James Lange Theory

11 Key excerpts on "James Lange Theory"

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  Emotions and Bodily Responses

  A Psychophysiological Approach

  • James L McGaugh(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  This theory was developed in the 1880s by the American psy-chologist William James and the Danish physiologist C. G. Lange, inde-pendent of one another. Broadly stated, the James-Lange theory held that consciousness of certain bodily reactions is the essential element in emotional experience. That is, some stimulus situations produce certain bodily reactions (e.g., pounding of the heart and other visceral re-sponses) and the perception of these reactions is the emotion. James (1890) expressed the theory in the following way: Common sense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect,... that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble [pp. 449-450). What James is saying is that we feel emotional because we sense our body reacting. According to this view, bodily reactions and the percep-tion of those reactions are controlling factors in the experience of emo-tions. It can be seen that without bodily reactions there would be no emotion. It also follows that each different emotion must be accom-panied by different bodily reactions. The James-Lange theory was seriously criticized and challenged in the late 1920s by Walter Cannon. Central to Cannon's criticisms were the following points: (a) When the bodily reactions that typically occur in emotion are prevented from occurring (as with transection of the spinal cord and vagus nerve, and removal of the sympathetic nervous system)

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  William James

  • Gerald E. Myers(Author)
  • 1985(Publication Date)
  • Yale University Press

    (Publisher)

  13 THE JAMES-LANGE THEORY OF EMOTION James first defined emotion in the 1884 essay What Is an Emotion? In the chapter on emotions in Principles he acknowledged a similar definition by a Danish thinker, C. G. Lange, and in 1894 he wrote: Professor Lange of Copenhagen and the present writer published, independently of each other, the same theory of emotional consciousness, now known as the James-Lange theory of emotion. 14 Although James differed with Lange on certain details, they agreed on the essentials of what constitutes an emotion; both asserted that it is the effect of the organic changes, muscular and visceral, of which the so-called 'expression' of the emotion consists. It is thus not a primary feeling, directly aroused by the exciting object or thought, but a secondary feeling indirectly aroused; the primary effect being the organic changes in question, which are immediate reflexes following upon the presence of the ob-ject. 15 This is the nerve of the theory as stated in 1894 and is the major point urged in both the 1884 essay and the chapter in Principles. Although his emphasis and formulation changed significantly between the earliest and the latest discussions of emotion—the changes have indeed baffled and even annoyed James's commen-tators—he adhered to basically the same theory throughout. 16 To understand the theory, we must appreciate not only what it asserts but also what it denies—the existence of bodiless emotions. Consider the emotion of fright caused by perceiving an approaching emu. According to common sense and tradi-tional psychology, James said, the perception of the emu causes a pure, primary feeling of fright—pure in that it is purely mental and independent of physiological events, primary in that it is the initial or direct effect of the perception. Any associated physical changes, such as running, sweating, heightened blood-pressure, palpita-tions, or trembling, are called the expressions or effects of the bodiless emotion of fright.

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  Essentials of Psychology

  • John P. Houston, Helen Bee, David C. Rimm(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  9) The hairs on the skin become erect. 256 Chapter 8 Emotion Theories of emotion The James—Lange theory The cart before the horse The James-Lange theory is one of the ear-liest, most famous, and most controversial of the theories of emotion (James, 1890/1950; Lange, 1922). The theory is labeled James-Lange be-cause William James and Carl Lange both came up with the same basic idea in 1884. According to their theory, the emotions we feel are the result of messages we receive from our bodies when they react to emotion-producing aspects of the environment. For example, if you encounter a snarling dog, your body reacts first—you tremble, you sweat, your heart pounds. These physical changes, in turn, stimulate the feeling of fear. This view makes things seem a bit backwards. We feel afraid because we are sweating, rather than sweating because we are afraid. We feel sad be-cause we are crying, rather than crying because we are sad. The James-Lange theory says that the physiological changes come first and then we experience the emotion. But most of us tend to think that physiological changes such as trembling and sweating follow the emotion rather than precede it. Evidence for the theory To be sure, the theory seems to fit some situa-tions. We have all had close calls where our fear seems to follow phys-iological changes. For example, remember the last time you narrowly avoided a traffic accident. While you were slamming on the brakes, you probably felt very little emotion at all. It was only after you came to a halt and noticed your trembling hands and rapid breathing that you experi-enced the sensation of fear. Evidence against the theory Unfortunately, experiments do not support the theory. If the James-Lange hypothesis is correct, a unique pattern of physiological changes should accompany each and every emotion. For in-stance, joy's pattern of physiological changes should differ from the pat-tern associated with any other emotion, such as despair.

