Scottish scientists posited, by compressing fear and surprise as well as anger and disgust, that there are four, not six, basic emotions.
—Harper’s, April 2014
I don’t know how to feel about this. Either fear and anger, or surprise and disgust, seem to have gone the way of feelin’ groovy.
Further: alert as I am to the world in which I live, I would have thought joy the Pluto of emotions.
All right, since you ask: sadness is Jupiter; fear, Saturn; surprise, Neptune (!); anger, the sun; disgust, the earth.
To tell you the truth, I hadn’t known there were only six, and now there are but four. Is this what comes of too much television? Globalization? Secularization? The widespread use of prescription drugs?
Sometimes—like, for instance, now—science just pisses me off. Which I guess means it disgusts me. Today, three or four Scots—whose facial expressions one can only imagine—have left me unaccountably sad (although I admit a touch of the blues is sometimes a joy).
(Note: Humintell.com, whoever they are, claims there are no fewer than seven human emotions: “contempt” counts, they say, and I agree: contempt sure counts. Still, one wonders what they are up to, there at Humintell . . . certainly they are not keeping up with the latest research, regarding which, perhaps, they’ve nothing but contempt.)
Clearly, I am confused. If so, am I feeling anything?
What, by the way, of love, which I had thought a basic if sometimes hard-to-come-by emotion?
It would be sad if it were true, but maybe love is merely joy at first, disgust in the end . . . that, I fear, would not surprise me.