Universal Emotions
Can you remember anything from your kindergarten art class besides the sweet, sweet smell of those deliciously toxic scented markers? If any brain cells survived your frenzied huffing sessions, they might recall some basic color theory. There are three primary colors—red, blue, yellow—that you mix to make secondary colors—purple, green, orange—that then mix to make more colors and so on and so forth. And mixing all the colors gives you get that lovely shade of brown that is heavily featured in the majority of the artwork you brought home to your poor mother.
Any of that coming back to you?
Well, that’s pretty much what emotions are like. All the complex and nuanced feelings you experience throughout your life are really just a blend of the same building block emotions that everyone is born with.
You might feel taco, and your friend feels burrito, but at the end of the day you both are just feeling a slightly different version of the same meat, lettuce, and cheese combo.
As much as I would like to continue to imagine emotions as various Mexican cuisine ingredients, I’m going to get super confused, super quick. And super duper hungry. So I guess we should refer to them by their actual names.
And I’ll warn my boyfriend that I’m going to be a cranky motherfucker if I don’t get tacos tonight.
The science people who do the learnings about these things have decreed there are only six universal emotions. These emotions are...
*drum roll please*
These basic emotions can be understood across all cultures, regardless of environment or language, due to our innate understanding of each associated facial feature. My drawings were so good you probably didn’t even need me to write out each emotion, unless you’re still operating at the same comprehension level of a five-month-old.
Which might still be giving you too much credit.
Zing.
This might seem like a very simplistic breakdown considering how advanced our brains are, but go into the comment section of any article about abortion or gun control and you’ll realize that, as a species, our minds aren’t actually all that complex. But remember three minutes ago, how I said emotions are like art or food? Well, some people can have elaborate emotional experiences with nuances matching the sophistication of a Rembrandt masterpiece, or the delicacies of the late, great Anthony Bourdain. Other people can only process emotions with the same complexity of a creepy GWB bathtub painting, or Guy Fieri’s diarrhea-inducing “cuisine”. But before you start thinking that you’d rather be a Beethoven than a Nickleback, the classical genius suffered from frequent diarrhea, likely linked to syphilis, and my stale cliche of terrible musicians are literally the best-selling group in the U.S. as I’m writing this, so which one sounds more appealing now?
I know, I cried a little for our country when I read that too. But back to emotions.
Did you notice that four out of the six emotions are considered "negative" emotions? Actually, depending on the situation, "surprise" is kinda the “and sometimes Y “of the list, so I’m going to call it a solid 75% negative. This revelation could lead one to deduce that, be it evolution or intelligent design (but definitely evolution), we are built to be unhappy. And it did. The one is me. I deduced it.
That’s good news! If misery is our intended natural state, once you start reconnecting with your biological roots, it should require much less work to maintain your givingupedness. Inertia, here we come!
Some people consider “Contempt” to be a seventh universal emotion, but many argue that it simply a combination of disgust and anger. The pictures associated with that emotion looked more like constipation to me, which honestly is probably a more relatable emotion. Other trouble makers are questioning the universal emotion theory altogether, but I’m trying to keep this shit simple so poo poo on them.
I only bring these things up to acknowledge that I’m aware of the different viewpoints being argued, but I have zero interest in turning this into a research paper on the competing theories on mammalian emotional comprehension. You have my permission to ridicule me if my one paragraphs about the six emotions has been proven wildly inaccurate by the time you’re reading this, since I imagine my work will timeless and revered for centuries to come.
But I still won’t care.
I gave up on this section already.