Paul Ekman’s Basic Emotions: How Emotions Override Hunger
In short: Psychologist Paul Ekman (1934–2025) found six basic emotions, anger, disgust, fear, happiness, sadness and surprise, recognized even by isolated cultures. He argued they can override our strongest drives: people may refuse food they find disgusting even if it is the only food available. Fear does it too: it stops the stomach.
I’ve always assumed hunger wins. You get hungry enough, you eat. Then I read Ekman’s Emotions Revealed and hit this line: “Emotion triumphs over the hunger drive!” This short post is the picture version of that idea, with four small simulations. It follows my essay on why we do what we do, which asks the same question from the philosophers’ side.
What are Paul Ekman’s six basic emotions?
Figure: six simple faces, one per basic emotion, drawn from the facial signs Ekman describes. Happiness: lip corners pulled up, cheeks raised. Sadness: inner corners of the eyebrows pulled up and together, lip corners down. Anger: brows lowered and drawn together, lips pressed. Fear: brows raised and drawn together, eyes wide, lips stretched back toward the ears. Surprise: brows raised, eyes wide, jaw dropped. Disgust: nose wrinkled, upper lip raised. Each face lists its universal trigger: enjoyment of pleasant experiences, loss, interference with what we want, threat of harm, something sudden and unexpected, and something offensive, poisonous or contaminating.
Read more: the New Guinea study and the seventh emotion
Paul Ekman (15 February 1934 – 17 November 2025) was an American psychologist at the University of California, San Francisco. In the 1960s many scientists believed facial expressions were learned, like words, and differed from culture to culture. Ekman set out to test that.
In 1967–68 he travelled to Papua New Guinea to study the Fore, a people who had seen almost no films, magazines or Western faces. Ekman and Wallace Friesen told them short emotional stories and asked them to pick the matching face from three photographs; for words the Fore lacked, such as disgust, they described situations instead. The Fore picked the expected face well above chance. The paper, “Constants across cultures in the face and emotion”, appeared in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology in 1971.
The six emotions in that study were happiness, sadness, anger, fear, surprise and disgust. Fear was the hardest for the Fore to tell apart from surprise. Ekman later found strong evidence for a seventh universal expression, contempt (one lip corner tightened and slightly raised), so the Paul Ekman Group now lists seven.
| Emotion | Universal trigger (Ekman) | Face signal |
|---|---|---|
| Happiness | Pleasant experiences | Lip corners up, cheeks raised |
| Sadness | Loss of something important | Inner brows up and together, lip corners down |
| Anger | Someone interfering with what we want | Brows lowered and together, lips pressed |
| Fear | Threat of harm | Brows raised and together, eyes wide, lips stretched back |
| Surprise | Something sudden and unexpected | Brows raised, eyes wide, jaw dropped |
| Disgust | Something offensive, poisonous or contaminating | Nose wrinkled, upper lip raised |
Basic emotion theory is not settled science. Researchers such as Lisa Feldman Barrett argue that emotions are constructed by the brain from context and that faces vary far more than the six-emotion picture suggests. Ekman’s claim is narrower than it is often reported: some expressions are universal, not that every face reliably shows what a person feels.
Why do emotions feel like a runaway train?
Figure: a simulation of Ekman's refractory period after someone insults you. The emotion starts within a fraction of a second. Then new information arrives: an apology at 5 seconds, an explanation at 30 seconds, a friend saying it was a joke at 5 minutes, and your own memory that the person is kind at 30 minutes. A slider sets the refractory period: 2 seconds, 1 minute, 10 minutes or 1 hour. Any information that arrives during the refractory period bounces off and the anger stays high; information after it gets through and the anger fades. With a 2-second refractory period all four messages get through; with 1 hour, none do.
Read more: autoappraisers and the refractory period
The “runaway train” is Ekman’s own image. In the introduction to Emotions Revealed he asks: “Why does it sometimes feel as though our emotions are a runaway train, and as though we have no control over them?” His answer has two parts.
First, emotions start before we decide anything. Ekman proposed autoappraisers, automatic mechanisms that keep scanning the world for things that matter to our survival and well-being. “As an emotion begins, it takes us over in those first milliseconds, directing what we do and say and think,” he wrote. In a near-miss on the road, you swerve and brake before the thinking part of your mind has a say.
Second, once an emotion is running, it filters what we think. Ekman called this the refractory period: “For a while we are in a refractory state, during which time our thinking cannot incorporate information that does not fit, maintain, or justify the emotion we are feeling.” If someone insults you in public and then apologizes, the apology may not register while the fury lasts.
A short refractory period is useful. Ekman says one “lasting for only a second or two” focuses attention on the problem at hand. The trouble starts when it “lasts much longer, for minutes or perhaps even hours”: then it biases how we see the world and ourselves. The simulation above shows that difference with made-up arrival times for the apology and the other messages.
