Emotions

How are you feeling now? Can you recognize the emotion of it? Anyway, we hope you are feeling great today! Today, let’s dive into human’s emotion🙂☹️😡😱🤢😮!

What is Emotion?

Emotion is the conscious experience that is subjective to each individual. For example, one may feel anger and grieve at the loss of a loved one while others may experience extreme sadness. It consists of two components:

1. A physiological (bodily) response, which is not limited to automatic bodily responses, pounding heart, and sweating palms.
2. A subjective feeling, which includes sadness, happiness, surprise, anger, fear, and disgust.

Theories of Emotions

Below are the explanations for the 2️ common theories of emotion that explained how humans experience emotion:

🔸James-Lange Theory of Emotions🔶

This theory suggests that emotion arises from physiological arousal. When our organs receive external impulses, the afferent impulses would be first delivered to the cortex through the spinal cord and perceive the object. It would then be delivered to the autonomic nervous system (ANS) to trigger physiological arousal. Here is when we will first experience bodily responses after we encounter a stimulus. Proceeding to the next step, the signal of the arousal would then be delivered back to the cortex and be interpreted and experienced as an emotion. For example, when a dog barks at us (emotion stimulus), our body’s ANS will respond accordingly (eg. increased heart rate & respiration rate), which will then make us experience the emotion of fear.

According to this theory, we would experience limited or no emotions if the link between the impulses and the cortex, which is the spinal cord was damaged. Hohmann’s (1966) study had proven so, by interviewing 25 males who suffered from spinal cord lesions. Participants were asked to compare certain emotional feelings (such as sexual excitement, feelings of fear, feelings of anger, feelings of grief, feelings of sentimentality) before and after their injury. Supporting the James-Lange theory, Hohmann had found that spinal cord lesions would lead to a significant decrease in experienced emotions such as sexual excitement, fear, anger, and the overall estimate change of emotions. He also found that the extent of the disruption of the ANS caused by the spinal cord injury was also negatively correlated to the intensity of the experienced emotional feelings.

Nevertheless, there are a few things that the James-Lange theory does not cover. First of all, the experience of physiological arousal is not diverse enough to explain all emotions that we can feel. Cannon (1927) had expressed that the change in viscera (internal organs) is too slow to become a source of emotion, and it is fairly insensitive as well. The visceral feeling or physiological arousal is too uniform to be distinguished into all emotions that we can feel. For example, if we feel that our heart rate is increasing, we could interpret it as either excitement or anxious. Besides that, research has found that patients who had spinal cord injury could still experience emotions, suggesting that we do not really need to rely on bodily responses to experience emotions. Buck (1984) had observed that a patient who has complete loss of sensation from her neck down and having spinal cord lesion showed normal levels of joy, annoyance, and grief. In addition to that, Chwalisz and colleagues’ study (1988) have even found that participants who had spinal cord injury reported experiencing stronger negative emotions. Hence, these findings refuted James-Lange’s theory, indicating that the perception of autonomic or physiological arousal might not be necessary for emotional experience.

🔶Cannon-Bard Theory of Emotions🔶

This theory argued against James-Lange theory suggesting that physiological changes and subjective feelings occur simultaneously, but independently from each other. In other words, we would experience emotions and physiological responses at the same time, but the emotion experience does not rely on the occurrence of physiological responses and vice versa. Slightly different from the James-Lange theory, in this theory, it is suggested that the impulses would be sent to the cortex for emotional processing and the autonomic nervous system (ANS) for physical reactions at the same time, creating an emotional experience and bodily responses simultaneously. Using the same example, when a dog barks at us, we will experience the fear emotion AND our body will react such as increase heart rate and respiration.

However, several studies had shown contradicting findings. For instance, the facial-feedback hypothesis suggested that people will feel happier when they are asked to smile. As the happy feeling relies on the facial expression of smiling, it supports the James-Lange theory, where emotions rely on physiological responses, hence refuting the Cannon-Bard theory of emotions.

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References/Resources:

1. Buck, R. (1984). The communication of emotion. New York: Guilford Press.
2. Chwalisz, K., Diener, E., & Gallagher, D. (1988). Autonomic arousal feedback and emotional experience: evidence from the spinal cord injured. Journal of personality and social psychology, 54(5), 820.
3. Hohmann, G. W. (1966). Some effects of spinal cord lesions on experienced emotional feelings. Psychophysiology, 3(2), 143-156.