Instruct: Given a question, retrieve passages that can help answer the question.
Query: What are the universal emotions?
Research on the relationship between culture and emotions dates back to 1872 when Darwin[2] argued that emotions and the expression of emotions are universal. Since that time, the universality of the six basic emotions[3] (i.e., happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise) has ignited a discussion amongst psychologists, anthropologists, and sociologists. While emotions themselves are universal phenomena, they are always influenced by culture. How emotions are experienced, expressed, perceived, and regulated varies as a function of culturally normative behavior by the surrounding society. Therefore, it can be said that culture is a necessary framework for researchers to understand variations in emotions.[4]
In another study analysis revealed that emotional responses were stronger than the listeners' perceptions of emotions. This study used a between-subjects design, where 20 listeners judged to what extent they perceived four emotions: happy, sad, peaceful, and scared. A separate 19 listeners rated to what extent they experienced each of these emotions. The findings showed that all music stimuli elicited specific emotions for the group of participants rating elicited emotion, while music stimuli only occasionally conveyed emotion to the participants in the group identifying which emotions the music conveyed. 
Based on these inconsistent findings, there is much research left to be done in order to determine how conveyed and elicited emotions are similar and different. There is disagreement about whether music induces 'true' emotions or if the emotions reported as felt in studies are instead just participants stating the emotions found in the music they are listening to.
Positive emotions can undo lingering negative emotions because they put the negative emotions in a broader perspective. If an individual can cultivate these positive emotions, he or she can use them to help cope with negative emotions. Positive emotions help people who are distressed deal with what is occurring and move forward and away from the negative emotions. Also, because of their broadening effect, positive emotions increase the probability of finding good in future events. Individuals high in resiliency are those who experience more positive emotions even in the face of stress. Having these positive emotions is what helps an individual build up resources to cope with negative emotional experiences.
The ideas about the nature of man and his emotional life are discussed in depth in the first chapter of "Psychic Wholeness and Healing" by her and Dr. Conrad Baars, M.D., who took Terruwe's ideas and treatment to the United States. Dr. Baars came across Dr. Terruwe at a time when he was ready to abandon his practice and the field out of his frustration with the Freudian approach that emotional repression belongs the "superego", particularly man's conscience, and the unethical treatment plan that focuses on changing a man's conscience. Dr. Terruwe practiced what she learned from Father Duynstee--that emotional repression does not belong to man's conscience, but is a conflict in the emotions themselves. It is not what a man believes about his emotions that makes him repress, but what he feels.
According to some theories, emotions are universal phenomena, albeit affected by culture. Emotions are "internal phenomena that can, but do not always, make themselves observable through expression and behavior".[1] While some emotions are universal and are experienced in similar ways as a reaction to similar events across all cultures, other emotions show considerable cultural differences in their antecedent events, the way they are experienced, the reactions they provoke and the way they are perceived by the surrounding society. According to other theories, termed social constructionist, emotions are more deeply culturally influenced. The components of emotions are universal, but the patterns are social constructions. Some also theorize that culture is affected by emotions of the people.
Emotional approach coping can be assessed using the emotional approach coping scales developed by Stanton, Kirk, Cameron, and Danoff-Burg in 2000. The scales involve two distinct subscales of items: emotional processing and emotional expression. Emotional processing and emotional expression scales are positively correlated but distinct. The emotional processing items reflect an attempt to understand, consider and examine emotions in response to a stressful event. For example, “I acknowledge my feelings” and “I take time to figure out what I’m really feeling.” Emotional expression items assess attempts to verbally and non-verbally communicate and share emotions. Sample items include: “I allow myself to express my feelings” and “I feel free to express my emotions.” The emotional approach coping scales have been tested and validated using situational (i.e., what do you do in response to a specific stressor) and dispositional (i.e., what do you do in general) instruction sets. The scales are uncorrelated with social desirability. In addition to English, the emotional approach coping scale has also been validated in Norwegian and Turkish.
