(Each blog reflects discoveries from the New Science of Mental Health, or combining evidence from clinical experience, scientific research, and natural selection/evolution in determining conditions for our mental health, while promoting effective strategies in brain health, psychological health, and relational health)
As a psychotherapist, I have noticed on an almost daily basis that people experiencing emotional difficulties typically experience three at once, or depression, anxiety, and irritability. I have noticed this so significantly and repeatedly that I created my own diagnostic term for it, or generalized stress response. Because, in the end, each of these three emotions is a response to something stressful.
But focusing here on the nature of emotions, and our emotional responses to stress, I ran across an article that described how a team of researchers at the University of Glasgow in Scotland identified four basic emotions. They did this through facial recognition studies, a field of research that has been around for decades. Their studies of emotions are descriptions of the facial signaling of emotions. But important to my clinical work, it mirrored what I see in my patients: the four primary emotional responses of joy, anger, fear, and sadness.
We can envision primary emotional responses as categories, or “families,” of emotions. All of the words in the English language that capture an emotional experience, like happy as an expression of the joy family of emotional responses, or nervous as an expression of the fear family of emotional responses, come from these four distinct families of emotions. As the researchers from University of Glasgow put it, primary emotions can be seen in this way as moving from “biologically basic to socially specific.”
The discovery of primary emotional responses can be seen as analogous to the five basic sensory responses — or sight, sound, touch, taste, and smell. Similarly, because the four primary emotional responses comprise the foundation for all other emotions, this is analogous to primary colors, as the three primary colors — cyan, magenta, and yellow — comprise all other colors we know.
The primary emotional response of joy obviously relates to everything that creates joy for us, in which we find enjoyment, happiness, and a sense of pleasure and well-being. People do not come to see me as a clinician because they are experiencing too much joy. It’s the other three emotions that brings them to my office.
The other primary emotional responses of anger, fear, and sadness are all naturally occurring emotions, extremely healthy and vital to survival, just like joy. But if they are experienced at high and chronic levels, they become clinically significant, or what we call irritability, anxiety, and depression. There is a lot more for me to describe in this blog over time around what this means, but the idea of four primary emotional responses lays the foundation.
Most importantly, if the discovery of primary emotional responses tells us that these clinical experiences of depression and anxiety are completely natural, emanating from the primary emotional responses of sadness and fear, and that they have a purpose — shaped by evolution, we no longer need to fear or dread them. If they are manageable when they occur, or can become more manageable through clinical interventions, we are emotionally healthy.
When I explain this to my patients, they tend to respond positively, eliminating the stigma of what we call mental illness, and instead replacing it with a natural and healthy understanding of their emotional response system.
That’s a big deal, and if we continue to work on discoveries around primary emotional responses, perhaps we can come to a common discovery and understanding that is beneficial to our lives, one that hopefully leads to filling our lives with the best of all primary emotional responses, or joy.