The legacy of Nico H. Frijda (1927–2015)

Nico never stopped wondering about human emotions, and human behaviour generally. In one of our last conversations he wondered aloud about human cruelty: what is the reason for hate, war, and genocide? And, he added in his characteristic way, psychologists just do not have convincing answers to such questions. Nico was a true scholar who was never satisfied with his own answers, who kept an eye open for evidence, and most importantly, who remained curious. In an obituary that appeared in the Dutch newspapers, his friend, the Dutch sociologist Abraham De Swaan, wrote just that “Nico kept asking the questions that other people considered answered, but that were not” (NRC, April 18, 2015, p. W7).

Nico grew up in Amsterdam, as the youngest son of Jewish parents. His father was a well-known professor of economics who refused to collaborate with the Nazis, and needed to go into hiding early in the war. Nico, his sister Jetteke, and their mother survived the war, but Nico's father, as well as his older brother Leo who joined the resistance and was executed by the Nazis, did not. Although Nico rarely talked about the war, the experience changed him forever. A real survivor, Nico made his war experiences a source of scientific curiosity and inspiration. He devoted his life to the study of emotions. Some of his analyses are clearly associated with his war experiences, especially those on revenge and commemoration.

Nico started his career by asking why we have emotional expressions. He rejected a number of previous answers. To be sure, facial expressions often do communicate, but he argued that they do not exist solely for purposes of communication. He also rejected Darwin's (1872) notion that emotional expressions are remnants of behaviours that once were functional, but are so no longer. Instead Nico argued that expressive behaviour is a manifestation of action readiness, a change in activation or in the motivation for goal-directed behaviour (Frijda, 1956). In surprise, for instance facial behaviour helps us to take in information. It is part of our motivation in a situation that gives rise to surprise. Nico's dissertation work further shows that confusions between facial expressions of surprise and fear can be understood from the modes of action readiness that these emotions share: both are characterised by an opening of the eyes, associated with the readiness to take in information about the environment. Research by Anderson and colleagues has supported these ideas using more advanced techniques thanwere available when Nico came out with his ideas (e.g. Susskind et al., 2008).

I had never read Nico's review on emotion recognition in Advances in Experimental Social Psychology (Frijda, 1969), before cleaning up his study after he died. It strikes me that he was far ahead of his time:

The standard procedure in classical psychological experiments on recognition of expression consists of having the subject label the expressions with a word denoting some emotional state. This procedure is, obviously, quite unlike what happens in daily social interaction. Occasionally people wonder about other people's inner experience or they verbalize their impressions by using categories like “anger” or “fear” or “being in love”. Far more commonly, however, all that happens is that the observed person's behavior presents the world to the observer in a new perspective. The objects of discussion, or the features of the actual situation, appear endowed with new or other qualities for the observed person, for the observer or both. (p. 169)

The idea was later endorsed by psychologists studying social referencing: facial expression of emotions serves as a source of information about what is going on (e.g. Klinnert, Campos, Sorce, Emde, & Svejda, 1983). In line with later studies on action readiness, Nico continued that recognition may also consist of “anticipation of the stimulus person's behaviour [ … ] Understanding a given behaviour as ‘anger’ may consist of readying one's self to receive attack” (p. 169). In later work, Anna Tcherkassov and Nico repeated the classic facial recognition task, asking participants to label facial expression using modes of action readiness (Frijda & Tcherkassov, 1997). The percentage of correct recognition with these modes was no different than with words that denoted emotions.

Nico's analysis of emotion recognition was a step towards one of his most original and most consequential contributions: he tied emotions to motivation. When I was an undergraduate at the University of Amsterdam in the early 1980s, one of Nico's colleagues told me that Nico was working on a book about emotions that it seemed he would never finish. He did finish it, but he had worked on it for eight uninterrupted years, not wise in a climate of publish or perish. Nico was interested in what emotions were and how they worked. To write his book, he organised every piece of research on emotions that he could lay his hands on at that time into a framework. The book appeared in 1986 and was published by Cambridge University Press. The Emotions made Nico famous in the world of emotion researchers and beyond. To quantify that fame – something that did not come naturally to Nico himself – it was cited over 2500 times in respectable psychology journals (count according to PsycNET), and almost 7000 times in other scientific work (count according to Google Scholar). The model of emotions that Nico presents in The Emotions can thought of as a cognitive emotion theory. Within a decade, several of his friends (or people who would become his friends) brought out related cognitive emotion theories. They included Lazarus (1991), Oatley (1992), Ellsworth (1991), Andrew Ortony and Gerald Clore (Ortony, Clore, & Collins, 1988), and Scherer (2005). Nico's is a flow model, starting from cognitive processing of the event or situation, and ending in expression and behaviour. Also similar to the other theories is that appraisal occupies one of the boxes of the flow diagram. Yet, in Nico's analysis, appraisal is not the only important part of the model. The model presented in The Emotions proposes that appraisals of the relevance of a situation to an individual's concerns change that person's action readiness in ways that will promote resolution of the concerns. Hence, emotions play a central role in goal fulfilment.

