Category: Emotion

Analysis of the 42 facial muscles which create emotional expressions reveals how many emotions there are.

How many basic human emotions are there?

Well, it depends who you believe.

Robert Plutchik, whose theories on the emotions were influential, thought there were eight primary emotions:

1. anger
2. fear
3. sadness
4. disgust
5. surprise
6. anticipation
7. trust
8. joy

He arranged them in a wheel to emphasise the idea that emotions can blend with each other, like colours, to create new emotions.

On the wheel shown below, the most intense feelings are in the middle, with milder emotions towards the outside.

Six basic emotions

Until recently many psychologists went along with the idea that humans experience six basic emotions:

1. happiness
2. sadness
3. fear
4. disgust
5. anger
6. surprise

This theory is largely down to psychologist Paul Eckman who came up with the scheme in the 1970s.

It is based on research finding that across different and varied cultures these six feelings are universally recognised.

Later on, though, Eckman added many more emotions to the list including amusement, awe, contentment, desire, embarrassment, pain, relief and sympathy.

Four basic human emotions

More recent research from the University of Glasgow has challenged the established view that there are six basic emotions: anger, fear, surprise, disgust, happiness and sadness.

Instead there may only be four.

To reach their conclusions, Jack et al. (2014) looked at how the muscles in the face move when expressing a variety of emotions.

They found that fear and surprise shared a common signal — the eyes are wide open — suggesting they only constitute one basic emotion, not two.

Similarly, for anger and disgust they found that the nose initially wrinkles.

Anger and disgust may, therefore, constitute only one basic feeling.

No anger and disgust?

None of this is to say that anger and disgust don’t exist as separate emotions, of course they do.

Rather it’s to suggest that anger and disgust only become obvious after the facial emotion has been given time to evolve, even if this development typically only takes a fraction of a second.

The authors argue that the facial expression associated with the basic emotions have an evolutionary function.

Lead author Dr. Rachael Jack said:

“First, early danger signals confer the best advantages to others by enabling the fastest escape.

Secondly, physiological advantages for the expresser–the wrinkled nose prevents inspiration of potentially harmful particles, whereas widened eyes increases intake of visual information useful for escape–are enhanced when the face movements are made early.”

Building blocks of emotion

The theory is that there are four biologically basic emotions — anger, fear, happiness and sadness — on top of which have evolved much more complex varieties of emotion over the millennia.

This doesn’t suggest that our feelings are any less complex, just that the basic building blocks could be four rather than six.

After all, the full complexity of life on earth is made possible from a sequence of just four nucleobases in DNA, commonly abbreviated to the letters G, A, T and C (guanine, adenine, thymine, and cytosine).

It’s the development of facial emotions over time that gives them their complexity:

“What our research shows is that not all facial muscles appear simultaneously during facial expressions, but rather develop over time supporting a hierarchical biologically-basic to socially-specific information over time.”

• The body map of emotions

The painkiller is found in 600 different drugs.

Acetaminophen — known as Tylenol in the US and paracetamol elsewhere — makes people take bigger risks, research finds.

Taking the popular painkiller makes people view risky activities as less so.

People report being more likely to speak their mind on an unpopular issue at work, change career in their 30s or even take up skydiving.

Acetaminophen is a painkiller that is used in at least 600 different medicines.

Most people are not aware of the wide range of psychological side-effects the drug has.

Previous studies have shown that acetaminophen reduces both positive and negative emotions, the ability to empathise and changes how the brain processes information.

Dr Baldwin Way, the study’s first author, said:

“Acetaminophen seems to make people feel less negative emotion when they consider risky activities — they just don’t feel as scared.

With nearly 25 percent of the population in the U.S. taking acetaminophen each week, reduced risk perceptions and increased risk-taking could have important effects on society.”

For one of the studies in the research, some participants took a standard 1,000 mg dose of acetaminophen.

Then all the participants started pumping up a balloon, for which they were offered a greater reward for each pump they put in.

Dr Way explained how the experiment worked:

“As you’re pumping the balloon, it is getting bigger and bigger on your computer screen, and you’re earning more money with each pump.

But as it gets bigger you have this decision to make: Should I keep pumping and see if I can make more money, knowing that if it bursts I lose the money I had made with that balloon?”

People who had taken acetaminophen carried on pumping and were more likely to burst the balloon.

