286 Emotion, Affect, and Mood in Social Judgments
arisen that provide different frameworks for research and ap-
plications in the field. From one program to the next, there is
no agreement about the meaning and scientific usefulness of
words such as anger, sadness,and the like or even of emotion
itself. In this section we describe several of these programs.
Although we emphasize the philosophical assumptions
guiding each program, we do not imply that individual theo-
rists endorse these philosophies explicitly, consistently, or
exclusively.
Emotions as Entities
The Facial Expression Program
Ontological realism comes close to the philosophical assump-
tions of the person in the street and remains the dominant po-
sition in the psychology of emotion. (See Lillard, 1998, for a
discussion of the ontological realist assumptions of the con-
cept of mind.) Emotions are natural entities. By “natural,” we
mean that emotions are now viewed as biological products of
evolution. By “entity,” we mean (a) that an emotion could, at
least in principle, be isolated from its surrounding context
(i.e., from its eliciting stimulus and behavioral and physio-
logical consequences) and still be the emotion that it is and
(b) that an emotion has causal powers (fear causes flight and
love makes one care for the loved one). Thus, in the days of
faculty psychology, emotion was a faculty.
The ontological position can be seen in much of the re-
search conducted on emotion, but its major theoretical repre-
sentatives today were inspired by Silvan Tomkins (1962,
1963). Tomkins was a psychiatrist with a vast range of inter-
ests and a formidable intellectual curiosity. Tomkins’s influ-
ence on two creative, enthusiastic scientists, Carroll Izard
and Paul Ekman, was a powerful tool in spreading his ideas.
Together, they created the Facial Expression Program (FEP;
Russell & Fernández-Dols, 1997), arguably the most influen-
tial network of assumptions, theories, and methods in the
psychology of emotion. The FEP combined ontological as-
sumptions about emotion with modern scientific concerns
about the evolutionary origins, neural mechanisms, and pre-
cise physiological correlates of emotion.
In this framework, the kinds of cultural differences with
which we began are acknowledged. Ekman (1972) named
his own theory neurocultural.Culture influences the observ-
able elements surrounding emotion, but not the unobservable
emotion itself. Members of different societies learn to have
different emotions in given situations: A food that produces
pleasure in one society can produce disgust in another. And
society regulates (through display rules) the observable man-
ifestations of each emotion: A society might believe that boys
should show a brave face even when sad or frightened. These
cultural differences are not taken to challenge the reality or
universality of the emotions themselves.
Izard and Ekman traced their intellectual roots to Charles
Darwin. Darwin’s Expression of the Emotions in Man and
Animalswas an extended argument for human evolution and
against the then-popular belief that most muscles of the
human face were God’s creations designed exquisitely for the
expression of emotion (Montgomery, 1985). Darwin’s strat-
egy was to show that expressions are not simply expressions
at all but vestiges of formerly instrumental actions. (A facial
expression of anger with bared teeth does not simply express
anger but is a genetically transmitted habit of baring the teeth
when preparing to bite.) Emotions and movements (expres-
sions) were described according to the everyday categoriza-
tion of nineteenth-century English society. Darwin was a
great empirical scientist, but his views on emotion were com-
monsense assumptions in the tradition of academic treatises
of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. His three princi-
ples of expressiondo not mention emotion, and his book is
focused mostly on the physiology of expression.
In the hands of Izard and Ekman the emphasis shifted
back to facial movements as genuine expressions and even
more to the emotions expressed. Darwin’s research became
the search for universal entities (now called basic emotions)
behind human faces. His findings of similar movements
across cultures, ages, and species became a finding of similar
emotionsacross cultures, ages, and species. Ekman and Izard
transformed Darwin’s vague and open-ended list of emotions
(e.g., meditation, hunger, determination, love, low spirits,
despair) into a closed list of basic emotions. Ekman (1972)
included happiness, fear, sadness, anger, surprise, and dis-
gust and more recently added contempt (Ekman & Friesen,
1986) and shame (Keltner, 1995). Basic emotions are
prepackaged neural programs that can be detected in all
human beings as well as in other species. Other emotions,
such as love, jealousy, shame,emocionado, liget,orningaq
are blends, mixtures, subcategories, or synonyms of the basic
emotions.
Although different theorists have proposed somewhat dif-
ferent theories, a list of the prototypical principles of the FEP
would include the following:1.There is a closed (although revisable) list of basic
emotions.
2.Basic emotions are discrete entities.
3.Basic emotions are genetically determined and universal.
4.Each basic emotion produces a coherent and unique pat-
tern of facial and vocal signals, conscious experience,
instrumental action, and physiological changes.