Surprise is one of the six basic emotions proposed by psychologist Paul Ekman in the mid-20th century. Ekman claimed that these emotions were biologically universal to all human beings, and were, like chemical elements, irreducible units from which all other emotions were derived.
The problem with this declaration is that it ignores the complex histories of and relationships between emotions. Surprise, for example, could be understood as a basic template for the emotion of shock, but shock is something more than just an amplification of simple surprise, containing a sense of violent debilitation that doesn’t exist in mere surprise.
Surprise can also be thought of as an experiential offshoot of the emotional experience of being overwhelmed. Just as to be overwhelmed is to be overpowered by an engulfing experience, to be surprised is to be seized, so that one no longer has control.
Yet, surprise is also something different from just being overwhelmed. In the linguistic history of surprise is the idea of being seized after being outmaneuvered by an opponent. Surprise in this sense is the result of being unready for the unexpected.
Surprise can’t be a universal basic emotion if it can be understood as consisting of parts of other emotions along with its own unique aspects. Emotions certainly feed into each other, but not in a simple hierarchical arrangement in which some emotions have priority as more fundamental than others.
Emotions are elusive experiences that aren’t fully understood even by the people who have them. They have complex relationships to each other, and long histories of change. Even within a single culture in a particular historical moment, the meaning of an emotion will change according to different contexts.
Emotions take us by surprise. They defy our plans, seizing us in their own agendas against our will. People who claim to have made emotions predictable and easy to manage have failed to grasp this fundamental distinction between our feelings and our rational cognitive frameworks.
