Ekman [7] distinguished seven properties of emotion:

1. automatic judgement,
2. invariability in events prior to the onset of the emotion,
3. occurrence in other primates,
4. rapid arousal,
5. short duration,
6. involuntary formation,
7. variation in physiological response patterns.

Division of emotions

The variety of definitions of emotional phenomena is linked to the presence of numerous criteria for the division of emotions. According to the evolutionary division, one distinguishes between emotions related to drives, which occur in both higher animals and humans, and higher (intellectualised) emotions characteristic of humans, which arose in connection with the development of psychological and social needs. The latter include moral, patriotic, aesthetic, love and friendship emotions [11].
The division of emotions according to Petrażycki (cited in [19]) into: sensation-driven and passive-active experiences takes into account the regulatory function of emotions and emphasises their dualistic character. Emotions, on the one hand, are a specific form of sensation and, on the other, a specific form of internal drive.

Division of emotions according to Mazurkiewicz

Jan Mazurkiewicz [13, 14] considered emotions as derivatives of physiological phenomena. He divided them into lower, notified by the second sympathetic neuron, located in the thalamus, and higher, with a physiological substrate in the cerebral cortex. He divided the lower feelings into:

• organic - a set of organic sensations, e.g. the sensation of an overflowing bladder that can be explained by an organ-spinal reflex. Organic sensations, compared to sensory sensations (visual, auditory, tactile), contain a small gnostic component. They allow recognition of physiological needs, but do not enrich knowledge of the organism;
• instinctual - of a mnemic-gnostic nature, they occupy a higher level than organic feelings. They appear in situations of energetic charging of subcortical centres of physiological needs (e.g. the feeling of hunger). They relate the person to the environment;
• contingent - arising at the level of the cortex as a result of irradiation (i.e. changing the sensory content of a feeling by extending it) of an organic feeling into the gnostic component of another syndrome. Irradiation allows the level of drive activity to be transcended, directing contingent feelings towards manual activities and interpersonal relationships;
• prelogical - isolated, magical feelings, devoid of self-criticism, normally associated with prelogical dynamisms in the child up to 7 years of age, while pathologically they occur in psychoses and as a manifestation of collective prelogisms, e.g. Hitlerism, Stalinism;
• feelings of pleasure and annoyance - any feeling, irrespective of development, of a polar and phasic nature; a feeling form experienced in the subjective dimension as a pleasant (klisis) or unpleasant (ekklisis) feeling, and in the objective dimension as an approximation to an object or a distancing from an object;

Higher (frontal-logical) feelings were described by Mazurkiewicz as 'brakes of instincts', which 'are not at all reflections of organic sensations, but are connected with a completely different world, namely with ideas representing either reflections of the external world or abstract concepts'.

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Division of emotions according to Buck

In Buck's conceptual approach [3], emotion is the very process of reading motives.

He distinguished between three types of emotion:

• emotions I - anatomical-endocrine reactions arising through interoceptive feedback, functionally related to organismal adaptation and homeostasis;
• emotions II - behavioural expression; expression of emotional states by facial expressions, gestures, vocalisations, etc., through proprioceptive feedback from skeletal muscles;
• emotion III - syncretic cognition; emotions related to internal cognitive reading and subjective experience of one's own states.
• Bilikiewicz [2] made a division due to the influence of emotions on the organism's performance (ability to act). This division distinguishes:
• sthenic emotions - increasing readiness to act (e.g. anger),
• asthenic emotions - lowering the efficiency of action (e.g. terror).

The stenic or asthenic nature of an emotion depends mainly on its intensity.

Division of emotions according to the degree of prototypicality, according to Plutchik ([18] cited in [10])

This theory assumed the division of emotions into:

• basic emotions,
• complex emotions.

Plutchik used the term basic emotions to describe emotions that are the lowest in the hierarchy, those that can no longer be broken down into more elementary emotions. He called basic emotions momentary sensations that arise under the influence of external stimulation and are accompanied by individual behavioural patterns.

The author distinguished eight basic emotions: joy, anger, fear, disgust, sadness, surprise, curiosity, acceptance and compared them to a range of basic colours, the appropriate selection of which gives further colour solutions. Basic emotions are differentiated along physiological and behavioural dimensions. He included in the group of complex emotions such higher emotions as love, hate, jealousy and hope. He framed complex emotions as a blending of different basic emotions. For example, the inclusion of anger, fear and disgust corresponds to a compound emotion such as hate.

How many basic emotions are there?

Emotion theorists propose to assume different numbers of emotions, depending on the type of data they consider.
Tomkins' [21] emotion model distinguishes seven basic emotions: two positive ones, i.e. interest, joy, and five negative ones, i.e. sadness, disgust, anger, shame, fear, and additionally surprise, which is an indirect emotion.

According to Izard, the emotion system consists of nine main emotions. These are interest, joy, surprise, sadness, anger, shame, fear, disgust and contempt [10]. Previous research [7, 10, 21] indicates the cultural constancy of the facial expressions of five emotions: anger, fear, sadness, joy and disgust. The universality of the mimetic pattern for feelings of contempt, shame and guilt remains debatable. A solution to the dispute over the number of emotions might be to assume that emotions are not single states, but groups of related states.

The taxonomy of emotions is controversial because of their interdisciplinary dimension. The diversity of descriptions of emotional phenomena is due to the diversity of their nature [15]. Providing a single definition, which is in line with the most important theories and simply captures the complex nature of emotions, remains an almost impossible task. Everyone knows what emotions are until they have to describe them verbally. This is also because emotions are not cognition, and the evaluation of emotional processes goes beyond the verbally accessible aspects of feelings, the precise criteria of logic and consciousness. Thus, emotions are neither concepts, nor objects, nor linguistic terms [20].

photo.panthermedia

Summarising the discussion so far, noteworthy are the thoughts of Schweder [20], who calls an emotion a narrative of somatic (e.g. fatigue) and affective (e.g. panic) events, experienced as a perception (e.g. threat), associated with some kind of action plan (e.g. attack, withdrawal). Making conceptual distinctions between emotions and feelings, affects and moods can contribute to a better understanding of the nature of emotional phenomena and greater scientific precision in empirical work.