Stanley Schachter and his doctoral student Jerome Singer formulated their theory of emotion based on evidence that without an actual emotion-producing stimulus, people are unable to attribute specific emotions to their bodily states. They believed that there must be a cognitive component to emotion perception beyond that of just physical changes and subjective feelings. Schachter and Singer suggested that when someone encounters such an emotion-producing stimulus, they would immediately recognize their bodily symptoms (sweating and elevated heart rate in the case of the grizzly bear) as the emotion fear. Their theory was devised as a result of a study in which participants were injected with either a stimulant (adrenaline) that causes elevated heart rate, sweaty palms and shaking, or a placebo. Participants were then either told what the effects of the drug were or were told nothing, and were then placed in a room with a person they did not know who, according to the research plan, would either play with a hula hoop and make paper airplanes (euphoric condition) or ask the participant intimate, personal questions (angry condition). What they found was that participants who knew what the effects of the drug were attributed their physical state to the effects of the drug; however, those who had no knowledge of the drug they received attributed their physical state to the situation with the other person in the room. These results led to the conclusion that physiological reactions contributed to emotional experience by facilitating a focused cognitive appraisal of a given physiologically arousing event and that this appraisal was what defined the subjective emotional experience. Emotions were thus a result of a two-stage process: first, physiological arousal in a response to an evoking stimulus, and second, cognitive elaboration of the context in which the stimulus occurred.
Humans' subjective experience is that emotions are clearly recognizable in ourselves and others. This apparent ease of recognition has led to the identification of a number of emotions that are said to be basic, and universal among all people. However, a debate among experts has questioned this understanding of what emotions are. There has been recent discussion of the progression on the different views of emotion over the years.
Happiness, joy, love, excitement are all positive emotions and there is no arguing that these emotions contribute in large to how we act, how we think, and what we do. In contrast there are also negative feelings such as sadness that can lead us to act in certain ways that may not necessarily be good. Studies have been performed that have shown that positive emotions can be used to "correct" or "undo" the effects of negative emotions. Barbara Fredrickson and Robert Levenson have come up with the undoing hypothesis. In essence what the hypothesis states is that people might hold in the effects of their positive emotions to counterbalance the effects of their negative emotions.
Overall positive emotions help lower the potentially health-damaging cardiovascular reactivity that lingers following negative emotions. This effect may be especially important for those most at risk for developing coronary heart disease.
Another aspect of the "group as a whole" perspective sees the normative forces a group has on its members' emotional behavior such as norms for the amount of feelings' expression and even which emotions it is best to feel. The group's norms control which emotions would (or at least should) be displayed at a specific situation according to the group's best interest and goals. The norms help differentiate felt emotions, what the individuals actually feel, from expressed emotions, what they display in the current situation. This perspective has practical implications as shown by researchers. Thus, according to this angle the group causes the emotions to be moderated and controlled.
Both sides of this debate agree that the face expresses emotion. The controversy surrounds the uncertainty about what specific emotional information is read from a facial expression. Opponents of the universality hypothesis believe that more general information is pieced together with other contextual information in order to determine how a person feels.
Emissaries of Divine Light teach that the key to creative living is the individual’s openness to the source of universal power and intelligence within them, and that human emotions either connect a person to that source or cut them off from it. The educational programs of the Emissaries are designed to assist people to find out what has been emotionally triggering them, so that they can withdraw their emotional attention from the trigger and turn it to the life force within them. The Emissaries believe that behind all emotions is the universal power of love and a universal intelligence that bring spiritual enlightenment. They teach that through deliberate conscious thought a person can let their own emotional current purify, so that they open themselves to the flow of the universal power and intelligence within them.
Humanistic approaches to assertiveness, as, for instance, outlined by Anne Dickson emphasise the importance of working with emotions. In particular it recognises the need to address manipulative or passive (the person does not say what they want) – aggressive (they try to force the other person to do what they want) behaviour in which the manipulator exploits the feelings of the other to try to get what they want. Building up emotional competence is a way of learning to handle such behaviour.
