THE 6 TYPES OF BASIC EMOTIONS (WITH PICTURES) - PSYCHOLOGY - 2025

The types of basic emotions present in humans are fear, anger, disgust, sadness, surprise and joy. Emotions are relatively brief conscious experiences characterized by intense mental activity and a high degree of pleasure or displeasure. For example, by having joy, you have an intense mental experience and pleasure.

An emotion is a complex psychological state that involves three distinct components: a subjective experience, a physiological response, and a behavioral or expressive response. Emotions are often intertwined with mood, temperament, personality, disposition, and motivation.

Currently, emotional psychology has proven that emotions are a fundamental part of the well-being of the individual. In addition, the positive thing is that more and more techniques are being perfected to manage emotions, so that they fulfill their objective of being adaptive and we know how to get the most out of it.

Definition of emotion

An emotion can be defined as an affective experience that is brief but intense and that gives rise to changes in various components of the organism that are interconnected. They occur in the face of events that are important to the person and function as an adaptive response.

This response has a temporal development characterized by a beginning, a culmination, and an end. In this way, it is associated with a change in the activity of the autonomic nervous system.

It seems that emotions constitute an impulse to act and can be observed and measured (facial expression, gestures, body activation…)

What are emotions for?

The emotions have the function of perpetuating the species and regulating the balance of the organism. They are part of the survival and well-being mechanisms of the individual, since they facilitate their relationship with others, indicate danger, facilitate us to ask others for help, etc.

The types of emotions are usually defined in universal terms (with very little variation between cultures) and are totally associated with physiological phenomena of the organism. There are three main ways to classify emotions: categorical classification, dimensional classification, and classification according to basic or complex emotions.

The elements of emotions

According to Scherer's model, there are five crucial elements of emotion. The emotional experience requires that all these processes be coordinated and synchronized for a short period of time, driven by evaluation processes. The elements are:

• Cognitive evaluation: evaluation of events and objects. For example, a girl is given a puppy and thinks (evaluates) that it is very pretty.
• Bodily symptoms: physiological component of emotional experience.
• Action tendencies: motivational component for the preparation and direction of motor responses. The girl behaves by playing and caressing the puppy.
• Expression: facial and vocal expression almost always accompanies the emotional state to communicate the reaction and intention of the actions. The girl smiles.
• Feelings: the subjective experience of the emotional state once it has occurred. The girl subjectively feels joy.

Types of emotions: categorical classification

The typical types of categorical emotions were proposed by Ekman and Friesen (1975), and are known as "The big six" (the big six). They are as follows:

1- fear

It is one of the most studied emotions and that has generated the most interest in researchers and theorists in Psychology. It is an emotion that arises in the face of real and present danger.

It is activated when our mental or physical well-being is threatened (thinking that we are going to receive harm or are in danger). This activation is intended to provide the body with energy to flee, or face the feared in some way.

Sometimes it is difficult to define which are the stimuli that trigger fear, because this can vary greatly. Thus, any stimulus can generate fear, it all depends on the individual. An example of this are the many and varied cases of phobias.

2- Anger

Affective state of frustration, indignation, rage, fury, anger… that arises from feeling offended by other people or when they harm others who are important to us. The anger reaction is more intense the more gratuitous and unjustified the damage, provoking temporary feelings of hatred and revenge.

The most typical triggers are to feel that we have been betrayed or deceived, or that we do not obtain a desired goal that we saw very close to. However, it can arise from almost any stimulus.

Its functions are social, self-protection, and self-regulation. There are techniques to control anger and aggression.

3- Disgust

It is experienced as a tension that has the objective of avoiding, fleeing or rejecting a certain object or stimulus that produces disgust. As for the physiological part, it produces a response similar to nausea.

It comes from the avoidance of eating food in poor conditions or unhealthy situations, as a survival mechanism since this could endanger the health of the individual.

4- Sadness

It is a negative emotion, where the individual carries out an assessment process about something that has happened to him. Specifically, it is usually triggered by the loss or failure (real or conceived as probable) of something important to the person.

This loss can be permanent or temporary, and it can also be experienced if another person important to us feels bad.

Something that stands out about sadness is that it can be reflected in the present through memories of the past and the anticipation of a future.

Sadness serves in social relationships as a demand for attention or help to be supported.

5- Surprise

It is a neutral emotion, neither positive nor negative. It occurs when we have already predicted what is going to happen and yet something different happens in a totally unexpected way. It is also defined by the appearance of unforeseen stimuli.

The organism is puzzled that it has failed in its mission to predict the outside world and tries to explain to itself what has happened. After analyzing the unexpected information, you must determine whether the unexpected is an opportunity or a threat.

The typical body expression is paralysis, raising the eyebrows and opening the mouth.

6- Joy

It is an innate positive valence emotion that arises at a very early age and seems to be useful to strengthen the bond between the parents and the child. Thus, the chances of survival increase.

