“Picturesque Incisiveness”: Explaining the Celebrity of James's Theory of Emotion

Abstract

William James is the name that comes to mind when asked about scientific explanations of emotion in the nineteenth century. However, strictly speaking James's theory of emotion does not explain emotions and never did. Indeed, James contemporaries pointed this out already more than a hundred years ago. Why could "James' theory" nevertheless become a landmark that psychologists, neuroscientists, and historians alike refer to today? The strong focus on James and Anglo-American sources in historiography has overshadowed all other answers given to the question of emotion at the time of James. For that reason, the article returns to the primary sources and places James's work back into the context of nineteenth century brain research in which it developed.

Attaining landmark status: Rumelhart and McClelland's PDP Volumes and the Connectionist Paradigm

“…As a result, it develops not only a historical account of these particular classic texts, taking a step toward understanding their place in the history of cognitive science, but also contributes to the body of research that accounts for rhetorical features as among the factors that shape the history of science, influencing not only which research agendas and scientific ideas win out, but which authors and texts ascend to prominence (eg. Campbell, ; Ceccarelli, ; Gross, ; Halloran, ; Kitcher, ; Lyne & Howe, ; Paul, Charney, & Kendall, ; Pickering, ; Wassmann, ).…”

Disciplining Physiological Psychology: Cinematographs as Epistemic Devices in the Work of Henri Bergson and Charles Scott Sherrington

“…The vital body played a critical role in James's understanding of emotion. In a phrase that had strong parallels with Bergson's protoplasmic conception of life, James referred to the body as a “sounding board” through which emotions were conveyed and experienced (Wassmann 2014, 173–174; see also Deigh 2014). Announcing what he characterized a self-generated “revolution” in the investigation of emotion, he argued that it was not (as associationists had presumed) sensations of the external world that had the greatest salience for psychological experience.…”

“…Emotions ( Gefühl ) for Wundt were not simply reports of the vital situation of the body, as James claimed, but in fact caused change within it. Emotions in this latter sense could be a means by which the body became passive to the nervous mind, and controlled by it (Wassmann 2014, 169–171; Wassmann 2009). For James in contrast, emotions were the bodily accompaniment of external sensation, and as such constituted an active component of perception itself.…”

“…That Sherrington was, during the first decades of the twentieth century, recognized as having published one of the most incisive studies to cast doubt on the scientific plausibility of James's theories (Wassmann 2014, 178–179) can therefore be read as having significance beyond the immediate claims that it made concerning James himself. In publishing two articles (which appeared in 1900), and repeating their conclusions in Integrative Action , Sherrington positioned himself as an important and increasingly influential antagonist of some of the more strident claims being made for affective states as a necessary condition and generative source of apprehension (Dror 1999a, 214–215).…”

“…This work re-affirmed Sherrington's contention regarding the continuation of emotional expression following the dissociation of the brain from the body. Further, it compounded objections to James's theory: quite different emotions, Cannon contended, produce physiologically similar effects; the physiological processes that accompanied emotional experience did not act quickly enough to provide “sensory” information; and even when such visceral changes did in fact take place, the relevant emotion was not according to Cannon necessarily experienced (Wassmann 2014, 179–180; see also Dror 2014). Kymographic recording thus became the principal means by which physiologists sought to define the relations of emotions to bodily processes.…”