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  Psychology

  Made Simple

  • Abraham P. Sperling, Kenneth Martin(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Made Simple

    (Publisher)

  To quote the New Testament, 'Perfect love casteth out fear'. THE JAMES-LANGE THEORY OF EMOTIONS Having investigated the various aspects of emotional responses to stimuli, we are ready now to examine their interrelationships. The question was the subject of another of William James's influential theories. James's second theory was concerned with the order of occurrence of the conditions related to the emotional state. The common-sense view is that in a state of emotion the conscious feelings are the first reactions one has to stimuli, that the visceral changes follow next, and that the overt responses are last. You see a lion, you 'feel' afraid, your blood pressure rises, and you begin to run. In 1884, William James argued that the overt responses and bodily changes preceded the conscious feelings. The feelings of fear, rage, etc., were supposed to be merely the awareness of the inner and outer changes, which supposedly followed the stimuli directly. You saw a lion, you began to run, your blood pressure rose, and, because of the running and the rise in pressure, you felt afraid. This has come to be known as the James-Lange theory of emotion, because a Danish physiologist named KARL LANGE had the same idea at about the same time as William James. Refuting the James-Lange Theory. Since the James-Lange theory holds that feelings are merely awarenesses of the bodily responses, it would be impossible, according to his theory, to have emotional feel-ings without awareness of the bodily actions. 162 Psychology To test this conclusion, Dr. C. S. Sherrington of Yale performed a clever experiment on a dog. He cut all the nerves carrying sensations from its nerve trunk back to the brain. Yet the dog showed anger, joy, and fear, when appropriately aroused. Dr. Walter B. Cannon went one step beyond this, and cut the sym-pathetic nerves which arouse the bodily changes. Cannon's cats and dogs were not merely unaware of having bodily reactions, they actually had no bodily reactions.

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  The Emotions

  A Philosophical Introduction

  • Julien Deonna, Fabrice Teroni(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  From a contemporary perspective, we may say that it involves at least five underlying classes of physiological changes: facial expressions, changes in skeletal muscles, alterations in vocal expression, those of the autonomic nervous system (adrenaline and cardiac rhythm), and those changes underlying the presence of polarity or valence. Perceiving these changes from the inside constitutes what is called awareness of our peripheral responses. It is in this way that the theory places the body at the center of its analysis, a side of emotions about which the theories discussed hitherto remained surprisingly silent. Another advantage is that it is not cognitively demanding, and thus accords with the intuition that children and animals have emotions. And finally, given that the reactions of the body are not reactions of the intellect, it can easily accommodate the existence of irrational emotions, that is to say those episodes in which our feelings diverge from our evaluative judgments (see Chapter 5, pp. 54–55). Note the following intriguing aspect of this analysis. One might think that James is putting the cart before the horse. Though it may be a bit of a caricature, is he not basically saying that we are sad because we feel our eyes well up and tears are shed, whereas common sense seems rather partisan to the reverse order of explanation: i.e. we cry because we are sad? This impression is due to the fact that we might regard the two explanations to be rival causal explanations. Yet this does not seem to be the right way to understand them. For James, the feeling of crying is constitutive of the emotion of sadness, and it is possible that the common-sense explanation ultimately refers to the same thing. The feeling of crying is a manifestation of sadness: it is not its effect, but constitutive of it. Still, if we interpret the theory as proposing a pure and simple equivalence between emotions and perceptions of bodily changes, two significant problems crop up

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  Religious Experience

  • Wayne Proudfoot(Author)
  • 1987(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  Aristotle recognized that emotional states have both physiological and cognitive compo-nents. We have seen that people often attribute emotions to themselves or others in the absence of any feeling or any sort of physiological change. Ascriptions of emotion are often made to explain behavior rather than feelings. I may conclude that someone is angry or jealous even in the face of his sincere denial of any feeling of anger or jealousy. People may be unaware of their own emotions. When a person reports a feel-ing of anger, jealousy, joy, or love, however, he or she is aware of feeling an emotion. Aristotle's analysis shows that these emotional experiences have both a material and a conceptual component, but it says nothing about how these are related. On the basis of an ingenious set of experiments, the social psychologist Stanley Schachter (1971) has advanced a two-factor theory of emotion, in which he distinguishes between physiological arousal and cognitive appraisal. Schachter began by reconsidering James's claim that emotions are the feelings or perceptions of bodily changes. If emotions were identical with bodily changes, then different emotions would be asso-ciated with recognizably different bodily states. Walter Cannon (1927, 1929) cast considerable doubt on James's theory by noting the following points: the total separation of the visceral from the central nervous system does not alter emotional behavior; the same visceral changes occur in very different emotional states and in nonemotional states; the viscera are relatively insensitive structures; visceral changes are too slow to be a source of emotional feeling; and the artificial induction of visceral changes that are typical of strong emotions does not produce the emotions (Schachter, 1971: I). 7 Schachter hypothesized that the specific character of emo-tional states may be determined by cognitive factors. In an EMOTION

