenberg–MacLean fourfold model of communicative displays and Plutchik’s model of existential problems: (i) Maclean’s courtship displays underlie Plutchik’s problem of temporality; (ii) signature displays, social identity; (iii) challenge and submission displays, hierarchy; (iv) territorial displays, territoriality. This ethogram thus provides an evolutionary foundation for Plutchik’s model of four existential problems, and further suggests that emotions involve social communication at the most fundamental, neurobiological level.

We can now take a further step, hypothesizing that these four communicative displays have, in the course of human social evolution, developed into elementary kinds of social relations. To this end, we can examine the dimensionality of models of social relations. In pursuing this analysis, we assume that each basic problem of life comprises a system addressed by an ‘opposite’ pair of adaptive reactions – a pair of primary emotions – and that, in evolution, ‘these systems of fast adjustment gradually included social behaviors that have a direct impact on survival through group interactions’ (Williams, 2017: 4).

While Plutchik might well have correctly identified eight primary emotions, there is nonetheless a galling limitation to his model. His four life problems underlying the four pairs of primary emotions are characterized by a certain sociological emptiness, as they apply to an alligator and a horse, but less so to humans. The dimensionality and nature of social relations is contested in the social sciences, but most contributors to this enterprise have presented four-dimensional models of human social relations. We will utilize a fourfold model of social organization, a sociogram, based on continuities in (i) Simmel’s (1971[1907–1910]: chs 5–7, 9) forms of social interaction (sociability, unity and its negation in conflict, domination, and exchange); (ii) Weber’s (1978[1921]) fourfold model of social relations (communal or associative, mutually responsible, authority-based, and market-participation-based); (iii) W. I. Thomas’s (1966[1923]) motivational theory of four wishes (for response or appreciation, recognition or acceptance, a secure and successful social status, new experiences and exploration); (iv) Blau’s (1964) fourfold model of social interaction (social attraction, balanced reciprocity, social power, and economic exchange); and (v), the Fiske (1991, 2004)–Haslam (1994)–Bolender (2010) cognitive-anthropological fourfold theory of relational models (communal-sharing, equality-matching, authority-ranking, and market-pricing). We use Fiske’s (1991) terminology for communal-sharing (CS) and equality-matching (EM), but for authority-ranking (AR) and market-pricing (MP), we prefer hierarchical ranking (HR) and, following Simmel and Blau, socioeconomic exchanging (SE) (TenHouten, 2020).

Relational-models theory asserts: (i) there exist four elementary sociorelational models; (ii) these four models have an evolutionary history and are, as a result, cross-culturally universal; and (iii), they are inseparable from their cognitive representations (Fiske, 1991, 2004). Implicit in these assumptions is that sociocultural and genetic factors are interdependent, as genes influence culture (as in the evolution of these sociorelational models), and that sociocultural relations influence genetic mechanisms (Parkinson, 2012: 292).

From temporality to communal sharing

Communal sharing refers to finitude, to the cycle of life and death, to the reproduction of life and the reintegration of community following death, embedded in the institutions of temporality – family, kinship, and community. Community-based social relations are validated through connection to the past, through tradition, ceremony, rite, and ritual, through the remembrance of those who came before. Communally-shared social relations thus centrally involve birth, begetting, and the institutions of family and kinship. They are ‘based on duties and sentiments generating kindness and generosity among people perceived to be of the same kind, especially kin’ (Fiske, 1991: 14). Communal-sharing-based social relations are close and personal. They involve homophily and a group entitativity, a ‘we-mode’ (Lickel et al., 2001; Gallotti and Frith, 2013) based on solidarity, social cohesion, unity, and ‘a subjective feeling of the parties, whether affectual or traditional, that they belong together’ (Weber, 1978[1921]: 40). In communal relations, group members are concerned about others’ welfare without expectation of reciprocity, and see informal association with others as socially attractive and intrinsically rewarding (Blau, 1964: 19–22).

From identity and signature displays to equality matching

Equity-balanced social relations involve turn-taking, quid pro quo exchange behavior, distributive justice, and in-kind, proportional reciprocity (Fiske, 1991: ch. 10; Laursen and Hartup, 2002). In equality-matching, individuals ‘conceive of each other – or the rights, duties, or actions involved in their relationships as distinct, but balancing each other, aligning, or matching, so they are interchangeable’, and ‘[p]ersons are intersubstitutable in [. . .] that they match and correspond on an even basis (Fiske, 1991: 15). In conflict situations, equality-matching can take the form of an eye-for-an-eye retaliatory vengeance in accordance with lex talionis. In decision making, equality-matching obtains when everyone has a vote or a voice. In organizational contexts, equality-matching involves the matching of interests and the sharing of information (Indriati et al., 2015).

From hierarchy to hierarchical ranking

Hierarchically-ranked social relations pertain to communicative displays of social power, domination and influence, and involve competitions for high status in social-dominance hierarchies, which can involve threats of pain or destruction. ‘Generally speaking’, Plutchik (1980b: 146) observed, ‘hierarchical organizations reflect the fact that some organisms are stronger or more skillful than others’. There are, Plutchik (1980b: 146) inferred, ‘two general ways to deal with the existence of hierarchies in social living [. . .] to try to fight one’s way up the hierarchy or to submit to those who are dominant’.

