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Humans experience emotions in a clear and recognizable way. This has led to the labeling of a number of emotions that are said to be basic and concrete among all people. However, a recent debate among experts in the field has questioned this approach to emotion.

Those who claim the former argument present emotions, such as anger sadness or fear, as each being their own set entities. Although many variations of this model have been presented, the basic idea is that an event triggers an emotion, which is then expressed in set physiological and behavioral responses. It is not to say that this model assumes that emotions are pure biology, however it groups responses into distinct categories, such as anger or fear. This position stems from Darwin’s theories, which argued that emotions have developed in the process of evolution. This approach views emotions as a type of an instinctual reaction to an event. This evolutionary flavored approach states that this reaction developed through our ancestral past as an adaptive method. According to Ekman the adaptive value of emotions are in dealing with “fundamental life tasks”, which could consists of various different necessities, however he emphasizes their importance in developing interpersonal relationships. His biggest supporting argument for his perspective of basic emotions is his cross cultural studies and his results, which claim that certain facial expressions appear to be universal.This ties back into the evolutionary aspect of this theory as some of these expressions are comparable to expressions in other animals apart from humans, such as primates. He also claims that certain facial expressions differ between each qualitative emotional state, such as between fear and disgust (Ekman). Another theme common to all basic emotions theorists is the idea that different emotions have specific locations in the nervous system. Ekman uses emotion specific physiology and coherence in expression and autonomic changes while experiencing emotion as supporting evidence to his argument. However, results of experiments done on this are inconclusive and both sides argue various possible reasons for this that strengthen their own argument (Ekman; Gendron& Barrett).

Those who claim the latter argument in the debate present emotion as an experience, which is the result of various contextual factors. This position argues that if, in fact, there are disctinct categories of emotion then it should be possible to objectivly measure them and that these should be qualitativly different.It then argues that Meta analysis empirical data has not been able to show evidence of separate distinguishable categories of emotion, therefore disproving the basicality position. Instead, peripheral nervous system responses and facial electromyography show measurements corresponding to two axis; positive vs. negative affect and degree of arousal. (Barrett, 2006). Those who take the constructive position of emotion argue that people categorize emotions into the already provided labels; therefore shaping the emotion that they experience by the information that they already have about that emotion. Comparisons of this type of contextualizing can be made to other areas in psychology, which are already broadly accepted. For example, in the field of social psychology there is an abundant body of research that shows that our preconceived knowledge of situations and people affects how we perceive an incoming situation or behavior. Another analogy made is the perception of color. Self reports of various different language speakers have yielded different results of a perceived color after being shown the exact same wavelength on the color spectrum. This was due to the different categorizations that exist in each language. (Barrett, 2006) Based on this idea that the existing labels for emotion are due to categorization, constructive psychology theorists propose that the experience of emotion is due to different ingredients that combine and together form this experience. A key ingredient to this experience is what has been referred to as “emotion state” or “core affect” (Lambie & Marcel, 2002; Barrett, 2006). These terms refer to the more basic natural state which a person experiences at a given point in time, such as valence and arousal. When this state is combined with contextual factors, such as preexisting knowledge, and with each individual’s perception then the experience of emotion is felt. (Barret, 2006)