Ortony Andrew
Department of Psychology, Northwestern University.
Perspect Psychol Sci. 2022 Jan;17(1):41-61. doi: 10.1177/1745691620985415. Epub 2021 Jul 15.
Despite decades of challenges to the idea that a small number of emotions enjoys the special status of "basic emotions," the idea continues to have considerable influence in psychology and beyond. However, different theorists have proposed substantially different lists of basic emotions, which suggests that there exists no stable criterion of basicness. To some extent, the basic-emotions enterprise is bedeviled by an overreliance on English affective terms, but there also lurks a more serious problem-the lack of agreement as to what emotions are. To address this problem, three necessary conditions are proposed as a minimal requirement for a mental state to be an emotion. A detailed analysis of surprise, a widely accepted basic emotion, reveals that surprise violates even this minimal test, raising the possibility that it and perhaps other would-be basic emotions might not be emotions at all. An approach that combines ideas such as undifferentiated affect and cognitive appraisal is briefly proposed as a way of theorizing about emotions that is less dependent on the vagaries of language and incoherent notions of basic emotions. Finally, it is suggested that the perennial question of what an emotion is should be given more serious attention.
尽管数十年来，“少数几种情感具有‘基本情感’的特殊地位”这一观点面临诸多挑战，但该观点在心理学及其他领域仍具有相当大的影响力。然而，不同的理论家提出了截然不同的基本情感列表，这表明不存在稳定的基本情感标准。在某种程度上，基本情感这一概念受到过度依赖英语情感术语的困扰，但还潜藏着一个更严重的问题——对于情感究竟是什么，人们缺乏共识。为解决这一问题，提出了三个必要条件，作为一种心理状态成为情感的最低要求。对惊讶这一被广泛认可的基本情感进行详细分析后发现，惊讶甚至不符合这一最低标准，这增加了一种可能性，即惊讶以及其他可能的基本情感也许根本就不是情感。本文简要提出了一种将诸如未分化情感和认知评估等观点结合起来的方法，作为一种对情感进行理论化的方式，这种方式较少依赖语言的变幻莫测以及基本情感的不连贯概念。最后，建议应更认真地关注“情感究竟是什么”这个长期存在的问题。
