Jesse J. Prinz is an American philosopher who is Distinguished Professor of philosophy and Director of the Committee for Interdisciplinary Science Studies at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York.
When we encounter a stimulus that affects our well-being we experience a set of bodily changes that represent things like dangers, losses, and offenses.
The ‘big six’ emotions are actually subdivided into a biologically basic primitive stock of feelings that each culture classifies in different ways.
Likewise, happiness subdivides into sensory pleasure, satisfaction, and joy which each have specific bodily responses.
Complex emotions such as despair, romantic love, and jealousy are recent (on an evolutionary timescale) additions to the breadth of possible affects that are also associations between our primitive stock of feelings and particular kinds of situations.
These bodily-change stimuli, or elicitors, belong to what Prinz calls a mental file that is connected to one of our primitive stock of emotions through learning.