Whereas in the years following the Second World War, the principal approach to emotions was based on Darwin and ethology, one can say that the approach that is at the centre of emotion research now is based on cognition, motivation, and relationships in society. It is this approach that was pioneered by Nico, and it is this approach that points ahead to the next phases of research.

In Nico's model of emotions, it is not facial expression or subjective feeling or physiology that is at centre stage, but the relationship between an individual and the environment. An emotion is:

the readiness (or unreadiness) to enter into contact or interaction with some object, and the mode of that contact or interaction. [ … ] Different motivational states or states of action readiness exist … Emotions are tendencies to establish, maintain, or disrupt a relationship with the environment. (Frijda, 1986, p. 71)

Thus, anger is not in the first place a subjective feeling, but rather the motivation to stop another's harmful action in any possible way, by yelling at him, ignoring him, blocking, or threatening him. Disgust is the action tendency of rejection, with the goal to protect oneself (Frijda, 1986).

In The Emotions, appraisal preceded action readiness. However, in the early 1990s Nico considered the possibility that appraisal constituted the content of the emotion, not its antecedent. In a contribution to a Special Issue on appraisal that Nico himself edited (Frijda, 1993a), he wrote:

How events are appraised during emotions appears often to result from cognitive elaboration of the appraisal process eliciting the emotion. The products of such elaboration are often what provide the characteristic flavour of experience. In anger, the eliciting appraisal may be that of sudden, unexpected pain, but the experience is that of evil-doing and responsible agent. (Frijda, 1993b, p. 371)

The idea that emotional experience emerges in this kind of way resonates with recent proposals that emotions are conceptual constructions (e.g. Barrett, 2011). Nico would not identify with those theories, because he thought they exaggerated the role of emotion concepts.

Nico was attracted to the biological. He liked to think that emotions were hard-wired. In The Laws of Emotion, an article published in the American Psychologist (Frijda, 1988), he argues that emotions are lawful. “ … emotions emerge, wax, and wane according to rules in strictly determined fashion … When experiencing emotions, people are subject to laws” (p. 349). Physics was Nico's inspiration here. Laws are “empirical regularities” (p. 349) which, Nico suggested, “are grounded in mechanisms that are not of a voluntary nature and that are only partially under voluntary control”. An example was The Law of Concern which states that “Emotions arise in response to events that are important to the individual's goals, motives, or concerns” (p. 351). The Laws of Emotion was an important research programme that followed from Nico's synthesis of the literature, and that provided the inspiration for much research to follow.

By Nico's definition, animals have emotions. He always found vivid examples in the animal literature, and he would interlace his lectures and many a conversation with them. On a camping trip many years ago, he pointed out a couple of pairing dragonflies, and argued that dragonflies’ emotions did not differ fundamentally from our own: that male dragonfly desires the female dragonfly; he is approaching her; desire, the emotion “producing a situation permitting consummatory activity” according to Frijda (1986, p. 88). No different from human sexual desire, he added. We disagreed, which was one of the things Nico and I loved to do.

One of the last articles Nico wrote was about ur-emotions, co-authored by Jerry Parrott (Frijda & Parrott, 2011). Ur-emotions correspond to universal modes of action readiness, and “are best conceived as activated mental structures … that specify particular motivational, motor, and cognitive response processes” (p. 408). Ur-emotions “form the source and thus are the most fundamental component of multicomponential emotion responses” (p. 411), and “if … a given set of modes of action readiness is universal, they are likely to be innate” (p. 412). We discussed the possibility that ur-emotions stood for set possibilities of interaction, and that the number of different interactions was logically constrained, rather than innate. I challenged Nico on the idea that universality meant biological and innate. I argued that these ur-emotions are not to be found within the brain, but in the structure of the world: how else would a person interact with their environment, if not by approaching, avoiding, dominating, submitting, and a number of other ways? He admitted it was a possibility, but was not prepared to concede.

Nico's examples often projected humans back into the time of our hunter and gatherer ancestors. He described anger as an emotion that “blocks the approach or progress of the antagonist”, a definition that I called him on: what about anger because a person does not follow group norms? Despite Nico's attraction to examples from the animal world and from our ancestors’ lives, he was skeptical of evolutionary explanations in psychology. “Of course we have anger, because anger evolved”, he would say. “But what does it explain?” He was interested in the proximal explanations of anger: why does this anger emerge under these circumstances? It is just too easy, and unfalsifiable, to say emotions exist because they evolved.

