One of the biggest misunderstandings about the 7 universal facial expressions of emotion is that people think that means we have only seven emotions. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Yes, facial expressions of anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise are universally recognized and expressed. But humans have many other types of emotions as well. These include pride, shame, guilt, embarrassment, triumph, worry, hate, love, jealousy – the list of emotions goes on and on.

A dilemma about emotions

This poses a dilemma. On one hand, decades of science have demonstrated that there’s a special category of emotions known as basic emotions. As we have discussed previously, different scholars classify different emotions into their list of what’s “basic.” We use universal, observable, nonverbal signals in the face as our criterion for classifying emotions as basic, which is why we believe there are 7 basic emotions. Other scholars have other approaches. Basic emotions are not necessarily better; they’re just different.

On the other hand, a quick search of emotion words will reveal that there are hundreds of emotion-related words in English. And this is true in all other languages as well. We can relate to all those emotions lists; they’re all important to our everyday social lives.

So how can we reconcile this dilemma?

Well, things are not as disparate as they seem. Most theories of basic emotions suggest that basic emotions (however you define them and whichever emotions you classify as basic) serve as the elemental building blocks for all other emotions that we have in life. There are important differences among these theories, and they have all generally received a lot of scientific support. And they all

serve as the base platform by which other emotions in everyday social life emerge.

The process goes something like this:

• As infants and young children, all humans come to the world with their building blocks of basic emotions.
• As we develop our cognitive skills and engage in a fully social life, with complex social situations, multiple actors and multiple actions, we have emotional reactions that leverage the basic building blocks we start with.
• Because these emotional reactions are occurring in a deeply embedded context, those emotional reactions are linked together to that context, including all of its linguistic and semantic meanings.

Because humans have the amazing capability known as language, we are able to create an emotion word – a label if you will – for these specific cognition-context-emotion combinations. Words, after all, are symbols of things in its world a culture deems important to it. Having these symbols (words) makes communicating about them much easier than without them.

The power of a word

That is, having these specific emotion word labels is really convenient (functional is the more scientific way to say that) because a word reifies a phenomenon in such a way so that we can all talk about it and communicate about it with and to others. Doing so greatly enhances and enables our communications, enhancing our sense of self and ability to coordinate socially with others. Over time, we create many emotion words in a language, but the actual emotions those words symbolize all leverage the same basic building blocks of emotion.

What about the “emotion wheel”?

Some people have suggested this process involves a mixing of the basic emotions to create unique emotions, like mixing basic colors of red, yellow and blue on a color wheel. But what I’m talking about is not exactly that.

What we’re talking about is unique cognition-context-emotion combinations, some of which may involve “mixing” or “blending” of multiple emotions, but some may not. This is different than “emotion mixing” like on a color wheel.

Specificity matters

Some emotion words are associated with specific types of contexts and actors. The emotion of “jealousy,” for example, suggests that there are three actors, person A, person B whom person A loves, and person C who is a rival for the affections of person B. Thus, many emotions may be associated with specific types of “scripts,” like scripts for a movie or play.

This thought has led many scholars in the past to create “script theories” of emotions, started by Silvan Tomkins and who many acknowledge as the father of modern emotion science. Script theories are important ways of understanding emotions in society, and thus the number of emotion words we have. But different scripts still leverage the same building blocks of basic emotions (just as blockbuster movies do, by the way).

What about culture and emotion?

Cultures differ in exactly how many words their languages have to refer to emotions. This is because cultures differ in what they believe are important enough to have a word that they can use to refer to a specific cognition-context-emotion combination.

• Some cultures hypercognize about emotions; they create many emotion words.
• Others hypocognize about emotions; they create less emotion words.

For example, scholars have studied and compared 124 or so emotion words in English to similar lists of words in other languages. I understand that Buddhist texts delineate thousands of emotion and emotion-related words. If true, that must mean that the specification of those states was important enough in that cultural frame to produce words for them.

But just because an emotion word exists in a culture but not another doesn’t mean that the emotions themselves or the situations to which they refer don’t exist.

