Despite decades of challenges to the idea that a small number of emotions enjoys the special status of “basic emotions,” the idea continues to have considerable influence in psychology and beyond. However, different theorists have proposed substantially different lists of basic emotions, which suggests that there exists no stable criterion of basicness. To some extent, the basic-emotions enterprise is bedeviled by an overreliance on English affective terms, but there also lurks a more serious problem—the lack of agreement as to what emotions are. To address this problem, three necessary conditions are proposed as a minimal requirement for a mental state to be an emotion. A detailed analysis of surprise, a widely accepted basic emotion, reveals that surprise violates even this minimal test, raising the possibility that it and perhaps other would-be basic emotions might not be emotions at all. An approach that combines ideas such as undifferentiated affect and cognitive appraisal is briefly proposed as a way of theorizing about emotions that is less dependent on the vagaries of language and incoherent notions of basic emotions. Finally, it is suggested that the perennial question of what an emotion is should be given more serious attention.

尽管几十年来对少数情绪享有“基本情绪”特殊地位的观点提出了挑战，但这一观点继续在心理学及其他领域产生相当大的影响。然而，不同的理论家提出了截然不同的基本情绪列表，这表明不存在稳定的基本情绪标准。在某种程度上，基本情感事业被过度依赖英语情感术语所困扰，但也潜伏着一个更严重的问题——对什么是情感缺乏共识。为了解决这个问题，提出了三个必要条件作为心理状态成为情绪的最低要求。对惊讶这种被广泛接受的基本情绪的详细分析表明，惊讶甚至违反了这个最小的测试，提高了它以及其他可能的基本情绪可能根本不是情绪的可能性。简要提出了一种结合诸如未分化情感和认知评估等思想的方法，作为一种较少依赖于语言的变幻莫测和基本情绪的不连贯概念的情绪理论化方法。最后，建议应该更加认真地关注情绪是什么这个长期存在的问题。