Basic Emotions: A Reconstruction

Basic Emotions, Complex Emotions, Machiavellian Emotions

Abstract The current state of knowledge in psychology, cognitive neuroscience and behavioral ecology allows a fairly robust characterization of at least some, so-called ‘basic emotions’ short-lived emotional responses with homologues in other vertebrates. Philosophers, however are understandably more focused on the complex emotion episodes that figure in folk-psychological narratives about ment...

Basic Emotions

What's basic about basic emotions?

A widespread assumption in theories of emotion is that there exists a small set of basic emotions. From a biological perspective, this idea is manifested in the belief that there might be neurophysiological and anatomical substrates corresponding to the basic emotions. From a psychological perspective, basic emotions are often held to be the primitive building blocks of other, nonbasic emotions...

Are There Basic Emotions ?

Ortony and Turner's (1990) arguments against those who adopt the view that there are basic emotions are challenged. The evidence on universals in expression and in physiology strongly sug~ests that ~he~e is a biological basis to the emotions that have been studied. Ortony and Turner's reviews of thls hterature are faulted, and their alternative theoretical explanations do not fit the evidence. ...

Q-Learning with Basic Emotions

Q-learning is a simple and powerful tool in solving dynamic problems where environments are unknown. It uses a balance of exploration and exploitation to find an optimal solution to the problem. In this paper, we propose using four basic emotions: joy, sadness, fear, and anger to influence a Qlearning agent. Simulations show that the proposed affective agent requires lesser number of steps to f...