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  Embodied Emotions

  A Naturalist Approach to a Normative Phenomenon

  • Rebekka Hufendiek(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Still, Nussbaum is making an important point: if James’s claim, that there are specific patterns of bodily arousal in humans that can be used to type-identify emotions, is taken literally, it seems hard to reconcile with the functionalist idea of multiple realizability. Yet the idea that all fear states in all mammals under all circumstances should involve exactly the same pattern of arousal sounds unlikely. We need a better definition of what these patterns are and what it means to reidentify them in various organisms in various situations. The Jamesian question needs to be situated in a broader theoretical framework in order to be answered. In the following, I examine approaches that take emotions to have a common origin and, therefore, an underlying causal mechanism or function that allow us to type-identify them. The Jamesian question is thereby merged with the Darwinian question.

  4. Common Origins of Arousal Patterns

  Thus far, we have seen that there is solid evidence for recurrent patterns of bodily arousal in different emotion types. Yet the main reason that the evidence is still somewhat ambivalent is that bodily arousal tends to vary strongly among persons and situations. The theoretical task arising from this is to account for both the fact that bodily reactions in emotions are not random, or mere side effects, and the fact that emotions are multiply realizable. James’s essential-ingredient view is too narrow to account for multiple realizability. What I want to argue for in the following is that the Jamesian question cannot be answered outside of a Darwinian framework, which refers to the common origin of the bodily reactions that belong to a particular emotion type.

  A current theory that makes a version of the Darwinian claim is the “affect program theory,” an approach that gives a precise definition of how emotions can be type-identified with regard to an evolved underlying causal mechanism that triggers the involved bodily and behavioral reactions. The affect program theory has been most notably defended by Paul Griffiths (1997). Griffiths’s main source of evidence is Ekman’s work on facial expressions, introduced earlier. The broader theoretical framework Ekman developed suggests that the facial expressions he discovered are components of basic emotions. Basic emotions are evolutionarily acquired reactions caused by automatic neural appraisal systems, which then trigger a complex pattern of reactions including facial expressions; musculoskeletal responses, such as flinching; vocal changes, such as a tremulous voice; endocrine system changes and consequent changes in the level of hormones, such as the release of adrenaline or cortisol; autonomic nervous system reactions such as heart rate or body temperature changes; and feelings (Ekman 2003).

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  Demystifying Emotions

  A Typology of Theories in Psychology and Philosophy

  • Agnes Moors(Author)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  According to common sense, it is simply unthinkable that emotions come after their outward expressions. Nevertheless, several researchers took up the glove and examined the empirical implications of James’s (1890b) theory. Cannon (1927) argued that it is implausible that bodily responses – which he restricted to visceral responses – would come before feelings because these responses and their feedback are too slow to determine feelings (see above). The solution offered by Cannon (1927) and McDougall (1908) was to argue that feelings already arise at the stage of the activation of the [S–R] links (i.e., centrally) and do not have to be postponed until the feedback (from the periphery) reaches the cortex again. Others have argued, on the other hand, that bodily responses are not restricted to visceral responses but also include musculo-skeletal responses, which arise and are fed back much quicker (e.g., Damasio, 1999). 3.2 James 109 Rather than focusing on order, one line of research investigated James’s (1890b) assumption that feedback from the peripheral effects of bodily responses to the sensory cortex is necessary for emotions. If this is indeed the case, the separation between the peripheral organs and the central nervous system should hinder the occurrence of emotions. Research conducted with paralyzed patients and animals shows mixed results. Patient studies show diminished emotions. Animal studies show intact emotions. In a study by Hohmann (1966), paralyzed patients (due to spinal cord injuries) reported reduced intensity of fear and anger (but increased sentimentality after loss) compared to the time before they got paralyzed, and the degree of paralysis correlated with the intensity of these emotions. Chwalisz et al. (1988), however, found support for the alternative interpretation that changes in the pattern of these patients’ emotions stemmed from changes in their daily lives.

