New emotion research – Are there only four emotions?

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As of February of 2014, new evidence came out saying that the basic emotions of the human being can be broken down into, not six, but four basic emotions. At least, that’s what the header of the article claimed. Here’s a link to the article I’ll be referring to: http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-scotland-glasgow-west-26019586.

In physiological psychology, one of my favorite lectures had to be the one on emotions. For the longest time, it has been suggested that human behavior can be explained by six basic emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise and disgust. Research performed by Gaslow University at the Institute of Neuroscience and Psychology has performed studies to see if this is still true. After examining different facial expressions with new and improved software, researchers found that fear and surprise share similar expressions, including wide-open eyes and that anger and disgust share the same feature of a wrinkled nose. While happiness and sadness continued to show large differences in expression from the other emotions, the other four emotions could be narrowed down based on the similar expressions they exhibited.

Lead researcher Dr. Rachel Jack argued that the focus of their study was to evaluate whether biological and social evolutionary pressures may influence the expressions of emotions over time. In addition, what muscles are activated in order to expression these emotions and have these remained consistent over time and across cultures. In order to test emotional expressions and how they have shifted over time, researchers used the Generative Face Grammar analyzing three-dimensional images of individuals who were trained to move all 42 of their facial muscles independently. This software is also able to generate specific or random facial expressions based on the activation of different muscles, to which they refer to as the “action units” individuals associate with different emotions.

Researchers asked volunteers to identify the emotions portrayed by the three-dimensional models of the individuals who could move their facial muscles independently as different action units were randomly generated. From this, researchers were able to gather information about which action units individuals associate with different emotional expressions. They found that participants generally confused signals for fear/surprise and anger/disgust. These emotions (fear, surprise, anger, and disgust) would only be chosen correctly when additional action units were added.

Dr. Jack suggests that their research shows that while there are still six basic emotions, there are only four basic expressions of emotion. In addition, as humans became more biologically and socially evolved, different cultures developed more unique appraisals of emotions and emotional expressions. Therefore, they intend to continue research like this in different areas of the globe to see if their findings hold true in other societies.

While the article’s title is indeed misleading, claiming that there is new evidence for only four basic emotions and not the full six, it is interesting to see that some researchers are interested in pursuing how emotional appraisals have shifted over time. A lot of the news articles or any other cites I found on the web focused solely on this one study and no one seems to have done a news update on whether or not other studies have found similar results or different ones. While I find this research to be incredibly interesting, I would like to see if another team of researchers could replicate it. I can definitely see the basis of Dr. Jack’s argument that humans have become diverse in their emotional appraisals and expressions over time and that these appear to be specific to different cultures. In some ways, even in my own life, I can see how these six emotions can be broken down into only four expressions. It certainly is a topic I would love to research more and see just how significant these findings are across cultures as well as across studies. Hopefully more research will emerge in this area of study.



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