From territoriality to socioeconomic exchanging

Social-exchange-based social relations involve territory (an activity range) that provides valued resources; in humans, territoriality extends to socioeconomic behaviors. In a wide variety of animal species, individuals must learn what aspects of the environment ‘belong’ to it, and must establish a territorial domain that provides nourishing resources necessary for survival, and an area relatively safe from attack by conspecifics and predators. The establishment of territory requires exploration. Once obtained, territory, as an activity range and a source of resources, must be defended; this requires an orientation response. These complementary behaviors of acquiring and holding territory require the adaptive emotions of anticipation – the emotion of a resource-seeking system (Panksepp, 1998: ch. 8; Panksepp and Biven, 2012: ch. 3) and surprise – the reaction to penetration of one’s territorial boundaries. In humans, territorial resources have been elaborated into the production and exchange of goods and services, and the emergence of economic systems.

It is beyond the scope of this article to trace the evolutionary history of these key social-relations models. For present purposes, it suffices to note that the most complex of the social-relations models, that of socioeconomic exchanging, has been shown by paleoanthropological evidence to be very ancient, and has developed last both on the evolutionary and ontogenetic time scales (Cosmides and Tooby, 2004, 2010).

If the social-relations models EM, CS, HR, SE are indeed socioevolutionary outcomes of Plutchik’s and MacLean’s existential problems, then we can hypothesize specific valenced relations between sociorelational models and the eight primary emotions, Thus, as one example, HR– → fear, CS– → sadness, and given the definition shame = fear and sadness, it follows that the joint occurrence of HR– and CS– will be predictive of shame (as shown in TenHouten, 2017b, 2017c). These pairings of relational models and emotions are, it must be added, characterized by reciprocal effects. Thus, for example, the experience of fear (perhaps caused by the anger of a competing conspecific) can result in a withdrawal of dominance striving (HR–).

Discussion and conclusions

Efforts to classify the basic emotions have three possible outcomes: (i) Emotions are not natural kinds, so that all efforts at classification are fruitless endeavors, and all emotions exist sui generis; (ii) Basic emotions are natural kinds, but their identities remain unknown; or (iii), Basic emotions are natural kinds, and one scholar has already correctly identified them (which would mean that all other inventories are incorrect). It is a central claim of this article that it is the latter is just what has happened; Plutchik has gotten the primary emotions exactly right.

While Plutchik’s model of four life problems came to him as an insight, and was presented without much evidence, we have shown his model bears continuity with the universal ethogram developed by Carpenter, Greenberg, and MacLean, and also with what are arguably the four elementary forms of sociality, the ‘sociogram’. We suggest that human social relations models have a deep evolutionary history. The four relational models are universal elements of human culture; they are the dimensions according to which individuals organize, understand, and describe their own cultures. Insofar as social relations are the basic elements of culture, they are key to understanding variations within and between cultures (Gross and Rayner, 1985: 3). Fiske (1991, 2004) and Haslam (1994) have emphasized that relational models are essentially cognitive, and indeed they are. Relational models are not themselves emotions, but emotions have evolved as motivation for adaptive reactions to negatively and positively valenced sociorelational situations and events. When individuals encounter complex social situations involving two or three valenced relational models, they will react with the appropriate primary emotions; these mix or combine to form higher-order secondary or tertiary emotions for which the involved primary emotions are elements, but which also gain emergent properties.

We propose that four social relations dimensions have evolved to address the most fundamental problems of life, and the primary emotions have evolved as prototypical adaptive reactions to these problems. Some social-constructionists would view this proposition as somehow shrinking the significance of social science’s role in explaining emotions, so that sociology, anthropology, political science, and economics becomes 'junior partners' that can draw on neuropsychology and affective neuroscience, then study cross-cultural variations in the regulation and expression of emotions. A more productive orientation is to investigate the interface between culture and biology, where emotions are seen as psychological–physiological states of mind that have sociocultural concomitants (Scheff, 1983: 337–338). McCarthy (1989: 53) imagines that accepting the notions that emotions require brainwork has meant that sociology ‘has suffered a theoretical defeat’, so that as long as the sociology of emotions [. . .] takes its lead from psychology and physiology, it will cease to develop its own distinctive approach to the emotions: one that views as its object not aspects of the emotions, but the emotions in their entirety as social phenomena’. The problem with this assertion is that emotions are simply not ‘in their entirety’ social phenomena, for they rather exist at the interface of brain, mind, and society; this fact has hardly been a defeat for the vibrant field of social, cognitive, and affective neuroscience, for neuropsychology, and for the promise of an evolutionary social science of the emotions. Realization that, while emotions are socially constructed, emergent phenomena, they are not constructed from scratch, does not shrink, or reduce, the social-scientific study of emotions. It is perhaps ironic that the notion of basic emotions, and the hierarchical classification of emotions that are enabled by combinations of primary emotions, are somehow a threat to the social-scientific study of emotions. The reason for this is that research in affective neuroscience has largely confined its attention to a handful of primary emotions easily evoked in experimental settings – anger, joy – happiness, sadness, anticipation, disgust, and fear; but the complex emotions, which are largely ignored in neuroscience, are the very stuff of social life: Our existence in the social world would be emptied of meaning and purpose if we did not experience love, ambition, confidence, sanguinity, despair, resentment, envy, indignation, jealousy, hatred, shame, guilt, and beyond. If these emotions are not secondary (as shown in table 1), then they might well be tertiary. And indeed, emotions such as resentment (TenHouten, 2018), love (TenHouten, 2021a), and hatred (TenHouten, 2021b) have been so classified. The concept of primary emotions – precisely because it implies the existence of secondary and tertiary emotions – is of greater value to fields such as sociology, anthropology, and cross-cultural psychology than it is to affective neuroscience.

Footnotes

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Warren D. TenHouten

Author biography

Warren TenHouten is a research professor in the Sociology Department, University of California, Los Angeles. His research interests, in addition to emotions, include alexithymia, time-consciousness, social exchange, alienation and anomie, and neurosociology.

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