著者

宇津木 成介

出版者

神戸大学

雑誌

国際文化学研究 : 神戸大学国際文化学部紀要 (ISSN:13405217)

巻号頁・発行日

vol.29, pp.73-91, 2007-12

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How many basic emotions are? As William James suggested, we may have an endless list of words expressing emotional states if we enumerate them. In this article the author briefly introduced "seven (basic) emotions" which seem to be based on Buddhism. Charles Darwin provided 37 affective words in eight chapter titles in his "On the expression of the emotions in man and animals." To the contrary J.B. Watson argued he found only three basic emotions X,Y, and Z in his "Behaviorism." James listed seven names of emotions in his 1884 article, and eight names in his 1892 textbook. Only anger and fear appeared in the both lists. He thought that "the varieties of emotion are innumerable," so he seemed to try not to talk about each emotion but to explain emotion per se. Researchers like Wundt have suggested the dimensional structure of emotion. Later, Plutchik introduced his three dimensions theory of emotions and maintained that there are 8 primary emotions and they compose other emotions as three primary colors do. His dimensional view of emotions seems to be the opposite to the one that we humans have a set of basic instincts and each emotion connects to the instinct. James' view of emotion could be understood on a sort of physiological continuum, he also subscribed the idea that humans have discrete instincts. Watson, criticizing James, followed the way suggested by James, that emphasizes the stimulus arousing the emotional response. Although he did not deny the basic action parts observed in the newborn child, he did deny the importance of human instinct which was laid a great importance by McDougall. Woodworth showed that 58 emotional words could be classified into 11 classes. He also indicated that there might be six categories of emotions using Feleky's data. The six categories showed a similar circular structure proposed by Plutchik. In sum, most common number of basic emotions will be 6 to 8. The modern theories of basic emotions should be compared with the older philosophical views of emotions speculated by Tomas Aquinas, Descartes, and Spinoza who proposed 3 to 6 basic emotions that humans have.