Paul Ekman Case Study

1. The researcher Paul Ekman maintains that there are six basic human emotions: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust. In the tradition of evolutionary theory, each of these should provide a survival value (they should be adaptive). Explain the survival value of each emotion and give examples of how it might help today’s people survive. Paul Ekman had defined that there are six basic emotions such as: happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust; as mentioned in our textbook, page 88. There is a survival value to each of these emotions that people feel because they provide a form of protection or stimulation. Without emotion we are detached from the world around us and other human beings. In the emotion of disgust, a person might feel ill or offensive and as human beings the action that would occur would be to remove oneself from the …show more content…
When person K feels stress and has a fight-or-flight response the hypothalamic-pituitary axis will engage the anterior pituitary gland and the two of them together establish the adreno-corticotropic hormone. This hormone that has been created then mobilizes the adrenal gland to release cortisol. With all these more complex activities in an active state person K's health may decline with high blood pressure, sickness as the immune system will be compromised, or may only feel a higher heart rate. The stress of the firing causing health problems could also create issues with their mental health. Anxiety, panic attacks and maybe even depression might also be produced. If person K cannot relive the stress it would be because they are not addressing some of the basic emotions of Paul Eckman (Understanding Emotions 2014), has identified. Those basic emotions are of happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and