Can emotions override hunger?
Figure: a toy model of hunger against disgust. Hunger urge rises with hours since the last meal, as 100 × (1 − e^(−hours/24)): 34 after 10 hours, 71 after 30 hours, 95 after 72 hours. Four foods have a disgust level: plain bread 0, an unfamiliar food from another culture 40, food that touched something rotten 80, and food you find truly disgusting 110. You eat a food only when hunger is higher than its disgust. Bread is eaten at once, the unfamiliar food after about 12.3 hours, the contaminated food after about 38.6 hours, and the truly disgusting food never, because hunger in this model can never pass 100.
Read more: Ekman, Darwin and the cockroach in the juice
Hunger is one of the fundamental drives, the motives psychologists long treated as the strongest we have. Ekman’s surprising claim is that emotions can beat it. In his words: “Emotions can override what most psychologists have rather simple-mindedly considered the more powerful fundamental motives that drive our lives … People will not eat if they think the only food available is disgusting. They may even die, although other people might consider that same food palatable. Emotion triumphs over the hunger drive!”
Disgust is built around food. Charles Darwin wrote in 1872 that “The term ‘disgust,’ in its simplest sense, means something offensive to the taste.” He described a man in Tierra del Fuego touching the cold preserved meat Darwin was eating: the man showed disgust at its softness, and Darwin felt disgust at his food being touched, “though his hands did not appear dirty.”
Disgust ignores what we know. The psychologist Paul Rozin showed that the feeling is about ideas, not germs or taste. Americans are often reluctant to eat chocolate fudge shaped like dog feces, or to drink apple juice from a new, never-used bedpan, “even though they ‘know’ there is no threat of contamination” (Haidt, Rozin and colleagues, summarizing Rozin, Millman and Nemeroff, 1986). At a talk, Rozin dipped a sterilized cockroach in a glass of orange juice and asked for a volunteer to sip it. Nobody was willing.
The model above. I made the toy model to show why this matters. If hunger grows but levels off, and disgust is a fixed bar, then some foods are eaten only after many hours and a food whose disgust bar sits above hunger’s ceiling is never eaten. The numbers (24-hour time constant, the four disgust levels) are invented for the picture; real hunger and disgust are not measured on one scale.
| Food (toy) | Disgust level | Eaten after |
|---|---|---|
| Plain bread | 0 | Immediately |
| Unfamiliar food from another culture | 40 | ≈ 12.3 hours |
| Food that touched something rotten | 80 | ≈ 38.6 hours |
| Food you find truly disgusting | 110 | Never (hunger caps at 100) |
The crossing time is hours = −24 × ln(1 − disgust / 100). Many real accounts of famine and survival show hunger winning in the end; Ekman’s point is that the outcome is not guaranteed, and that for some people and some foods, it never happens.
What does fear do to your stomach?
Figure: a stomach with churning waves (peristalsis) moving across it, based on Walter Cannon's 1915 X-ray observations of a cat. Pressing "Startle" stops the waves instantly and the stomach goes slack. They stay stopped until you press "Pet the cat"; then the cat purrs and the waves start again. Cannon watched one young cat's stomach for more than an hour while its only sign of excitement was a twitching tail, and saw no waves at all.
Read more: Walter Cannon's cats and "fight or flight"
Disgust stops us from eating. Fear and anger stop us from digesting. The Harvard physiologist Walter B. Cannon, who described the body’s emergency response to danger (later called “fight or flight”), watched animals’ stomachs with X-rays (then called Röntgen rays). In Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage (1915) he wrote that when a cat became frightened, its stomach waves “immediately stopped, the gastric wall became wholly relaxed, and only after the animal had been petted and began to purr did the moving waves start again on their course.”
He found the effect was extreme. “In the cat, therefore, any sign of rage or fear … was accompanied by a total abolition of the movements of the stomach.” In one young male cat he watched the stomach for more than an hour and saw “not the slightest beginning of peristaltic activity”, though the only visible sign of excitement was a twitching tail. He saw the same in rabbits, dogs and guinea pigs.
Cannon’s explanation is still the standard one: digestion is a peacetime job. In strong emotion, the body releases stored sugar and adrenaline, speeds the heart, and shifts blood to the muscles, and “the motions of the stomach and intestines cease at once, both in man and in the lower animals, whenever pain, fear, rage, or other strong excitement is present.” That is why a frightened person feels a dry mouth and no appetite.
Two ways emotions beat hunger
Figure: two panels. Left, disgust stops eating: people will not eat food they find disgusting, even if it is the only food available (Ekman, 2003). Right, fear and anger stop digesting: saliva, gastric juice and stomach movements stop whenever pain, fear or rage is present (Cannon, 1915). Each panel shows a hunger bar being outweighed by an emotion bar.