Hogan also explains that the time and emotion which a person devotes to understanding a character's situation makes literature "ecological[ly] valid in the study of emotion". That is literature unites a large community by provoking universal emotions, as well s allowing readers to access cultural aspects that they have not been exposed to, and that produce new emotional experiences. Theorists argue that authors choose literary device according to what psychological emotion they are attempting to describe.
The primary goal of the most recent Meta-Emotion Interview (MEI) is to gain a clear idea of how an individual experiences a particular emotion. Although it was first used to examine the emotions of sadness and anger, it has since been expanded to include pride and love/affection. The MEI focuses on one emotion at a time—all the questions are answered about one particular emotion (i.e.: sadness) before the interviewer moves on to the next emotion. For each emotion, the individual is first asked about their childhood and how their family handled and expressed each emotion. Then, they are asked about how they experience the emotion now. The questions particularly target how they experience each emotion in their relationships with their spouse and/or child. The MEI also addresses nonverbal expressions of emotion. For example, the interviewer asks what the individual looks like when he or she experiences a particular emotion (i.e.: "What do you look like when you are sad?"). The MEI is videotaped and then coded using the MEI Coding System, which focuses on four main dimensions of emotion: awareness, acceptance, dysregulation, and coaching. Awareness refers to the extent to which the individual acknowledges that they are experiencing an emotion. Acceptance refers to whether the individual not only allows themselves to experience the emotion, but also feels comfortable expressing it. Dysregulation relates to the individual's reported difficulties regulating their expression of the particular emotion. Finally, coaching refers to the degree to which individuals are able to identify and accept others' (i.e.: spouse or child) emotional experience in a positive manner.
Emotions are divided into categories because they are discrete from one another. Each emotion entails a separate and distinct set of reactions, consequences, and expressions. The feeling and expression of emotions is a natural occurrence, and, it is actually a universal occurrence for some emotions. There are six basic emotions that are considered universal to the human species across age, gender, race, country, and culture and that are considered to be categorically distinct. These six basic emotions are: happiness, disgust, sadness, surprise, anger, and fear. According to the discrete emotions approach, people experience one emotion and not others, rather than a blend. Categorical perception of emotional facial expressions does not require lexical categories. Of these six emotions, happiness is the most easily identified.
There are no requirements for training emotional support animals. Emotional support animals typically have no training beyond what would be expected for the same type of pet. Emotional support animals perform no tasks other than what a pet of the same type would do – including unwanted behaviors, such as defecating in inappropriate places, growling and barking at people, or biting them.
Emotion is universal
Over the decades, emotional intelligence is increasingly gaining attention due to its contribution and meaningful outcomes in society. Generally, psychologists and other stakeholders in the psychology industry have adopted the ability model to explain various concepts about emotional intelligence. In this case, the ability model is widely used because it provides experts with the opportunity to investigate emotions and the way it affects the universe across every domain in the society. The model defines emotional intelligence as an individual's ability to incorporate emotional knowledge to improve thought. Further, the ability model divides emotional intelligence into three main branches: emotion understanding, emotion perception, and emotion regulation. The cascading model outlines that emotion perception leads to emotion amongst people while emotion awareness allows a person to understand the way emotions function. By noting emotions as they unveil, individuals gain an understanding of the causes and effects of emotions and the way emotions evolve over a period. In addition, emotion perception expedites emotion understanding among human beings. Despite the growing literature on emotional intelligence, numerous questions are raised concerning the construct of emotion. One area that remains controversial is whether emotion affects all people across cultures throughout the world. Emotions play a significant role in the lives of human beings particularly among infants who need constant attention which, assist them to grow holistically in the environment.
Some people oppose the concept of animal emotions and suggest that emotions aren't universal, including in humans. If emotions are not universal, this indicates that there is not a phylogenetic relationship between human and non-human emotion. The relationship drawn by proponents of animal emotion, then, would be merely a suggestion of mechanistic features that promote adaptivity, but lack the complexity of human emotional constructs. Thus, a social life-style may play a role in the process of basic emotions developing into more complex emotions.
