Support For Change

The Four Basic Human Feelings

.....................FEAR.............................................................................................. ............................................SADNESS...............................................................
.....................................................................ANGER.........................................

Almost all psychologists who have written about human emotions or feelings have included these four as part of our basic psychological makeup. These feelings are considered basic because they represent universal biologically based patterns of arousal and energy in our human bodies, which exist prior to our ability to label them for ourselves. The precursors to human feelings can be found in animal life and thus the biological component of emotions is clear. Feelings belong clearly to both the body and mind, but their origin is certainly bio-energetic. They represent patterns of arousal within the body, heavily dependent upon hormones.
Emotions provide basic motivators for living (as do the more basic biological drives- hunger, thirst, and sex) and they give texture and meaning to life as well.
Some researchers and writers have argued that shame and disgust are also universal and biologically based and should be included in the list of basic emotions. Their biological prominence is less clear to me (they appear to have a very strong Mind component at their core and they seem more likely to be exclusively human processesand not present in animals. Consideration of shame and guilt will be given a separate essay later.

Chart One: Basic Human Feelings

Since emotional patterns grow out of the biological (BODY) aspect of our being, it is not surprising that they can be understood in terms of reactions to a stimulus leading to preparation for a certain kind of action.? The Chart above presents the four basic feelings with the category of stimulus for each feeling and the basic action it prepares us for.? The chart also has a column indicating the emotionally expressive reaction for each feeling as well as the words that might give voice to the human experience of each of them.
There are no negative feelings. Each of them has a function and is a part of our repertoire of survival.? They represent reactions to life situations and have the potential for increasing our ability to adapt to and handle certain situations.

Feeling can be problematic for humans for a number of reasons.? The factor which contributes the most to difficulties in the feeling realm grows out of the fact that the energies that they represent must be well socialized in order to have them function well in our complex and highly interdependent modern societies.? The biology of emotion is primitive (arises out of our early biological evolution), but our emotional behavior must be civilized.

A culture is a set of rules that a group shares for understanding and patterning inner states and outer behaviors in relation to common situations that members of the culture (and perhaps all people) share.? Different cultures have different prescriptions and proscriptions about various behaviors, among them the appropriate and inappropriate (acceptable and not acceptable) ways to experience and express feelings.
 Sometimes these cultural rules are healthy (support balance) for the individual and sometimes they are not. Most modern cultures are based upon high levels of interdependency among individuals and require cooperation.This usually means that the primitive levels of energy that emotions naturally foster have to be inhibited, defelected, sublimated, and delayed leaving individuals to cope with the unneeded and unexpressed energy.

 Other problems in the feeling realm occurs when people experience high levels of stimulation for one or more feelings and are not given support for how to safely discharge them, express them, integrate them into life.? This leads to various forms of avoidance of the feelings, with consequences that will be elucidated in subsequent sections. Our childhood experience with feelings and how they were responded to and how we were socialized in relation to them is often critical for our emotional health (and psychological dysfunction) in adulthood.

 As indicated in the chart above, the basic human emotions are fear, anger, sadness and excitement. As the chart indicates, each emotion or feeling has a prototypic stimulus that normally and naturally evokes that kind of energy, and each energy has a certain function (or purpose) and certain natural channels of flow into experience, action and expression.

Note that excitement is no more (or less) positive than the other three feelings: the arousal that goes with the stimulation of the anticipation of satisfaction can be just as problematic as other emotional arousal. Children who are overstimulated for excitement in childhood often have trouble managing excitement in adulthood.

When emotional energy is stimulated and unexpressed, it does not automatically disappear with the passage of time.? Especially when there are chronically unexpressed emotional energies, people use real muscular energy to hold them in or keep them out of awareness and action.?? These unexpressed emotional energies are part of what Gestalt therapy refers to as unfinished business. According to Gestalt theory we often retroflect or project the energy from unfinished emotional situations. We then lose the spontaneity and liveliness that goes along with flowing, present energy. We also lose the additional energy required to hold in or retroflect the original emotional energy that has not been expressed or released.

Therapy is often about finishing emotional business. In order to do this we have to discover what energies are present from the past, how we are controlling them in the present, how we can release them from control, how we can safely express them in the present.

Other essays on this website will describe the natural flow of emotions as well as specifics of positive and not so positive aspects of the socialization of emotional experience and expression. Attention will also be given to how the various feelings can interact with one another and the specifics of what healthy adult emotionality looks like and how we can work toward balance and health in our relationship to our feelings (and those of others).

The essay on Anxiety on this website describes processes that lead to the retroflection of feelings and how this holding in of feelings is related to anxiety and secondary symptoms, which can lead to the development of dysfunctional personality defenses and ultimately to personality disorders.