History Module: The Quest for a Theory of the
Emotions The nature of what we call the emotions has always been
a subject of debate. Many explanations have been proposed for the process by which
a particular stimulus produces a conscious emotion in an individual. William
James can be said to have really launched the debate in 1884 with the publication
of his article "What Is an Emotion?" In this article, James asked whether
we flee from a bear because we are afraid, or whether we are afraid because we
are fleeing. For him, the first, most obvious explanation was not the right one.
On the contrary, James asserted that we feel fear precisely because we experience
this flight response. James’s theory of the process leading to the
emergence of an emotion was based on the observation that emotions are accompanied
by various bodily phenomena such as a faster heartbeat, wet hands, and tense muscles.
According to James, these bodily processes came first, and it was only when the
brain became aware of them that the emotion corresponding to the bodily changes
specific to a given situation arose. James’s conception of the emotions
was widely accepted until the 1920s, when the physiologist Walter Cannon began
to question it. Cannon had observed that all bodily responses to situations that
were important for survival were very similar, and that all of them were controlled
by the autonomic nervous system. According to Cannon, since all emotions had this
same signature in the autonomic nervous system, they did not require the brain
to “read” anything through the body. In Cannon’s view, the emotions were produced
entirely in the brain. Throughout the mid-20th century, when behaviourism
dominated the field of psychology, very little effort was made to explain what
causes the emotions. Like all other mental processes, emotions were regarded as
concepts that were unnecessary for the scientific study of behaviour and should
even be eliminated from it. But things began to change in the early 1960s,
when Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer proposed a new solution to the debate
between James and Cannon. Influenced by the emerging cognitive sciences, Schachter
and Singer proposed that thoughts or cognition could bridge the apparent gap between
the non-specificity of the feedback received from bodily responses and the specificity
of the emotions felt. In Schachter and Singer’s model, our thoughts, using information
about the context in which we are experiencing an altered bodily state, assign
it an emotional label, such as fear, love, anger, or joy. In other words, we experience
an emotion when we use our cognitive abilities to attribute an explanation to
ambiguous bodily signals. At just about the same time as Schachter and Singer
were developing their theory, Magda Arnold published an important book about the
emotions, in which she introduced the concept of appraisal of a situation. According
to Arnold, the brain must first appraise a situation and decide whether it is
potentially beneficial or harmful to the organism. Next, the brain chooses an
action consistent with its appraisal of the situation. Only then does the emotion
emerge, from becoming aware of the approach or avoidance action. Many other
researchers, such as Richard Lazarus, subsequently showed that the way that a
situation is interpreted strongly influences the emotion that is felt. Arnold’s
concept of appraisal in fact became the cornerstone of the cognitive approach
to the emotions, which tended to reduce the distinction between emotions and cognition.
This approach prevailed until the 1980s. But this distinction re-emerged
as the result of an article by Robert Zajonc, who showed that emotions can be
independent of cognition and can even exist prior to any cognitive activity. In
his article, Zajonc reported experiments in which his subjects were exposed very
briefly to new stimuli, such as Chinese ideograms. Zajonc than asked his subjects
to choose the ideograms that they liked best from a set of several. The subjects
almost always chose the ideograms to which they had been exposed previously, thus
illustrating a positive emotion (preference). In these experiments, the pre-exposure
was always subliminal, so that the subjects did not even have any conscious recollection
of having seen the ideogram in question before. These results thus clearly
contradicted the then-widespread idea that we must consciously know what something
is before we can determine whether we like it or not. Zajonc’s research thus opened
the way to studies on unconscious perception and to current research, which posits
that we can have emotional reactions without being consciously aware of a stimulus. |