Ortony A, Turner T J
Institute for the Learning Sciences, Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois 60201.
Psychol Rev. 1990 Jul;97(3):315-31. doi: 10.1037/0033-295x.97.3.315.
A widespread assumption in theories of emotion is that there exists a small set of basic emotions. From a biological perspective, this idea is manifested in the belief that there might be neurophysiological and anatomical substrates corresponding to the basic emotions. From a psychological perspective, basic emotions are often held to be the primitive building blocks of other, nonbasic emotions. The content of such claims is examined, and the results suggest that there is no coherent nontrivial notion of basic emotions as the elementary psychological primitives in terms of which other emotions can be explained. Thus, the view that there exist basic emotions out of which all other emotions are built, and in terms of which they can be explained, is questioned, raising the possibility that this position is an article of faith rather than an empirically or theoretically defensible basis for the conduct of emotion research. This suggests that perhaps the notion of basic emotions will not lead to significant progress in the field. An alternative approach to explaining the phenomena that appear to motivate the postulation of basic emotions is presented.
情绪理论中一个普遍的假设是，存在一小部分基本情绪。从生物学角度来看，这种观点体现在人们相信可能存在与基本情绪相对应的神经生理和解剖学基础。从心理学角度来看，基本情绪通常被认为是其他非基本情绪的原始构成要素。本文对这些观点的内容进行了审视，结果表明，并不存在一个连贯且有意义的关于基本情绪的概念，即不存在一种作为基本心理原素的基本情绪，据此可以解释其他情绪。因此，那种认为存在所有其他情绪都由其构建且能据此进行解释的基本情绪的观点受到了质疑，这就引发了一种可能性，即这一立场是一种信念条款，而非情绪研究中基于实证或理论可辩护的基础。这表明，或许基本情绪这一概念不会在该领域带来显著进展。本文提出了一种替代方法，用于解释那些似乎促使人们假定基本情绪的现象。
