Il “ruolo” della paura nel diritto penale e nelle scelte di politica criminale

A reflection on the role of fear in the criminal sciences implies to focus on a primary emotion with a marked anthropological component. Emotion, in fact, is a complex condition – which arises in response to a certain external stimulus or affectively marked experiences – and is generated by factors that enter into a synergistic relationship: the subjective-experiential component, the physiological component, in turn linked to the psychophysical characteristics of the organism, and the distinctly expressive component.
Ekman classifies, for the first time in Western psychology, a limited number of emotions recognized as "primary" or "basic": happiness, fear, anger, surprise, sadness and disgust. For Plutchik, on the other hand, the number of basic emotions would be wider: to the taxonomy elaborated by Ekman adds expectation and acceptance.
Beyond adhesion to a specific classification structure, it is important to note that primary emotions are considered such because they are innate, ancestral, found in any population and therefore, ultimately, common to all eras and cultures.