Author Reply: What is a Basic Emotion Theorist?

What is a basic emotion theorist? One view is that a basic emotion theorist is one for whom the idea of basic emotions is the essence of the theory. Certain emotions are seen as more fundamental, more innate, more universal than other emotions, and sometimes as the only real emotions. Central to a basic emotion theory is a list. This list classifies certain emotions as basic, and the theory then goes on to describe their nature, their functions, and sometimes the specific facial expressions that characterize them. The basic emotions are generally regarded as categorically discrete with distinctive physiological profiles. Descartes and Ekman proposed six basic emotions (not the same six), Panskepp and the later Ekman seven, Plutchik eight, Tomkins and Izard nine, and McDougall various numbers culminating in 17.

No list was central to William James’s theory, and his contempt for lists and taxonomies was pervasive. The goal of his theory was not to show that certain emotions were the real ones and others less important derivatives, and certainly not to prove that emotions were immutable, categorically distinct entities. Although it is not easy to pin down a single goal in James’s writings about emotion, certainly a major objective was to show that emotion is not possible without physiological arousal and muscular feedback and that every emotional experience, including intellectual and aesthetic pleasure and distaste, has a distinctive set of bodily symptoms. Distinctive, but not definitive, because emotion, like consciousness itself, is an ever-changing stream, and attempts to capture the essence of a stream by defining “pailsful, spoonsful, quartpotsful, barrelsful” (James, 1890/1950, Vol. 1, p. 255) all miss the point of the continuously changing process, which might more aptly be described as currents, waves, eddies, whirlpools, and ripples.

James was opposed to lists and classifications, except as heuristic devices applicable to specific questions, and argued in italics that “any classification of the emotions is seen to be as true and as ‘natural’ as any other” (James, 1890/1950, Vol. 2,p. 454). Thus I am not convinced by Reisenzein and Stephan’s (2014) claim that James believed that there is one best, natural classification of the emotions and that all other classifications are arbitrary. He never says that there is one best, and he never says that others are arbitrary. Different classifications may be useful for different purposes, or to answer different questions. Thus for someone interested in the relationship between physical and moral disgust the distinction between “sensuous or ideal” emotions might be relevant, while for someone interested in the nature of empathy or altruism the distinction between “egoistic or nonegoistic” might be useful. For a developmental psychologist, the distinction between the coarser and the subtler emotions might be valuable.

So I do not think that James was a basic emotions theorist like McDougall, Plutchik, Tomkins, Izard, or Ekman. All of the men on that list that I have met (all but McDougall) spent a good deal of time worrying about which emotions should be on the list: Is surprise really an emotion like the others? How can love be left out? Nothing in James suggests that this sort of question interested him.

James distinguishes between the “coarser” emotions and the “subtler” emotions, and Reisenzein and Stephan (2014) seem to argue that the coarser emotions correspond to other theorists’ basic emotions; that he endorsed these emotions as a “limited set” of the true or natural ones. In Psychology: The Briefer Course James does provide a list—“anger, fear, love, hate, joy, grief, shame, pride, and their varieties” (1892/2001, p. 374). This list immediately follows the heading “The varieties of emotion are innumerable,” and all he claims for these coarser emotions (which he elsewhere refers to as the “so-called” coarser emotions [1890/1950, Vol. 2, p. 468]) is that the bodily correlates are stronger, not that these emotions are more basic or real.

But a looser belief in “basic emotions” might involve the idea that emotions are adaptive, that some emotions evolved earlier than others, and that some are more universal than others, and I expect that James probably did believe this. Although “each race of man … [has] names for some shade of feeling which other races have felt undiscriminated” (James, 1890/1950, Vol. 2, p. 485), many more cultures feel fear than feel amae, even though the exact parameters of the fear feelings may vary from culture to culture and individual to individual. Some people scream and run, others are silent and freeze, and the same person may do either one depending on the circumstances. Young children, savages, and even relatively uneducated lower middle class people (James, 1890/1950, Vol. 2, p. 472) lack the “intellectual or moral rapture” (James, 1890/1950, Vol. 2, p. 470) that people like James himself could feel for a brilliant scientific proof, a breathtakingly just decision in a difficult legal case, a late Beethoven quartet, or Titian’s Assumption, even though they are perfectly capable of feeling anger, fear, or love. ¹

James’s belief that there are no strict definitive categorical distinctions among emotions does not imply that he thought that emotions are random or that there are no cultural or individual generalities. He does not argue that all possible combinations of bodily changes occur, but that the number is “indefinitely numerous and subtle” (James, 1890/1950, Vol. 2, p. 450), far far greater than can be captured in any categorical classification scheme. In this endlessly fluctuating space some areas are named, and exist as categories in the minds of the people who name them. Present-day emotion theorists who would not call themselves basic emotion theorists certainly agree that some areas of multidimensional space are more densely populated than others, but they would also agree with James that emotions can shade from one named category to another through many unnamed intermediate states. A person’s fear may shade into anger as she realizes that she has greater control and certainty than she had before.

In fact, as in many scientific disputes, there may not be much difference between Reisenzein and Stephan’s (2014) view and mine. Zajonc and Lazarus quibbled for years over whether cognition was a necessary component of emotion before deciding that it all depended on one’s definition of cognition. Whether James was a basic emotion theorist or not depends on how one defines basic emotion theory. If basic emotion theory means that a small collection of categorically distinct emotions defines the real emotions, or the only emotions, then James was not a basic emotion theorist. If it means that emotions evolved, and that some emotions evolved earlier both phylogenetically and ontogenetically, and are therefore more general across cultures and even across species, then possibly he was. There is a world of possibilities between the extreme view that the emotional world is completely defined by a few basic categorically distinct emotions and the extreme view that there is an infinite multidimensional world in which every point is equally probable. All serious contemporary scholars endorse theories that are somewhere in between, and I expect that James did too.