Dimensional classification

This classification is based on the idea that there is an emotional space that has a certain number of dimensions, generally bipolar (two dimensions), where all the affective experiences that exist can be organized.

The two basic bipolar dimensions of this classification are "affective valence" and "intensity". The first refers to pleasure versus displeasure and the second refers to the level of activation or arousal, the extremes being high activation versus low activation.

For example, a person may feel a lot of joy (high intensity and positive affective valence). There is thus a critical point in which depending on whether it is above or below, the affective experience is classified at one pole or another.

Another example; The emotion of being scared can be classified as high arousal and unpleasantness. Whereas being relaxed fits low arousal and pleasure. On the other hand, the surprise would be of high activation, but of neutral affective valence.

Here the attention is not fixed on making a list of emotions, but on explaining how they are organized and associated with each other.

It has been a theory criticized for not describing more emotional labels than there is much empirical evidence. Furthermore, it is not known whether they truly reflect biologically programmed brain functions.

Basic / complex classification

There is another way of classifying our emotions, traditionally seen as basic or simple emotions and complex or secondary emotions.

- Primary or basic emotions (simple)

They are discrete emotions, which cause exclusive response patterns for each emotional state to certain situations or stimuli. The characteristics found in these types of emotions are:

1. Typical, distinctive and universal facial expression.
2. A physiology or activation of the organism that is also distinctive.
3. Automatic process of cognitive assessment of that emotion.
4. There are events or stimuli that generate emotion that are universal.
5. They occur in different species of primates.
6. It starts up very quickly.
7. Its duration is short.
8. It happens spontaneously.
9. It has thoughts, memories and images that are distinctive of each one.
10. They are experienced subjectively by the person.
11. They have a refractory period during which data from the environment that support that emotion tend to leak. This explains why when we are in an emotional episode of sadness we pay more attention to negative events, being congruent with our state.
12. The emotion, however, can be triggered by people, situations, animals… it has no restrictions.
13. The emotion can be triggered and act in a constructive or adaptive or destructive way. For example, there are situations in which anger can be adaptive (pushing another individual away to avoid further aggression) or maladaptive (“exploiting” or releasing frustration on someone when that person has nothing to do with it).

According to Damasio, the primary emotions can be classified into: innate, preprogrammed, involuntary and simple. They are accompanied by the activation of the limbic system, mainly the anterior cingulate cortex and the amygdala.

- Secondary emotions

They are mixtures made up of different primary emotions, and would consist of emotions such as love, trust, affinity, contempt, humiliation, remorse, guilt, etc.

According to Damasio, as the individual lives and emotions develop, they become more complex, appearing states of valuation of their own emotions, feelings, memories, connections between categories of objects and primary situations or emotions.

In this case, the limbic system structures are not enough to support this complexity, with the prefrontal and somatosensory cortices playing an important role.

Other classifications

Later, in his book In Search of Spinoza, Damasio further refined this classification:

Background emotions

They are essential, but not easily visible in our behavior. It is that discomfort, nervousness, energy, tranquility… that we can slightly capture in a person. It can be observed by looking closely at body movements, facial expressions, limbs, intonation, voice prosody, etc.

These emotions are due to various regulatory processes in our body such as metabolic adjustments or external situations to which we must adapt. Discouragement or enthusiasm, which occur briefly in the person, would be examples of underlying emotions.

Social emotions

They are more complex and involve shame, guilt, disdain, pride, envy, jealousy, gratitude, admiration, indignation, sympathy, etc. Researchers are currently trying to study the brain mechanisms that govern these types of emotions.

How are emotions related to each other?

According to Damasio, emotions are linked thanks to the nesting principle: it refers to the fact that the simplest emotions are combined with various factors to give rise to more complex emotions, such as social ones.

Thus, social emotions include a set of regulatory reactions (background emotions) and components of primary emotions in different combinations.

References

1. Carpi, A., Guerrero, C. and Palmero, F. (2008). Basic emotions. In F. Palmero, EG Fernández-Abascal, F. Martínez, F. and M. Chóliz (Coords.), Psychology of motivation and emotion. (pp. 233-274) Madrid: McGraw-Hill.
2. Dalai Lama & Ekman, P. (2008). Emotional awaresness: Overcoming the obstacles to psychological balance and compassion. NY: Times Books
3. Damasio, A. (2005). In search of Spinoza: Neurobiology of emotion and feelings. Pp.: 46-49. Barcelona: Editorial Crítica.
4. Ekman, P., & Cordaro, D. (2011). What is meant by calling emotions basic. Emotion Review, 3, 364-370.
5. Russell, JA (1980). A circumplex model of affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39 (6), 1161-1178.
6. Surprise. (sf). Retrieved on August 18, 2016, from Changingminds.
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