Universal Emotions

Abstract

Universal emotions was based on the work of Darwin who proposed that emotions were simply evolved traits, and that they were universal to all humans. In the 1960s, psychologists Tomkins, Ekman and Izard took the expressions of emotions to the lab. They came up with a set of photos that represented the six basic emotions that they defined as biological fingerprints. However, research in different cultures threw a shade of doubt on the idea of universality, because it neglects contextual clues. Research also proved that emotional meaning, classifying emotionsand emotion work vary from culture to culture. Some cultures have no equivalent words for emotions in other cultures. To study the role of emotion in cultural patterns and the role of culture in the shaping and conceptualization of emotions, we need to pay close attention to language, in all its aspects: lexical, grammatical, andpragmatic.