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  Theories of Emotion

  • Robert Plutchik, Henry Kellerman, Robert Plutchik, Henry Kellerman(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  Upsets and hang-ups indicate malfunctions of control; warmth suggests that the regulatory mechanisms controlling emotional state are functioning flexibly and smoothly. It is these states and their regulation about which today's scientists have attained such a considerable body of evidence. Current scientific knowledge regarding emotion has its roots in the Galenical medicine of the Middle Ages. Four humors, sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic, and melancholic, were considered to determine temperamental differences in reactivity. The humors were thought to be bodily secretions, and modern biomedicai research has supplanted these primitives with a host of endocrine hormones. The hormones must, of course, even today be seriously considered in any comprehensive treatment of the biological regula-tions that determine emotions. In addition to the multiplication and specification of humors, two other major developments have occurred in the scientific study of the biology of emotions. One of these developments points to the role of nonhumoral mechanisms in the emotional process: Lange's (1887) visceral theory, made famous by William James (1890), and Nina Bull's (1951) muscle-based at-titude theory are probably the most important of these. The second major development shows brain mechanisms to be central and 10. THE BIOLOGY OF EMOTIONS AND OTHER FEELINGS 247 critical to understanding. The realization that the brain is involved in the ex-perience and expression of emotions began with the work of Gall and Spur-zheim (1809/1969) at the beginning of the nineteenth century and achieved considerable sophistication by its end. Thus, William James (1890) could write: If the neural process underlying emotional consciousness be what I have now sought to prove it, the physiology of the brain becomes a simpler matter than has been hitherto supposed.

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  The Aesthetics of Emotion

  Up the Down Staircase of the Mind-Body

  • Gerald C. Cupchik(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Emotional Phase Theory (EPT) tries to provide a unifying framework that accounts for the interaction of affects, feelings, and emotion during action epi- sodes involving adaptation or a search for meaning that leads to an emotional reaction. Affects Affects lie at the boundary between bodily processes and mental experi- ences. According to Paulhan (1930), “An affect is the expression of a more or less profound disturbance of the organism, due to the fact that a relatively considerable quantity of nervous energy is released without being able to be used in a systematic manner” (p. 57). These “disturbances” have been variously described as “bodily changes” (James, 1890) which are the basis for emotions, as “visceral feelings” related to “sympathetic dis- charge” that lead to social comparison with others in a similar situation (Schachter, 1964), or as an “internal, visceral response” that is too general to distinguish particular emotions (Mandler, 1962). A broad range of scholars have contributed to our understanding of affect as a concept which emerged from instinct theories of the later nineteenth century. Behavioural, psychodynamic, and cognitively oriented scholars have all had something to say about the way that bodily affects resonate with personal and social meanings. When it comes to acknowledging homologies between humans and their mammalian ancestors, it is sufficient to note that the roots of emotions antedate symbolization. It is significant here to distinguish appetitive from affective systems, though they can interact. Appetitive systems are homeostatic and relate to fundamental bodily needs involv- ing hunger, thirst, elimination, sexual drive, and self-preservation. Affective systems are also bodily but are more closely related to our responses to events in the moment, recalled or imagined.

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  The Role of Emotions in Criminal Law Defences

  Duress, Necessity and Lesser Evils

  • Eimear Spain(Author)
  • 2011(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Emotions have a more primitive function under this theory, having evolved over time, separately to the cognitive appraisal system, in order to aid survival. Indeed, Le Doux suggests that different emotions have different neural bases as they evolved at different stages in human development for different reasons. 161 Emotions are activated extremely quickly through the emotional appraisal system and provide valuable information about the state of the environment and how it relates to us. Damasio holds a similar opinion to Clore, and suggests that feeling and emotions ‘serve as internal guides, and they help us to communicate to others signals that can also guide them’. 162 Advocates of the emotional appraisal theory suggest that emo- tions evoke automatic reactions which are non-cognitive, occur extremely quickly and aid survival. They achieve this by limiting the number of responses available to a number of evolutionarily predetermined responses, thus allowing us to respond to the situation in the shortest time possible. Levenson 163 is of the opinion that emotions short-circuit cognitive processing and under proper conditions, anger can drive the pacifist to fight; sadness can make the strong weep; and fear can cause the brave to cower. In this regard, emotion has the unique capacity to set aside, in a moment, a lifetime of individualised learning, refinement, culture, and style, revealing the common denominator of human response. 164 This raises the very interesting question of whether emotion can over- whelm character. The author suggests that under a non-cognitive theory of emotions, automatic responses with an evolutionary origin can 160 Ibid., at p. 16. A full discussion of the long Versus short-term value of emotions is contained below. 161 Le Doux, The Emotional Brain, above note 98, at p. 126. 162 Damasio, Descartes Error, above note 103, at p. xv. 163 Levenson, ‘Human Emotion: A Functional View’, above note 118, at pp.

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