OUTLINE OF A SOCIOEVOLUTIONARY THEORY OF THE EMOTIONS

Following Darwin, Plutchik's psychoevolutionary theory defines emotions as adaptive reactions to stimuli. While his ‘stimulus’ stands as an unanalyzed psychological construct, he does explicate four existential problems of life ‐ territoriality, hierarchy, temporality, and identity ‐ each of which can present itself as positive or negative, as an opportunity or a problem. Plutchik's four existential problems can be generalized into Fiske's (1991) four elementary relations of the social life ‐ market pricing, authority ranking, communal sharing, and equality matching, respectively. A set of propositions is presented, according to which the predicted values of particular emotions are proportional to power functions of the products of pairs of social relations variables. With the measurement of just eight social relations variables, the general, formal, socioevolutionary theory makes it possible to predict the level of each of the eight primary emotions and of the 28 secondary emotions that are mixed pairs of primary emotions. The possibility that jealousy is a mix of three primary emotions ‐ fear, sadness, and surprise ‐ is discussed.