Schadenfreude! And other examples…

The most well-known example of this is the German schadenfreude, which loosely refers to “joy in someone else’s misfortune,” which has no word equivalent in English. Many scholars have used the fact that the word schadenfreude exists in Germany but not elsewhere to suggest that that emotion doesn’t occur elsewhere, like in the U.S.

But that’s not true; just take a look at television shows such as America’s Funniest Videos, where audiences laugh at other people’s misfortunes. Just because that specific word doesn’t exist in English doesn’t mean that the phenomenon doesn’t occur. It does mean that for some reason in its cultural history, German culture believed that that phenomenon was important enough to reify it by having a specific word for it.

Or take the word sadness, which the famous anthropologist Levy noted did not exist in Tahiti. He did note, however, that sadness did in fact occur there, and that Tahitians cry at sadness eliciting events. It’s just that they didn’t have a specific word for it.

Emotion Categories

Regardless of the total number of emotion words in a language, research has demonstrated that they are all conceptually and empirically linked to a small number of base words.

For example, Phil Shaver, a very respected scientist, has demonstrated that emotion words in multiple languages essentially categorize into five categories in all languages:

• Anger
• Fear
• Sadness
• Surprise
• Love

Note that four of the five map directly to the universal facial expressions of emotion. One could also argue that happiness is the building block to love. In fact, in his original work, joy was part of the base categories of words in addition to the others.

Here’s the emotion word tree from one of Shaver’s seminal research articles in this area:

From: Emotion knowledge: Shaver, P., Schwartz, J., Kirson, D., O’Connor, C. (1987). Further exploration of a prototype approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52(6), 1061-1086, p . 1067.

Emotion Families

In our line of work, we call the various trees and branches of emotion words “emotion families.” To us, anger, contempt, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness, and surprise are all prototypical category names for a host of emotions that are all related to the category label. Many of the family members differ in intensity, from low to high.

The anger family, for example includes low intensity anger words like frustrated and annoyed to high intensity words like enraged and hostile, and everything in between. And then there are all the other words that build upon anger, like jealousy. They’re all signaled by the universal angry face, or parts of it.

The fear family includes all fear-related words from worry, apprehensive, stressed to horrified, mortified, terrorized. They all are signaled by the universal fear face, or parts of it. The same is true for all other emotions associated with the universal faces.

Can you name all the emotion words and map onto the universal faces?

Thus, even though there are “only” seven universal facial expressions of emotion, they do NOT refer only to seven emotions. They refer to a LOT of different emotional states, all of which utilize the same basic building block of emotion and are signaled by the same facial expression, or part of it.

Yes, there are still many other emotions that are not signaled in a unique facial expression. And there’s likely good evolutionary reasons why. But that also means that the ones that are signaled by the face are a very special set of emotions. And there’s lots of them, for good reasons!

The post How Many Emotions Are There? first appeared on Humintell.

Ever notice that when emotions run high, thinking critically and strategically is almost impossible? In a previous popular blog, we discussed how emotions and critical thinking are intricately linked with each other in high-level sports.

But sports is not the only context in which emotions affect our critical thinking abilities; many of us are in situations in which we need to be able to think critically and adapt strategically despite the fact that we are in intense emotional situations. This is true not only for athletes in high-level competition as mentioned in the previous blog, but also for individuals in many walks of life – frontline healthcare workers facing life or death crises, individuals in harm’s way, people involved in extremely meaningful negotiations with others, or those who deal with difficult situations with loved ones.

For all, being able to think critically and strategically despite being very emotional can be a very useful skill to have. But doing so is extremely difficult, because emotions and critical thinking are on a see-saw; the more intensely we experience emotions, the more difficult it is to think critically and strategically.

Where does this come from?

From an evolutionary perspective, this makes a lot of sense, especially because emotions and affective experiences existed much earlier in our phylogenetic history than did the complex critical thinking skills modern humans have. We needed those emotional reactions to help us navigate our complex social world and to adapt to threats in the environment in order to survive with minimal conscious deliberation.

Emotional reactions helped us deal with the tiger jumping out at us all of a sudden, when we found our valuable food or mates were absconded, or when we ingested spoiled foods or drinks. If we didn’t have emotional reactions that allowed us to adapt to those and many other situations, we wouldn’t be here today! Or more precisely, those individuals who did not have those emotional reactions were selected out of the gene pool naturally, and those with the emotion system (that is, the rest of us today) were selected in to survive. Even though many situations in our evolutionary history may not exist today, we still have that emotion system in us.

