The Big Two (part I)

Hi.

I think the best way to introduce you to me, and by extension introduce you to this website, is to hold forth on some of the concepts that guide my life.

Allow me to start here in my very first blog by asking a simple question: How many emotions are there? I'll state my answer first before I get into the nitty gritty of how and why and what this means to you and me.

The answer is four. There are four emotions. And they are happiness, anger, sorrow and fear. Or to put it in a more memorable way: glad, mad, sad and scared.

(And as a sidebar you can see that I'm not a fan of the Oxford comma.)

Now you may ask, "Says who?" And is there widespread agreement on this number?

The people who study emotions are behavioral scientists. That is, psychologists, social workers..... even biologists and anthropologists. Paul Ekman is the guy who initially categorized and you may say "collected" human emotions. His work is the basis of both the recent TV series "Lie to Me" and the Pixar animated movie "Inside Out." Paul is widely known as "the best human lie detector in the world."

How did he scale such lofty heights? In the year 1958 the draft was still active in this country. Paul was 24 when he was volunteered into the Army as the chief psychologist in Jersey's own Fort Dix. Here, he came to the revelation that changed his life: researching psychological issues instead of merely applying the research of others one patient at a time, held the potential to help a great many more people in a much more efficient manner. That quickly led to the next step in his personal evolutionary process: to truly understand what people and think and want and need, he decided to study nonverbal behavior. Paul eventually determined that people are capable of making over 10,000 facial expressions... and yet only some 3,000 of these are related to emotion.

It took a few years to do this.....