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. The content of such claims is examined, and the results suggest that there is no coherent nontrivial notion of basic emotions as the elementary psychological primitives in terms of which other emotions can be explained. Thus, the view that there exist basic emotions out of which all other emotions are built, and in terms of which they can be explained, is questioned, raising the possibility that this position is an article of faith rather than an empirically or theoretically defensible basis for the conduct of emotion research. This suggests that perhaps the notion of basic emotions will not lead to significant progress in the field. An alternative approach to explaining the phenomena that appear to motivate the postulation of basic emotions is presented.

To test the hypothesis that Schadenfreude, pleasure at the suffering of others, will result when an envied person experiences a misfortune, envy was created in subjects by asking them to watch a videotaped interview of a student who was made to appear either superior or average. An epilogue informed subjects that the student had suffered a recent setback. The envy created in subjects was found to enhance the likelihood that they would feel Schadenfreude on learning of this setback. In addition, dispositional envy predicted subjects' envy of the student, and this envy also mediated subsequent Schadenfreude. These results strongly support linking envy with Schadenfreude.

The authors discuss some of the key points raised by Ekman (1992), Izard (1992), and Panksepp (1992) in their critiques of Ortony and Turner's (1990) suggestion that there are and probably can be no objective and generally acceptable criteria for what is to count as a basic emotion. A number of studies are discussed that are relevant to the authors' contention that a more promising approach to understanding the huge diversity among emotions is to think in terms of emotions being assemblages of basic components rather than combinations of other basic emotions. The authors stress that their position does not deny that emotions are based on "hardwired" biological systems. On the other hand, the existence of such systems does not mean that some emotions (such as those that appear on lists of basic emotions) have a special status. Finally, the authors note that Ekman, Izard, and Panksepp, in adopting different starting points for their research, arrive at rather different conclusions as to what basic emotions are and which emotions are basic. It is concluded that converging resolutions of these questions are improbable.

We describe an experiment that was designed to replicate an unpredicted and puzzling asymmetry found in the data of surprise recognition tests given in several earlier, unpublished experiments. In the present experiment, which used foils that were affective transformations of presented sentences, the affectively negative foils consistently produced a significantly higher rate of correct rejections than did the positive foils. This effect occurred in the absence of a difference in hit rates between positive and negative sentences. We consider various possible explanations but argue that the results cannot be accounted for in terms of factors (such as sentence integratedness or congruence) that effect memorability. We propose an explanation in terms of differential changes in the strength of affective responses to positive and negative sentences as a possible way of accommodating the data.

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