Despite Nico's penchant for the biological, his theory was my inspiration and that of several others (for example, his PhD student and past ISRE-President Agneta Fischer) to study emotions as social and cultural phenomena. Nico and I wrote one of the first chapters in psychology about the “social roles and functions of emotions” (Frijda & Mesquita, 1994). At much the same time, Keltner and Haidt were working on same issue (Keltner & Haidt, 1999). Nico's model of emotions as action readiness rendered emotions central to social relating. The chapter we co-authored starts with the central observation that emotions:

are part of the very process of interacting with the environment … They are first and foremost, modes of relating to the environment … It will be difficult to understand the social role of emotions if these are not, from the outset, viewed as dynamically changing, structured elements in ongoing interchanges, which both influence and are influenced by the other elements in these interchanges, such as the external events and the attitudes and actions of the other individuals involved. (p. 51)

Everyone who knows Nico's prose recognises that this is his sentence, not mine. Nico's theory was more ready than any other to show the deeply social nature of emotions.

Nico himself made some beautiful social analyses. In a chapter in his own Festschrift, he offered an analysis of revenge (Frijda, 1994, see also Frijda, 2007). He poses the question of the “use of vengeance” (p. 266). Why is people's desire for revenge often so strong, despite the high costs involved for oneself (for instance, of being imprisoned or even killed), and given the fact that revenge does not usually solve the situation at hand. Nico's answer is a thoroughly social one: The desire of revenge can be understood from “the awareness of another person's glory in having inflicted suffering upon me and, in the event, his glory of having gotten away with it; all that contrasts with my own situation” (p. 274). The desire for revenge is the desire to undo the power inequality. “Revenge precisely achieves in the individual's emotion what a social or societal analysis of vengeance indicates might be its purpose: power equalization. Through revenge one gets even” (p. 275). By so doing, revenge also restores self-esteem. Nico's analysis draws on the world literature (Cain and Abel, Euripides’ Medea), modern history (Nazi revenge for acts of resistance), the daily news (killing of a Palestinian leader by Israelis), and the results from a survey on revenge among Dutch psychology students. In all these cases, the person desires revenge in response to pain. “Pain, mental as well as physical, makes the body cringe” (p. 279). Vengeance, and the cruelty to which it leads “provides the most unambiguous proof of power over someone else … it is the unambiguous elementary power to act upon the environment, to control it” (p. 280). Non-reductionist from the beginning, Nico started from real-life observations, asking questions, and providing answers that satisfied him; some based on empirical evidence, some derived from philosophy, history, or literature, but all addressing complex emotional phenomena.

In recent years, Nico's published on the regulation of emotion and the nature of action. He challenged the idea that emotion regulation is a separate process from emotion itself (Mesquita & Frijda, 2011). Instead, emotion regulation happens when several appraisals co-occur: This person has harmed me, but she is my boss and I want to maintain a good relationship with her. In other words, the same event touches on several concerns. Whichever concern is stronger or more salient is likely to win, and this is what we call emotion regulation. With two former students, Nico proposed the first coherent theory of what is referred to in the psychiatric literature as impulsiveness (Frijda, Ridderinkhof, & Rietveld, 2014). In a complex situation, impulsive action blindly follows one emotional concern, disregarding others. Impulsiveness may be overcome by considering other concerns as well, which would lead to other modes of action readiness.

The interaction of multiple modes of action readiness is one of the mechanisms of impulse regulation. One does not want to hurt one's spouse, even if he or she just hurt you. Although very much liking to drink, one also does not want to become a useless or despised drunk. (p. 5)

Nico also worked on the question of free will (Frijda, 2013). Among his examples was the way in which during the Second World War, people resisted social pressures and harboured Jewish people from the Nazis. Though he does not mention it in the article, he was one of those who had been harboured in this way. He does mention that more recently Hutu mothers harboured Tutsi children during the Rwanda genocide. These actions of protecting others rather than prioritising self-preservation were of free will, rather than of the un-free will of yielding to social coercion. Free will is not a matter of action being undetermined. Nico says that of course our will is determined by processes within us. But for us as agents it's a matter of choosing among alternatives, of doing what is important rather than what is merely urgent or expedient.

In his last year, Nico started to complain that he was finding it difficult to concentrate. He would have liked to finish the article he was working on, based on a keynote address he gave in Santiago, Chile in 2014. In this article, Nico argued that emotions do not really exist, but consist of elementary processes that happen in every animal (cf. Barrett, 2006). Examples of such processes were openness to information in the environment, motion, action readiness, and affective valuation:

“Emotion” is not a fundamental functional category … By consequence, it is mistaken to search for the neural backgrounds of “emotions” in any particular region of the brain … . A definition of “emotion” is indeed not to be found, and not to be searched for. (Frijda, this issue, p. 17)

Nico was thus arguing that to think of emotion as such, or to search for specific emotions, is not really the right way to go. He was prepared to take the risk of undermining his own life's work – which had been on emotions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.