Theorists disagree about the number and quality of our basic emotions. Some list as many as eleven (Arnold), while others reduce their number to only four or five.
One study (Parrot 2001) lists six primary emotions, including love, joy, surprise, anger sadness, and fear which lead on to a longer list of secondary emotions such as longing, pride and exasperation, which again connect to an even larger list of tertiary emotions (for a complete listing go to changingminds.com).
I like to keep with Marrow' approach who limited the list to two basic emotions, pain and pleasure. However, I would like to qualify this by adding that both pleasure and pain often are merely anticipated. Whatever secondary or tertiary emotions may be connected to them, more often than not they are not based on the actual experience but rather on an perceived or anticipated experience.
Pain or the anticipation of pain is, of course, directly linked to our feeling of security and how we estimate our chances of survival.
Belonging to a group, being accepted and valued by its members, for instance, plays a very important role in our human evolution. This is true especially for women, who due to their vulnerability as physically generally weaker and reproductively more involved sex, have been (and in many environments still are) very dependent on protection through others.
According to this approach, anticipated pain, this underlying feeling of insecurity, can bring on all kinds of emotions, including those usually not linked to pain as for instance in the Stockholm Syndrom (love for an abductor). And, by the same token, it can help explain why in abusive relationships there often is much talk about love.
As to my own feeling this morning, they are definitely leaning more towards the side of pain. And yet, a vague but nevertheless powerful feeling of loneliness earlier today has been somewhat eleviated by a brisk morning walk across the fields with a few friendly faces along the way.
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