The James Lange Theory

12 Key excerpts on "The 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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  What is Psychology?

  Foundations, Applications, and Integration

  • Ellen Pastorino, Susann Doyle-Portillo, Ellen Pastorino(Authors)
  • 2021(Publication Date)
  • Cengage Learning EMEA

    (Publisher)

  Or when we see a baby, we may feel happy. Motivation, in contrast, often comes from some internal source—hunger may be initiated by low blood sugar or an empty stomach. Motives tend to be sparked by a specific need or goal, but emotions can be elicited by many stimuli. For instance, many things can make us happy, but only a few conditions will lead to hunger. Although psychologists have struggled with the concept of emotion, several notable theories of emotion have been set out over the years. Let’s take a look at some of them now. 5.4.1 The James-Lange Theory of Emotion American psychologist William James and Danish physiologist Carl Lange each proposed one of the earliest theories of emotion at approximately the same point in history (James, 1884). Their theory, now called the James-Lange theory of emotion, states that emotion is equal to the pattern of physiological arousal that the person experiences during an emotion. In short, emotion is a physiological response to some stimulus. In our example of meeting the bear in the woods, from the James-Lange point of view, the emotion you feel is the pattern of physi- ological reactions you have as you see the bear. Your physiological reactions—the increased heart rate and the increased respiration—are the emotion of fear that you would experience in this situation. In the James-Lange view, emotion is a purely physiological event. Cannon’s Criticisms of the James-Lange Theory The James-Lange view of emotion has had many critics. One important critic was Walter Cannon, who noted that for the James-Lange theory to adequately explain emotion, there would have to be a different bodily response for each emotion we experience. If emotion is simply a physiological and bodily response, the only way to discriminate among emotions would be if there were different physical reactions for each emotion. Cannon doubted that this was true and, in fact, of- fered three good reasons to doubt the James-Lange view (Cannon, 1927).

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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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  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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  Emotions Of Normal People

  • William Moulton Marston, Marston, William Moulton(Authors)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Such new-found insistence upon the sanctity of unrelated fact is commendable in so far as it places just emphasis upon objectivity of research method. But the history of psychology's elder sisters among the sciences, and even of psychology herself, reveals a certain dependence upon constructive theory. The laws of Newton, for example, have received important modification at the hands of Einstein and others; yet who can doubt the central importance of Newton's hypothesis to the growth of physics, and allied sciences? The atomic theory may be inadequate as a formulation of present-day chemical data; yet modern chemistry has climbed to its present height upon the scaffolding of that same atomic theory. So it is with the James-Lange theory of emotions. Psychology may be just at the point of outgrowing it, but must we abandon ourselves, forthwith, to an orgy of unscientific disorganization?

  Clearly, efforts are being made to drive the psychology of emotion in that direction. There is a certain self-important ease and nonchalance to be obtained by the method of putting out one's research results bare of theoretical analysis that has its appeal. And there is less danger of being contradicted. Yet, if psychology is to become the same sort of science that neurology and physiology are, for example, it seems to be necessary for somebody to take a chance and construct basic theories.

  Physiologists' Disproof of Jarnes-Lange Theory

  James' theory of emotion received two radically different formulations at his hands. The first formulation was contained in the simple statements: “We are afraid because we run away. We are angry because we attack.” With this theory duly qualified, I am in entire agreement, and this book will be devoted to an attempted elucidation thereof.

  When faced with the necessity of explaining his radical-sounding thought, however, James slipped over into an entirely different theory of emotion which agreed, substantially, with that of Lange. It is easy to see how James was forced into this contradictory transition. He had observed, introspectively and objectively, that bodily changes “followed directly the perception of the exciting fact”, and that “awareness of these changes as they occur, IS the emotion”. But when called upon to state how we could be aware of the changes occuring in our organism, as they occur, James found only sensory terms in existence with which to describe the awareness in question. If we didn't have sensations of the immediately resulting bodily changes, how could we become conscious of them at all? So James was compelled to suppose that the initial bodily changes stimulated somatic sensory end organs, in muscles and viscera, setting up a second series of reflex arcs productive of bodily sensations. Shrewdly forecasting, perhaps, the reports of Lennander1 and others concerning the paucity of visceral sensory mechanisms, James did not place the same emphasis upon visceral sensation as content of emotion as did Lange. Nevertheless, he accepted both visceral and kinaesthetic sensations as characteristic constituents. In so doing, we may note that James denied his primary thesis that “emotion IS the awareness of these bodily changes AS THEY OCCUR ”. If emotion is made up of sensation, then the important sensations are those set up as a result of initial bodily changes, and these sensations can only occur after