Read more: why emotions can sit above our drives
The two routes work at different stages. Disgust acts before the first bite: the food is judged contaminating, so it is refused no matter how hungry you are. Fear and anger act after it: the body switches to emergency mode, so even food already eaten is not digested until the emotion passes.
Ekman credited the idea’s spirit to his mentor Silvan Tomkins, who claimed in 1962 that emotion motivates all the important choices we make. Ekman thought Tomkins overstated it, “for surely there can be other motives”, but kept the core: emotions are not a side effect of our drives; they can sit above them. The philosopher David Hume had made a related point in 1739: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions.”
What did famous psychologists say about emotions?
Figure: five quotes on a timeline, each checked against the original text. David Hume, 1739: "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." Charles Darwin, 1872: "The term 'disgust,' in its simplest sense, means something offensive to the taste." William James, 1884: "we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble." Walter Cannon, 1915: digestion stops "whenever pain, fear, rage, or other strong excitement is present." Paul Ekman, 2003: "Emotion triumphs over the hunger drive!"
Read more: where each quote comes from
- David Hume (philosopher), A Treatise of Human Nature, Book II, 1739: “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.” I wrote more about this line in my philosophy timeline.
- Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, 1872, chapter on disgust: “The term ‘disgust,’ in its simplest sense, means something offensive to the taste.”
- William James, “What is an Emotion?”, Mind, 1884: “the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful.”
- Walter B. Cannon, Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage, 1915: “the motions of the stomach and intestines cease at once, both in man and in the lower animals, whenever pain, fear, rage, or other strong excitement is present in the organism.”
- Paul Ekman, Emotions Revealed, 2003: “Emotion triumphs over the hunger drive!”
James’s idea, that the body reacts first and the feeling follows, fits Ekman’s autoappraisers and Cannon’s cats. Cannon himself later argued against James’s theory of emotion, but both agreed that the body’s emergency reactions arrive fast and without asking permission.
Sources
- Paul Ekman, Emotions Revealed: Recognizing Faces and Feelings to Improve Communication and Emotional Life (Times Books, 2003). Quotes from the Introduction and chapters 2 and 3.
- Paul Ekman and Wallace V. Friesen, “Constants across cultures in the face and emotion”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 17(2), 124–129 (1971).
- Paul Ekman Group, Universal emotions and What is disgust?
- Association for Psychological Science, Lives lost in 2025 (Ekman’s dates).
- Walter B. Cannon, Bodily Changes in Pain, Hunger, Fear and Rage (1915), Project Gutenberg.
- Charles Darwin, The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals (1872), Project Gutenberg.
- William James, “What is an Emotion?”, Mind 9, 188–205 (1884).
- David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Book II, Part III, Section III.
- Paul Rozin, Linda Millman and Carol Nemeroff, “Operation of the laws of sympathetic magic in disgust and other domains”, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 50(4), 703–712 (1986).
- Jonathan Haidt, Paul Rozin, Clark McCauley and Sumio Imada, “Body, psyche, and culture: the relationship between disgust and morality”, Psychology and Developing Societies 9(1), 107–131 (1997).
- Michael D. Lemonick, “Why we get disgusted”, TIME, May 2007 (Rozin’s cockroach demonstration).
Frequently asked questions
What are Paul Ekman's six basic emotions?
Anger, disgust, fear, happiness (enjoyment), sadness and surprise. Ekman and Wallace Friesen tested them with the Fore people of Papua New Guinea, who had little contact with Western media, and published the results in 1971. The Fore matched faces to emotional stories above chance. Ekman later added contempt as a seventh universal emotion, so his own group now lists seven.
Did Paul Ekman say emotions can override hunger?
Yes. In Emotions Revealed (2003) he wrote that emotions can override fundamental drives that many psychologists had treated as more powerful, and hunger was his first example. His example was food: people will not eat if they think the only food available is disgusting, and they may even die, although other people might consider that same food palatable.
Why does fear make you lose your appetite?
Fear switches the body into emergency mode. In 1915 the physiologist Walter Cannon watched animals’ stomachs with X-rays and found that any sign of fear or rage stopped stomach movements completely; saliva and digestive juices stopped too. He explained it as the body moving its resources from digestion to the muscles that may have to fight or run.
What is the refractory period of an emotion?
It is Paul Ekman’s name for the stretch of time, right after an emotion starts, when our thinking cannot take in information that does not fit, maintain or justify the emotion. A refractory period of a second or two helps us focus on a danger. When it lasts minutes or hours, we ignore apologies and evidence, which is why emotions can feel like a runaway train.
When did Paul Ekman live?
Paul Ekman was born on 15 February 1934 and died on 17 November 2025 in San Francisco, aged 91. He was a professor of psychology at the University of California, San Francisco, best known for showing that some facial expressions are universal, for the Facial Action Coding System, and as a scientific adviser to Pixar’s film Inside Out.