 Basic emotion theory emerged in the 1970s from the pioneering work of Silvan Tomkins, whose orienting insight was that “the primary motivational system is the affective system” (Tomkins 2008: 4). Tomkins proposed that there are nine basic or innate affects controlled by inherited programs: interest, enjoyment, surprise, fear, anger, distress, shame, contempt and disgust. Their motivational power comes from their feeling pleasurable or painful, with such hedonic feelings emerging from the perception of facial changes providing “motivating feed-back” (Tomkins 2008: 623).