bones of a scene, such as the threat of harm for fear, or some important loss for sadness.

Another equally likely possibility is that what is stored is not at all abstract, but is a specific event, such as for fear, the loss of support or something coming at us so quickly that it is likely to hit us. For sadness, the universal trigger might be the loss of a loved one, of a person to whom one is strongly attached. There is no scientific basis yet for choosing between these two possibilities, but it does not make a difference for how we lead our emotional lives. Over the course of our lives we encounter many specific events that we learn to interpret in such a way as to frighten, anger, disgust, sadden, surprise, or please us, and these are added to the universal antecedent events, expanding on what the autoappraisers are alert to. These learned events may closely or distantly resemble the originally stored events. They are elaborations of or additions to the universal antecedent events. They are not the same for all people but vary with what we each experience. When I studied members of a Stone Age culture in New Guinea in the late 1960s, I found they were afraid of being attacked by a wild pig. In urban America, people are more afraid of being attacked by a mugger, but both cases represent a threat of harm. 5 In an earlier book6 my coresearcher Wally Friesen and I described the scenes we thought were universal for seven emotions. Psychologist Richard Lazarus later made a similar proposal.7 He used the phrase core relational themes to reflect his view that emotions are primarily about how we deal with other people, a point with which I very much agree (although impersonal events such as a sunset or an earthquake can also trigger emotions). The word theme is a good one because we can then talk about the universal themes and the variations on those themes that develop in each person's experiences. When we encounter a theme, such as the sensations we experience when a chair unexpectedly falls out from under us, it triggers an emotion with very little evaluation. It may take a bit longer for the autoappraisers to evaluate any of the variations on each theme, the ones we learn in the course of growing up. The further removed the variation is from the theme, the longer it may take, until we get to the point where reflective appraising occurs.8 In reflective appraising, we are consciously aware of our evaluative processes; we are thinking