For example, Silvan Tomkins (1962, 1963) concluded that there are nine basic affects which correspond with what we come to know as emotions: interest, enjoyment, surprise, distress, fear, anger, shame, dissmell (reaction to bad smell) and disgust.
More recently, Carroll Izard at the University of Delaware factor analytically delineated 12 discrete emotions labeled: Interest, Joy, Surprise, Sadness, Anger, Disgust, Contempt, Self-Hostility, Fear, Shame, Shyness, and Guilt (as measured via his Differential Emotions Scale or DES-IV).
He proposed that there is a limited number of inborn basic "affect programs": surprise, interest-excitement, enjoyment-joy, anger-rage, fear-terror, shame-humiliation, distress-anguish, disgust, dissmell.
[7] After performing a series of cross-cultural studies, Paul Ekman and Carroll Izard reported that there are various similarities in the way people across the world produce and recognize the facial expressions of at least six emotions.
[8] A study investigated whether the emotions behind specific facial expressions could be identified by people from a group in New Guinea who had had little to no exposure to Westerners and who had never seen a movie.