We don’t have emotions. They have us.

When emotions are elicited, essentially they take over our critical thinking abilities. In English we like to say we “have” emotions but in fact this is a misnomer. When we are emotional, they “have” us, and they take over many of our cognitive and behavioral systems. Recovering our ability to think critically takes some time.

Everyone is born into the world with natural propensities and individual differences in this timing characteristic; some people naturally recover quickly while others may take some time. For some, it takes a LOOOOOONG time! Some people are like quick, intense flames that spark rapidly but go out equally quickly. Some people take a long time to simmer but once boiling point is reached, remain boiling for a long time. Thus, there’s definitely an inherited and genetic component to consider.

What the research says.

Academia likes to pigeonhole very complex concepts like cognition and emotion into simple-to-understand dichotomies. While those dichotomies are useful for teaching and discussion, unfortunately they ignore the complex interconnections and high degrees of overlap among them. Ample research from the last two decades has demonstrated that emotions and cognitions are not entirely distinct, separate, independent systems in our minds and brains, but in fact are highly interconnected with each other. This is true not only psychologically but also neurophysiologically, as recent brain research has demonstrated.

You might notice the addition of the words “and strategically” to thinking critically. This addition qualifies what should be referred to when thinking about critical thinking. Critical thinking generally refers to something like “the ability to analyze information at multiple levels of complexity.” And to some extent, people can do so when they are intensely emotional. When extremely angry, for instance, many people can think about one’s anger in many destructive ways, and similar associations in the past, present, and future, come fairly easily. To some degree, this is critical thinking.

But that’s not necessarily the kind of critical thinking that is constructive for us at the moment. What’s more important is strategically thinking about “how to deal with the context or situation one is in in order to achieve a goal, despite or in addition to the fact that one is very emotional.” This then leads us to understand important issues related to emotions and critical thinking a bit better: what we want is to be able to think critically and strategically even while experiencing intense emotions, that is, to be able to achieve constructive goals in intense situations.

Where to go from here?

Given the somewhat biologically hardwired nature of the association between emotion and cognition, and our extremely long evolutionary history with it, how can we “override” that system to be able to think critically and strategically in the moment in order to achieve constructive goals despite experiencing intense emotions? Is it an inborn, unchangeable aptitude? Or is it a skill that can be trained and improved?

The answer is that it is both. Regardless of whatever natural timing characteristics we come into the world with (which is related to our genetic composition), we can still train and improve this skill. This skill has been called a bunch of names in the past: emotional skills, emotional competence, emotional intelligence, emotion regulation, etc. But whatever it is called, here’s the secret: IT’S NOT EASY! We are talking about overriding something that is largely inborn and inherited, is part of our evolutionary and phylogenetic history, and that we have had practice with for XX years (insert your age). Given that backdrop, anyone who says that training the emotional system is easy is nuts.

Practical Tips (to be continued…)

As many of you know, I have studied and conducted research on the emotion system for over three decades. In addition to my academic work, I have also had the very practical problem of how to train individuals to think critically and act strategically in intensely emotional situations. For decades I have had the problem of needing to train athletes for high-level competition in a combat sport (judo) in which they needed to think critically, strategically and tactically on the fly in intense situations.

Because of my scientific background in emotion and affective science, I have studied, experienced and tried many, many different methods and systems to do so. These have included critical incident analyses (there are many ways to do so), journaling (but it needs to be directed and focused analytically), mindfulness meditation (and there’s a ton of ways out there), yoga (all different types) and many others. And we have actually done many of these methods.

They all work if done regularly and as intended. Thus there’s more than one way to improve emotional skills (whatever you call it). But for me, the most important takeaway has been what I believe is the lowest common denominator of all approaches, that is, the one elemental component that is the basis of all approaches. Knowing what it is has been especially helpful both academically and practically in my applied work.

In my next blog, I’ll discuss more about what that is and equally important, what to do about it. See you then!

The post Emotions and Critical Thinking – Update 2021 first appeared on Humintell.