For almost a century, conventional wisdom held that emotions from happiness to sadness, anticipation to surprise, and anger to terror were opposites. And like primary colours, they could be combined to create other emotions like ‘guilt’ or ‘delight’. Such an idea is deeply flawed argues philosopher of psychology and neuroscience, Juan R. Loaiza. The metaphor of colour should be replaced by a new analogy – sound – to describe more meaningfully the complexity of human emotional experience.
From happiness to sadness, anticipation to surprise and anger to terror, we tend to think emotions have opposites. In fact, these ideas are baked deep into our culture. But under closer inspection, this idea falls apart. To understand why, we need to look a little at the history of psychology.
Psychologists and thinkers have tried to sttudy the structure of emotions and the relationships between them by using the metaphor of colour circles. Presumably, if the analogy works, we can map emotions onto some spatial construction that informs us how each emotion relates to others, including which emotions figure as opposites to others on some dimension. This way of thinking was formulated as early as the 1920s, appearing in the work of William McDougall, Harold Schlosberg, and Robert Plutchik. More recently, the idea of carving out some dimensional space for emotions has been proposed by James Russell, Lisa Feldman Barrett, and other psychological constructionists.
Plutchick emotions wheel
To understand the analogy between emotions and colours, let us begin by examining how colour circles are constructed. The first to provide a colour circle defining some form of colour opposition was Isaac Newton. Newton famously showed that white light could be decomposed into light of different primary colours by using a prism. He also showed that we can produce lights of other various colours by recombining different quantities of light of the primary colours obtained through decomposing white light. For instance, combining red and blue would make purple and blue and yellow, green.
This suggested a procedure to define every colour in the visible spectrum as the combination of light of the various primary colours. Further developments in the study of colour by Grassmann, Maxwell, and Helmholtz showed that we can define every other colour in the spectrum as combinations of as few as three primaries, and that we could map these combinations onto dimensions such as hue, saturation and luminosity.
Based on this method of constructing colour spaces, psychologists such as McDougall, Schlosberg and Plutchik thought of defining emotions in a similar fashion. They proposed to think of some emotions as being the primary emotions, and then finding possible combinations of these primaries to obtain a representation of the whole of human emotional experience.
This required, first, finding criteria to select the primary emotions. For instance, one proposal was to select as primaries those emotions that were evolutionarily primitive (similar to how basic emotion theorists like Ekman defined basic emotions), such as fear, anger or joy. Additionally, such efforts required finding a set of dimensions onto which to map these primary emotions and that allowed us to define other emotions as combinations of these primaries. In this regard, the most explored approach is to map emotions onto a valence (positive vs. negative) dimension and an arousal (activation vs. Inactivation) dimension.
Ekmans six basic emotions.
Does this approach to emotions allow us to define oppositions between emotions? In the case of colour, Newton noted that we can get the impression of white light by combining different pairs of coloured light rays. If we combine indigo and yellow light, we obtain a ray of light that appears white (or at least some colour close to white). Newton called these pairs of colours whose light produced the impression of white complementary colours. Following the analogy between colour and emotion, can we define opposing emotions as complementary?
To define opposing emotions as complementary, we would need to define opposing (i.e., complementary) emotions as those whose combination leads to a neutral emotional state. But taking the case of happiness and sadness, it is not the case that when we feel happy and sad at the same time, we obtain a neutral emotional state. If I feel happy that I won a competition, but sad that my friend did not despite their efforts, I do not get a state where I feel neutral or where my happiness and sadness balance out. Or consider other candidates to opposing emotions, such as fear and bravery (assuming feeling brave is an emotional state). If I feel afraid in a situation, but muster the courage to tackle it, we do not obtain a neutral emotional state analogous to obtaining a ray of light that appears white. Hence, when we try to apply the analogy with colour to define opposing emotions, the analogy breaks down.
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There is yet another difficulty that we might already anticipate, namely, that while we have a clear idea of what it means to combine coloured light, we do not know what it means to combine emotions. In our daily lives, our emotional experience is often complex, and people report feeling more than one emotion at a time. But does this mean that they have a unique sensation obtained from the combination of more basic sensations? Empirical evidence shows that this is not the case. Rather, people have either two feelings to which they can pay attention at different times (similar to how people can switch between one stimulus or another in binocular rivalry experiments), or they have one main feeling but cognitively judge that they also have different attitudes towards some event. In this sense, emotions do not combine as colours do.
What does this entail for the concept of opposing emotions? First, it means that there is probably no tractable definition of opposing emotions in terms of their resulting combination. Second, these difficulties show that we should think about emotions and emotional experience in some other way.
One possibility is to think about emotions in analogy with sounds rather than colours. On this analogy, feeling two or more emotions is akin to listening to a chord: we obtain one overarching sensation, but we can still distinguish each note that composes the chord. Furthermore, the chord may be harmonious, feeling natural and without provoking much conflict, or it could be disharmonious and lead to tension.
There is yet another way of defining emotion opposition based on colour which may be more promising. Besides colour spaces constructed by considering combinations of light rays, we can also define a colour circle following Goethe’s method of construction. According to Goethe, if we look at a spot of a particular colour for some time, and then look at a white surface, we will see an afterimage of a different colour. For example, if we focus on a red spot and then shift to a white surface, we will see a green afterimage. In this sense, red “demands” green and can be described as its opposite.
Following Goethe, we can imagine cases where we feel one emotion and, after releasing such emotion, feel a sensation close to another emotion. Let us imagine feeling particularly sad, and suddenly releasing that sadness (perhaps by regulating or by noticing that sadness is not an appropriate emotion in that context). Would we then obtain a feeling similar to happiness? If so, could this method be applied to other emotions to define emotion oppositions?
To my knowledge, no such construction has been tested empirically. At the outset, it might not even be applicable. This is because, at the very least, we do not have a method of quickly releasing an emotion and obtaining a sensation analogous to the afterimages Goethe considered. But this does not prevent similar methods being developed and tested in the future. What this new analogy suggests is that we can perhaps think of emotion opposition in terms of contrasts between different emotional sensations, rather than in terms of resulting combinations or afterimages.
Currently, the metaphor between emotion and colour, which had proven fruitful before, faces serious challenges. Specifically, the metaphor between emotions, and colour and lightassumes an image of emotions thatcombine or even cancel each other out, an image that does not capture our emotional experience. Perhaps it is time to reconsider this metaphor and explore new ways of thinking, such as thinking of emotions as sound, or to propose a new model for emotion separate from other sensations altogether.
We must however remain open to new models and ideas, even those trying to refine older schemes. As the history of science has shown time and time again, sometimes the best ideas are attempts to reuse the previous ones.There Maybe what is wrong is thinking of emotions under the model of colored light, but there may still be hope for understanding emotions under the image of colours in some other way. What I suggest is to think of emotion, not in terms of combination, but in terms of contrast.In this regard,And thus there may be future for the emotion-colour metaphor.
Questions about emotions opposing one another, or combining to produce new emotional experiences, are left open for future research to hypothesize about and develop new theories and paradigms.
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