資料紹介

資料の原本内容

In T. Dalgleish and M. Power (Eds.). Handbook of Cognition and Emotion. Sussex, U.K.: John
Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 1999.

Chapter 3
Basic Emotions

Paul Ekman
University of California, San Francisco, CA, USA

INTRODUCTION
In this chapter I consolidate my previous writings about basic emotions (Ekman, 1984, 1992a,
1992b) and introduce a few changes in my thinking. My views over the past 40 years have
changed radically from my initial view (Ekman, 1957) that: (a) a pleasant—unpleasant and
active—passive scale were sufficient to capture the differences among emotions; and (b) the
relationship between a facial configuration and what it signified is socially learned and culturally
variable. I was forced to adopt the opposite view by findings from my own and others’ crosscultural studies of facial expressions. There are some who have challenged this by now quite
large body of evidence: I describe those challenges and the answers to them in Chapter 16.
The framework I describe below is most influenced by Darwin (1872/1997) and Tomkins
(1962), although I do not accept in total what either said. There are three meanings of the term
“basic” (see also Ortony & Turner, 1990). First, it distinguishes those who maintain that there are
a number of separate emotions, that differ one from another in important ways. From this
perspective, fear, anger, disgust, sadness and contempt, all negative emotions, differ in their appraisal, antecedent events, probable behavioral response, physiology and other characteristics
described below. So, too, amusement, pride in achievement, satisfaction, relief and contentment,
all positive emotions, differ from each other. This basic emotions perspective is in contrast to
those who treat emotions as fundamentally the same, differing only in terms of intensity or
pleasantness.
To identify separate discrete emotions does not necessarily require that one also take an
evolutionary view of emotions. A social constructionist could allow for separate emotions
without embracing the second meaning of the adjective “basic”. Even the discovery of universals
in expression or in antecedent events does not require giving a major role to evolution. Instead,
one can attribute universals to species-constant learning—social learning which will usually
occur for all members of the species, regardless of culture (cf. Allport, 1924). In this view it is
ontogeny, not phylogeny, which is responsible for any commonalities in emotion; universals in
expression are due to what ethologists call “conventionalization”, not “ritualization” (see Ekman,
1979 for a discussion of these distinctions as applied to emotion).
The second meaning of the adjective “basic” is to indicate instead the view that emotions
evolved for their adaptive value in dealing with fundamental life tasks. Innate factors play a role
in accounting for the characteristics they share, not species-constant or species-variable learning.
There are a number of ways to describe these fundamental life tasks. Johnson-Laird & Oatley
(1992) say they are universal human predicaments, such as achievements, losses, frustrations,

etc. Each emotion thus prompts us in a direction which, in the course of evolution, has done
better than other solutions in recurring circumstances that are relevant to goals. Lazarus (1991)
talks of “common adaptational tasks as these are appraised and configured into core relational
themes” (p. 202) and gives examples of facing an immediate danger, experiencing an irrevocable
loss, progressing towards the realization of a goal, etc. Stein & Trabasso (1992) say that in
happiness a goal is attained or maintained, in sadness there is a failure to attain or maintain a
goal, in anger an agent causes a loss of a goal, and in fear there is an expectation of failure to
achieve a goal. Tooby & Cosmides (1990) tell us that emotions impose on the present world an
interpretative landscape derived from the covariant structure of the past . . .”. Emotions, they say,
deal wi...

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