In University of Chicago surveys conducted by the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) between 1990 and 2002, 27% of people who reported being happy in marriage admitted to having an extramarital affair. The meaning and definition of what infidelity constitutes often varies depending on the person asked. Sexual feelings in an emotional affair are necessarily denied to maintain the illusion that it is just a special friendship. Affair surveys are unlikely to explore what is denied. Many people in affair surveys are not honest with themselves nor with the interviewer.
It is believed that there are six universal emotions which expand across all cultures. These emotions are: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise, and disgust. There is some argument that contempt should be combined with disgust, though it is not as widely accepted. According to Ekman (1992), each of these emotions have universally corresponding facial expressions as well. In addition to the facial expressions that are said to accompany each emotion, there is also evidence to suggest that certain autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity is associated with the three emotions of fear, anger, and disgust. Ekman (1992) theorizes that these specific emotions are associated with the universal physiological responses due to evolution. It would not be expected to observe the same physiological responses for emotions not specifically linked to survival, such as happiness or sadness.
Summarizing the consensus in psychological research, professor David W. Martin, PhD, from North Carolina State University, states that people have tried to use the polygraph for measuring human emotions, but there is simply no royal road to (measuring) human emotions.[24] Therefore, since one cannot reliably measure human emotions (especially when one has an interest in hiding his/her emotions), the idea of valid detection of truth or falsehood through measuring respiratory rate, blood volume, pulse rate and galvanic skin response is a mere pretense. Psychologists cannot ascertain what emotions one has,[25] with or without the use of polygraph.
One thing which seems, on the surface, to distinguish Spinoza's view of the emotions from both Descartes' and Hume's pictures of them is that he takes the emotions to be cognitive in some important respect. Jonathan Bennett claims that "Spinoza mainly saw emotions as caused by cognitions. [However] he did not say this clearly enough and sometimes lost sight of it entirely."
Spinoza provides several demonstrations which purport to show truths about how human emotions work. The picture presented is, according to Bennett, "unflattering, coloured as it is by universal egoism"
Spinoza's treatment of the emotions in Part Three of "The Ethics", "On the Origin and Nature of the Affects", utilizes a broad set of terminology, clearly intended to cover the whole of human experience. He tells us in the Preface:
Whether there is any meaningful kind of freedom which humans may genuinely have is, in Spinoza's picture, at least contentious. He certainly claims that there is a kind of freedom, namely, that which is arrived at through adequate knowledge of God, or, what is the same: the universe. But in the last two propositions of Part Two of "The Ethics", P48 and P49, he explicitly rejects the traditional notion of free will. In E2P48, he claims:
Paul Ekman is most noted in this field for conducting research involving facial expressions of emotions. His work provided data to back up Darwin's ideas about universality of facial expressions, even across cultures. He conducted research by showing photographs exhibiting expressions of basic emotion to people and asking them to identify what emotion was being expressed. In 1971, Ekman and Wallace Friesen presented to people in a preliterate culture a story involving a certain emotion, along with photographs of specific facial expressions. The photographs had been previously used in studies using subjects from Western cultures. When asked to choose, from two or three photographs, the emotion being expressed in the story, the preliterate subjects' choices matched those of the Western subjects most of the time. These results indicated that certain expressions are universally associated with particular emotions, even in instances in which the people had little or no exposure to Western culture. The only emotions the preliterate people found hard to distinguish between were fear and surprise.
Ekman noted that while universal expressions do not necessarily prove Darwin's theory that they evolved, they do provide strong evidence of the possibility. He mentioned the similarities between human expressions and those of other primates, as well as an overall universality of certain expressions to back up Darwin's ideas. The expressions of emotion that Ekman noted as most universal based on research are: anger, fear, disgust, sadness, and enjoyment.
Theories on emotion have focused on perception, subjective experience, and appraisal. Predominant theories of emotion and emotion perception include what type of emotion is perceived, how emotion is perceived somatically, and at what stage of an event emotion is perceived and translated into subjective, physical experience.