Which psychologist proposed that six facial expressions of emotion are universal across cultures, and what are they?

A: Robert Plutchik — joy, sadness, anger, fear, trust, disgust, anticipation, surprise

B: Paul Ekman — happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise

C: William James — joy, grief, rage, terror, love, shame

D: Charles Darwin — happiness, fear, disgust, contempt, shame, pride

Correct: Paul Ekman — happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, surprise

Paul Ekman, through cross-cultural studies in the 1960s and 1970s — including fieldwork with isolated pre-literate communities in Papua New Guinea — identified six emotions whose facial expressions he proposed are universally recognised: happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise. Ekman later added contempt as a seventh. These became the canonical "basic emotions" in much of 20th-century emotion research.

Charles Darwin's 1872 book "The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals" contributed which foundational claim to emotion science?

A: Emotional expressions are entirely cultural and vary arbitrarily between societies

B: Emotional expressions evolved from functional behaviours in ancestral species and are therefore shared across humans and related animals

C: There are exactly four primary emotions, from which all others are derived

D: Facial muscles evolved solely to communicate emotional signals to conspecifics

Correct: Emotional expressions evolved from functional behaviours in ancestral species and are therefore shared across humans and related animals

Darwin argued that many emotional expressions — such as baring teeth in anger or the "grief muscles" of sadness — are vestigial adaptations, evolutionary remnants of functional behaviours in our ancestors. He proposed that the continuity between human and animal expression suggests emotions are not culturally constructed but biologically rooted. This evolutionary framework grounded all subsequent work on basic and universal emotions, including Ekman's research.

Robert Plutchik's "Wheel of Emotions" is best described as:

A: A two-dimensional model organising emotions along valence and arousal axes

B: A psychoevolutionary model proposing eight primary emotions in opposing pairs, with intensity gradations and compound emotions formed by combinations

C: A clinical tool for measuring emotional dysregulation in personality disorders

D: A hierarchical model placing happiness as the foundational emotion from which others derive

Correct: A psychoevolutionary model proposing eight primary emotions in opposing pairs, with intensity gradations and compound emotions formed by combinations

Plutchik (1980) proposed eight primary emotions arranged in opposing pairs: joy–sadness, anger–fear, trust–disgust, and anticipation–surprise. On the wheel, each emotion has varying intensity levels (e.g., joy ranges from serenity to ecstasy). Adjacent emotions combine to form compound emotions: joy + trust = love; anticipation + joy = optimism; fear + surprise = awe. Opposite emotions are mutually inhibitory. The model aimed to integrate evolutionary, neurological, and subjective dimensions of emotion.

Ekman's universality hypothesis was tested most crucially with which population, and why was this population methodologically significant?

A: Bilingual adults in multilingual urban settings — to control for language effects on emotion labelling

B: Isolated pre-literate communities in Papua New Guinea — to control for exposure to Western media and emotion concepts

C: Identical twins raised apart in different cultures — to separate genetic from cultural contributions

D: Congenitally blind athletes — to show that facial expressions appear even without visual learning

Correct: Isolated pre-literate communities in Papua New Guinea — to control for exposure to Western media and emotion concepts

A key objection to universality claims is that people worldwide share exposure to the same mass media, which could explain cross-cultural recognition. Ekman's studies with the Fore people of Papua New Guinea — who had had minimal contact with outsiders or Western media — were designed to eliminate this alternative explanation. When Fore participants were shown stories and asked to match them to photographs of facial expressions, they showed above-chance accuracy, which Ekman interpreted as evidence of genuine cross-cultural universality.

True or False: Ekman later expanded his original list from six to seven basic emotions by adding contempt.

Answer: True

Following his initial work on the six universal expressions, Ekman concluded that contempt also qualifies as a basic emotion with a universal facial expression — a unilateral raising of one lip corner. Contempt is considered distinct from disgust in that it is a moral emotion directed at a person (rather than at an object or behaviour) and communicates superiority or disdain.

According to Plutchik, what adaptive function does the primary emotion of "disgust" serve?

A: Preparing the organism for fight-or-flight in response to threat

B: Rejection — motivating the organism to expel or avoid potentially contaminating or harmful substances and situations

C: Strengthening social bonds through shared negative experience

D: Signalling submission or appeasement to dominant group members

Correct: Rejection — motivating the organism to expel or avoid potentially contaminating or harmful substances and situations

In Plutchik's psychoevolutionary model, each basic emotion is linked to an adaptive behavioural prototype. Disgust evolved to protect organisms from ingesting harmful or contaminated substances (poisonous food, disease-carrying matter). The characteristic "gape" face — wrinkling the nose, curling the upper lip, protruding the tongue — may have originated to facilitate expulsion. Disgust has since expanded beyond food to moral and social contexts, a process Jonathan Haidt and others have studied extensively.

A major critique of the "basic emotions" concept, developed by Lisa Feldman Barrett and others, is that:

A: There is no evidence that any emotional states are shared across different animal species

B: Forced-choice recognition tasks inflate cross-cultural agreement; studies using free-labelling find substantially lower consensus, and no reliable neural or physiological fingerprints have been found for individual emotions

C: The basic emotions model entirely ignores the role of physiology in emotional experience

D: Ekman's methodology was technically sound but his proposed list was too short to capture the range of universal emotions

Correct: Forced-choice recognition tasks inflate cross-cultural agreement; studies using free-labelling find substantially lower consensus, and no reliable neural or physiological fingerprints have been found for individual emotions

Barrett and colleagues argue that much of the evidence for universality was obtained through forced-choice tasks, where participants select from a constrained set of emotion labels. When asked to freely describe what they see in a face, cross-cultural agreement is much lower. Additionally, neuroimaging meta-analyses find that no brain region is reliably and specifically activated for one emotion (e.g., the amygdala responds to many different emotion categories, not uniquely to fear). Barrett argues this evidence supports construction over discrete basic emotions.

According to Ekman, what distinguishes "basic" or "primary" emotions from complex or secondary emotions such as guilt or pride?

A: Basic emotions require conscious cortical processing; complex emotions can occur unconsciously

B: Basic emotions are universal, have distinctive facial and physiological signals, are evolutionarily ancient, and arise quickly; complex emotions are culturally variable and require greater cognitive elaboration

C: Basic emotions are always consciously experienced; complex emotions can remain implicit

D: Basic emotions are longer in duration than complex emotions

Correct: Basic emotions are universal, have distinctive facial and physiological signals, are evolutionarily ancient, and arise quickly; complex emotions are culturally variable and require greater cognitive elaboration

Ekman proposed several criteria for designating an emotion as "basic": (1) cross-cultural universality of expression; (2) a distinctive physiological signature; (3) evolutionary origins shared with other primates; (4) rapid, automatic onset; (5) brief duration; (6) automatic appraisal. Complex or "self-conscious" emotions like guilt, shame, pride, and embarrassment require self-evaluation, awareness of social norms, and are much more culturally variable in their expression and elicitation.