Las emociones y los productos

Red de Revistas Científicas de América Latina, el Caribe, España y Portugal

Sistema de Información Científica

José Luis Díaz, Enrique O. Flores
La estructura de la emoción humana: Un modelo cromático del sistema afectivo
Salud Mental, vol. 24, núm. 4, agosto, 2001, pp. 20-35,
Instituto Nacional de Psiquiatría Ramón de la Fuente Muñiz
México
Available in:http://www.redalyc.org/articulo.oa?id=58242403

Salud Mental,
ISSN (Printed Version): 0185-3325
perezrh@imp.edu.mx
Instituto Nacional de Psiquiatría Ramón de la
Fuente Muñiz
México

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LA ESTRUCTURA DE LA EMOCIÓN HUMANA:
UN MODELOCROMÁTICO DEL SISTEMA AFECTIVO
José Luis Díaz,1,2 Enrique O. Flores1

“A ese sentimiento desconocido cuyo tedio, cuya dulzura me obsesionan, dudo
en darle el nombre, el hermoso y grave nombre de tristeza”
Françoise Sagan
Primera frase de "Buenos días tristeza"

SUMMARY
There are two distinct approaches in the modeling and classification
of human emotions. One is the identification of thefundamental
variables or dimensions of the affective system, and the other is the
recognition of primary emotions by the analysis of universal facial
expressions. In this paper a system of classification of the human
affective system is proposed which integrates the foundations of
both approaches using a method derived from the Munsell color
system. The resulting architecture is a topological modelbased upon
a methodic, constructive and progressively empirical analysis of the
emotional vocabulary in Spanish. Since the words used to designate
particular emotions in natural languages seek to express discrete
affective states and effectively serve as communication devices
among individuals, we ascertain that the identification of such words
and their mutual meaning relationshipsconstitutes a valid route to
understand the structure of the affective system.
The exercise consists of six consecutive stages: 1) The compilation
of a vocabulary of words in Spanish which designate particular
emotions (n=328); 2) The grouping of these terms in 28 clusters or
“semantic fields” of 6 to 17 related ideas (mean = 12); 3) The selection
of a representative term for each cluster or set ofkindred words;
4) The ordering of the words within each set in a sequence according
to the intensity of the designed emotion; 5) The identification of
pairs of antonymous sets (pleasant and unpleasant) and, thereby, the
establishment of 14 bipolar axis of human emotion (calm-tension,
certainty-uncertainty, compassion-anger, fun-boredom, pleasantnessunpleasantness, happiness-sadness,pleasure-pain, satisfaction-frustration, desirereject, love-hate, courage-fear, strength-tiredness, enthusiasm-aparthy, arrogancehumiliation); 6) The elaboration of the final model of the human
affective system as an circle or wheel where the 14 axis are located in
reference to an orthogonal two-dimensional system. A vertical dimension of hedonic value (pleasant above and unpleasant below) and ahorizontal dimension of activation (excitation to the right and relaxation to the left) constitutes the two reference variables. In this way
each one of the selected emotional terms falls within a specific space.
Even though the model is preliminary and requires further
empirical validation it is presented as plausible, particularly
concerning the theoretical and practical strategy used to obtainit.
1
2

Moreover, the model suggests the existence of specific bipolar and
mutually inhibitory neural systems involved in the expression of
each identified axis of human emotion.
Key words: Emotion, emotional words, language, color, model,
affective system.

RESUMEN
Hay dos aproximaciones y esquemas distintos para clasificar las
emociones humanas. Uno de ellos es la identificación de...