Ekman's Paradox and a Naturalistic Strategy to Escape From It

Abstract

The purposes of this paper are two: first of all, to show that blind-following of a oversimplistic model of emotions like happens with Ekman's one is a bad situation for contemporary researchers from different disciplines. The author has called this situation, the Ekman's paradox; at the same time, the complexity and divergence of ideas, concepts, methodologies and evidences among emotion researchers makes difficult to obtain the necessary agreement to facilitate future researches. Consequently, and this is the second purpose of this text is to define an unique and very specific emotion, pain, as a fulcrum from which to start to define a clear map of emotions. Pain has been chosen due to its specific and unique hardwired body mechanisms as well as a universal agreement among experts about its primordiality. Changing a word to make this explicit, one can have a new start point for the understanding of emotions: dolet, ergo sum.