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  Test File to Accompany Essentials of Psychology

  • Sarah Rundle(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  This quotation is supportive of a. the Cannons-Bard theory. *c. the James-Lange theory, (p. 256)L b. Schacter's cognitive theory. d. sociobiological theory. 29. Research suggests that if the James^Lange theory were true we might a. swear when we*re happy and smile when we're angry. b. spend most of our lives in a state of high emotion. *c. see a grizzly bear coming toward us in the forest and not know whether our physiological responses were telling us to pat the bear or to run away from it. (p. 256). d. respond more appropriately to emotional experiences. 30. The evidence that has resulted in rejection of the James-Lange theory has come from research that shows that a. physiological changes occur very rapidly when an emotion-provoking stimulus is presented. b. emotional responses are under the control of the hypothalamus. c. the subjective experience of emotion is regulated by the cortex. *d. emotions cannot be identified on the basis of physiological changes, (p. 256) The Cannon-Bard Theory 31. Cannon's theory proposes that a. physiological changes precede the subjective experience of emotion. b. the subjective experience of emotion precedes the physiological changes. c. the subjective experience of emotion and physiological changes occur simultaneously. *d. messages are sent to the cortex and the autonomie nervous system simultaneously, (p. 257) 32. Cannon proposed that external stimuli arouse the and that it sends messages to the cortex and the autonomie nervous syste». *a. hypothalamus (p. 257) c. reticular activating formation b. adrenal glands d. thalamus The Cognitive Theory 33. Two drivers barely miss having a collision on the highway and both of them experience the physiological changes that accompany emotion. One driver angrily swears at the other driver, and the second driver tells his passenger that the incident really scared him. The fact that the two drivers interpreted their physiological changes differently supports the theory.

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  Kant's Theory of Emotion

  Emotional Universalism

  • D. Williamson(Author)
  • 2015(Publication Date)
  • Palgrave Macmillan

    (Publisher)

  2 Nevertheless, the position that emotions constitute a “natural kind,” that is, that there is a relatively small set of definitive criteria for something being an emotion, is the more popular one. It makes sense that those engaged in offering a theory of emotion would like to say something of general and broad-sweeping importance about all emotions, not just something that holds true for some of the emotions some of the time. Still, that conclusion might be more of a disciplinary assumption than a falsifiable theory. In fact, most theorists of emotion simply assume that the question “What is an emotion?” has a single answer, rather than just a bunch of partial answers. Nevertheless, as we look at the answers that people have given to this question, we should remain open to the possibility that they are all right. Perhaps there are substantially different things that we can mean by “emotion,” as well as substantially different ways that we should react to different emotions, and perhaps no one theory can explain them all.

  Affective Theories of Emotion

  If we were to survey all of the theorists studying emotion now, we would find that William James’s theory of emotion has been the most influential. Biology (including medicine) is perhaps the best represented discipline in emotion research, and James strove to provide the foundation for a biological consideration of emotion. He and James Lange are considered to be the founders of what is called the affective theory of emotion, which, as we shall see, does the best job of describing some manifestations of the emotion of fear.

  In “What Is an Emotion?” James argues that emotions are the conscious recognition of bodily responses that follow from certain stimuli. His definition gives primacy to what he takes to be the first phase of an emotion experience: physical response, such as a rush of adrenaline. It is often believed that he means to reduce emotions to these physiological occurrences or “affects.”3

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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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  The Aesthetics of Emotion

  Up the Down Staircase of the Mind-Body

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

    (Publisher)

