An objective theory of emotion.

Abstract

Theories attempting to explain the emotions are found in the very earliest psychological literature. The ancients considered emotions to be non-physical entities located in the various visceral organs. They believed that sorrow was located in the heart, jealousy in the liver, hate in the gallbladder, anger in the spleen, etc. The more modern mentalists do not thus locate the emotions but define them no less psychically, as the "affective aspect of the operation of any one of the principal instincts." 2 For example, the instinct of escape is accompanied by the emotion of fear, the instinct of combat is accompanied by the emotion of anger, the parental instinct is accompanied by the emotion of love and tenderness, and so on through fourteen instincts and their accompanying emotions. In other words, emotion for the mentalist is the psychic aspect of the physical processes commonly known as instincts. A recent writer says that, "Emotion is the cognitive aspect of the physiological processes stirred up by a situation which is natively or habitually unwelcome or dangerous or unusual to the organism." 3 Prior to 1885 the mentalist understood emotion to be a psychic phenomenon which aroused or caused physiological 1 Max Meyer has pointed out in a stimulating article ("That whale among the fishes-the theory of emotions," PSYCHOL. REV., 1933, 40, 292-300) that emotion is fundamentally no different from other forms of behavior. A complete understanding of organic behavior will include all information about emotion. If it were possible to solve the problem of organic behavior adequately, there would then be no need to discuss emotion. It would have been included. The writer agrees with Meyer if that condition could be met. However, since we understand organic behavior only inadequately, it would seem justifiable to discuss emotion as a separate problem. It is perhaps too important to be submerged in a general discussion of organic behavior.

Reconstructing the Past: A Century of Ideas About Emotion in Psychology

“…James, he said, did not distinguish between the “state of being angry” and “feeling angry.” It is not clear whether James actually thought there actually is a state of emotion that is separate from the person's experience of that state. But Dewey, who assumed this distinction (and ontologically reduced emotion to a physical state), had a ready-made solution for solving the Darwin–James discrepancy that foreshadowed the solution offered sixty years later by Tomkins (1962, 1963): emotion is a state that is characterized as the tendency to act in a particular manner, and the afferent information from this state can be felt as an experience (see also Bull, 1945; Gray, 1935; Young, 1943). According to Dewey, Darwin must have been writing about the former (the emotion itself), and James the latter (the experience of the emotion).…”

“…Dewey's analysis served to reinforce a singular idea—an object instinctually causes a readiness to act in a particular way, and this action readiness is the core of emotion (Dewey, 1895, p. 17). By redefining emotion as a state of readiness to perform a particular behavior, Dewey hit upon an assumption that was carried forth in many different works on emotion (e.g., Bull, 1945; Gray, 1935; Stout, 1899; Young, 1943), and takes center stage in modern appraisal models (Arnold, 1960a, 1960b; Frijda, 1986):9 emotions are tendencies to behave in a certain way, and the conscious experience, physiology, and observable behaviors that result from action readiness are the symptoms of the emotion, but not the emotion itself. Like his contemporaries, Dewey acknowledged variability in how the symptoms configure with one another from instance to instance, although Dewey believed that typically these symptoms were coordinated with each other in time and intensity.…”

The evolution of mental metaphors in psychology: A 90-year retrospective.

“…Nervous system is like a switchboard mechanism (Gray, 1935) Goal gradient: positive/negative transfer (Dennis, 1935)…”

“…3 Those metaphors that did occur during the middle decades often reflect mathematical models of the behavioral phenomena: for example, "goal gradient" (Dennis, 1935). The other class of metaphoric domain that is represented is neural metaphors: for example, "neural flux" (Gray, 1935). We will return below to the issue of why neural metaphors withstood the general moratorium on mental metaphors.…”

Recent developments in the field of emotion.

“…As soon as the endocrines became firmly established in psychology we find Gray proposing an extension of the James-Lange theory, which locates the sources of the "emotional feelings" in the proprioceptive stimulation caused by the endocrine changes in the chemistry of the blood (38). The electroencephalograph has just given us a new datum, the "brain wave"; and since certain peculiarities in these brain rhythms are observed during emotion, Hoagland and his collaborators suggest them as "the cortical signal of some conscious correlate of the emotional response" (48, p. 261).…”