Dr Way said:

“If you’re risk-averse, you may pump a few times and then decide to cash out because you don’t want the balloon to burst and lose your money.

But for those who are on acetaminophen, as the balloon gets bigger, we believe they have less anxiety and less negative emotion about how big the balloon is getting and the possibility of it bursting.”

Dr Way thinks the results have some topical implications, since people are told to take acetaminophen for initial COVID symptoms:

“Perhaps someone with mild COVID-19 symptoms may not think it is as risky to leave their house and meet with people if they’re taking acetaminophen.”

The study was published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (Keaveney et al., 2020).

Curiosity can help people make healthier choices and change their behaviour.

Curiosity is a powerful way to motivate people, research finds.

It can even help people make healthier choices.

Across four experiments, researchers found that people’s curiosity encouraged them to take the stairs and eat more healthily.

Dr Evan Polman, the study’s first author, said:

“Our research shows that piquing people’s curiosity can influence their choices by steering them away from tempting desires, like unhealthy foods or taking the elevator, and toward less tempting, but healthier options, such as buying more fresh produce or taking the stairs.”

For example, in one experiment 200 people were given a choice between two cookies.

One of them was plain, but they were told it was a ‘fortune cookie’ that contained some personal information about them.

The other cookie held no such intriguing information, but was covered with chocolate and sprinkles.

Still, 71 percent of people chose the fortune cookie, preferring some personal information to mere chocolate and sprinkles.

(Incidentally, the fortune cookies all contained the same, extremely disappointing line for everyone: “You are not illiterate”.)

Dr Polman said:

“By telling people if they choose the ordinary cookie they’ll learn something about themselves via the fortune inside of it, it piqued their curiosity, and therefore they were more likely to pick the plain cookie over the more tempting chocolate-dipped option.”

In a second experiment, researchers promised to reveal the secret to a magic trick — this also strongly motivated people’s behaviour.

In a third experiment, people were encouraged to use the stairs rather than the lift by the posting of trivia questions at the bottom, with the answers in the stairwell.

Dr Polman said:

“Evidently, people really have a need for closure when something has piqued their curiosity.

They want the information that fills the curiosity gap, and they will go to great lengths to get it.”

The effect — sometimes known as the ‘curiosity gap’ — was surprisingly powerful, and can be put to good use, said Dr Polman:

“Our results suggest that using interventions based on curiosity gaps has the potential to increase participation in desired behaviors for which people often lack motivation.

It also provides new evidence that curiosity-based interventions come at an incredibly small cost and could help steer people toward a variety of positive actions.”

The study was presented at the annual convention of the American Psychological Association, 2016 (Polman et al., 2016).

Most people are quick to see the good in others and slow to condemn.

Most people are quick to forgive others who have behaved badly in the past, research suggests.

The majority tend to give others the benefit of the doubt, offering forgiveness even in the face of bad behaviour.

In other words, most are quick to see the good in others — indeed, want to see it — and are slow to condemn.

It might help explain why some people stay in bad relationships.

Dr Molly Crockett, study co-author, said:

“The brain forms social impressions in a way that can enable forgiveness.

Because people sometimes behave badly by accident, we need to be able to update bad impressions that turn out to be mistaken.

Otherwise, we might end relationships prematurely and miss out on the many benefits of social connection.”

The research included over 1,500 people in a series of experiments.

They observed strangers who had to make a decision in a moral dilemma.

Should they inflict electrical shocks to gain money?

‘Good’ strangers were seen to mostly refuse to shock others, while ‘bad’ strangers were observed often going ahead with it.

The observers were asked about the moral character of the strangers.

The results revealed that people were relatively quick to forgive bad behaviour and avoided condemning people as ‘truly bad’.

However, people were confident that the ‘good’ strangers were ‘truly good’.

Dr Crockett said:

“We think our findings reveal a basic predisposition towards giving others, even strangers, the benefit of the doubt.

The human mind is built for maintaining social relationships, even when partners sometimes behave badly.”

Ms  Jenifer Siegel, the study’s first author, said:

“The ability to accurately form impressions of others’ character is crucial for the development and maintenance of healthy relationships.

We have developed new tools for measuring impression formation, which could help improve our understanding of relational dysfunction.”

The study was published in the journal Nature Human Behaviour (Siegel et al., 2018).