The Primary Emotions

Most experts agree on the existence of powerful primary emotions from which all other emotions derive. While a consensus has still not been reached on what those might be, almost every list includes the quartet of fear, joy, grief and anger.

The great French thinker Rene Descartes named six basic emotions love, hate, astonishment, desire, joy and sorrow - while German philosopher Immanuel Kant proposed five love, hope, modesty, joy and sorrow. In his 1890 text, Principles of Psychology, William James narrowed the field down to four: love, fear, grief and rage. Every other emotion, he argued, was a variation on those four themes.

Aiming for more scientific and less subjective criteria, researchers in the 1970s and '80s tried using sociology and physiology to distill primary emotions from the rest. In his study of how different cultures perceive emotions, Paul Ekman discovered that people everywhere could recognize fear, anger, sadness and enjoyment when they saw it in another person's facial features or gestures. Other researchers expanded the number of universal expressions to seven, adding the emotions of contempt, disgust and surprise.

Despite these findings, some experts dispute the very concept of distinct emotions. At a landmark conference on emotions that took place in the 1950s, one psychologist claimed he had never seen a pure or undiluted emotion, because all feelings incorporate elements of others. Jealousy stems partly from anger, but also from fear and sadness; shame is a mix of sadness and fear; and relief combines an anticipated fear with happiness (to say nothing of the proverbial thin line between love and hate).

Hundreds of emotions have been catalogued over the centuries. Here is a list of the most common emotions, arranged according to the primary emotions with which each is typically associated:

Fear: anxiety, nervousness, suspicion, prejudice, panic

Joy or Happiness: love, delight, enjoyment, relief, pride

Grief or Sadness: melancholy, despair, humiliation, shame, remorse, embarrassment

Anger: hatred, contempt, resentment, irritability, exasperation, jealousy

Other emotions sometimes classified as primary include disgust, surprise, excitement, loneliness, gratitude and humility.

PDF Table of How We Develop Emotions