  Emotional experiences are always accompanied by some form of expression, either postural (i.e., facial, bodily) or visceral, which helps to sustain the experience. Once an emotional reaction is elicited, the person might ruminate or replay particular details that further evoke bodily responses and re-energize the process. Energy embedded in the emotional memory sustains the process. There are many conceptual lessons to be learned from the lineage beginning with Renaissance Humanism through Romanticism and then various schools of psychology including: William James’s peripheral- ism, Werner’s organismic variation on Gestalt psychology, Freudian psychodynamics and phenomenology. These holistic viewpoints describe the structured nature of emotional experiences that unfold in real time. William James argued that bodily feedback (facial and pos- tural) provides a kind of affective glue binding the elements of our experience into a cohesive structure which is self-sustaining, like a feed-forward loop or circuit. Psychodynamic scholars emphasized the potential symbolic and thematic implications of early family experi- ences. Unresolved aspects of critical family episodes remain with us as life-long interpretive challenges bound up with background emo- tions that reside in our unconscious. This may account for dysfunctional symptomatic responses to situations the meanings of which are elusive to the person and are the goal of therapy. Accordingly, emotions are bound up with the self, whereas feelings are more diffuse and transitory. We can say that we “feel happy,” in the sense of being aware of happiness, but stating “I am happy” lies closer to the existential core of the person. Phenomenology underscores the intentional nature of experience that we project onto the world (“see as”) in a seemingly automatic manner. In this sense, events in the world are meaningful for us, both as indi- viduals and as members of social groups.

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  Demystifying Emotions

  A Typology of Theories in Psychology and Philosophy

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

    (Publisher)

  James’s (1890b) idea that the total number of innate and learned [S–R] links is infinite, combined with his idea that [S–R] links not only lead to emotional responses (somatic and facial responses) but also to instinctual behavior (outward deeds), contributed to his view that emotional responses are produced by general-purpose mechanisms (i.e., not dedicated to emotional responses). Add to this his view that these [S–R] links are not localized in dedicated brain centers (James, 1884, p. 188, 1890b, p. 453), and it becomes clear why he resisted reifying emotions as “eternal and sacred psychic entities” (James, 1890b, p. 449) as so many of his contemporaries did. Step 4 In the fourth step, the bodily responses produced in Step 3 return to the sensory cortex where they are perceived via interoception and 3.2 James 101 proprioception (i.e., cognitive component). The process at work here is one that takes a raw internal stimulus (iS; the immediate outcomes of somatic and motor responses) as its input and produces an afferent representation of concrete stimulus features as its output ([icS]). To the extent that the content of this representation is conscious, it is also felt, and it is this feeling that James (1890b) called the emotion. This feeling qualifies as raw feeling and not as labeled feeling. James (1890b) was convinced that the feelings he called emotions are exhausted by (changes in) bodily feelings: The emotion begins and ends with them. To make this insight persuasive, he presented his “subtraction” argument, which reads: “If we fancy some strong emotion, and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, [. . .] a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains” (p. 451). Two nuances are worth noting, however. First, in addition to the standard emotions discussed so far, James (1884, 1890b) also left room for non-standard emotions such as moral, intellectual, and aesthetic emotions.

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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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  Cognitive Science

  • Benjamin Martin Bly, David E. Rumelhart(Authors)
  • 1999(Publication Date)
  • Academic Press

    (Publisher)

  J. Stein and Young (1992). IV. CENTRAL ISSUES IN THE STUDY OF EMOTION I have tried to show that different theorists see different conditions, situations, con-cerns, stresses, and junctures central in creating emotional reactions. There is also disagreement whether the felt emotion itself depends on significant sympathetic nervous system participation. Given such diversity, are there any overarching issues that all theories address—or should address? I turn to several issues that have been of concern to students of the emotions and that cut across disciplinary lines, rang-ing from the relation of cognition to emotion to the definition of emotion by the social context. A. Cognition and Emotion It has been several decades since the notion of cognition was reintroduced into the analysis of emotion.The central question raised by the cognition approach is,“What is it that the organism needs to know and perceive in order to react emotionally? During the behaviorist hegemony in America (ca. 1920–1950), it was convenient to look only at behavior as such (e.g., lashing out anger) and to look at the envi-ronment for the causes of emotion (blocked action/goal r anger/frustration). In that context, a continued adherence to an orthodox Jamesian view was acceptable (i.e., that an emotion was [the perception of] bodily reactions). But even James in a later paper (1894) realized that something has to set the behavior going, and today essentially all theories and positions that deal with human emotions are cognitive in the sense that they require some analysis of the environment and social setting to produce the required “emotional” state. The one exception is Zajonc’s position (1980, 1984) that postulates a set of “sensory” events, called preferenda, that act 8 Emotion 373 directly on preferences that set the stage for emotions and that produce their effect prior to and independent of cognitive analyses.

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