James–Lange theory

Emotions are often assumed to be judgments about a situation that causes feelings and physiological changes. In 1884, psychologist and philosopher William James proposed that physiological changes actually precede emotions, which are equivalent to our subjective experience of physiological changes, and are experienced as feelings. In his words, "our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion." James argued: If we fancy some strong emotion, and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its characteristic bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no "mind-stuff" out of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains. … What kind of an emotion of fear would be left, if the feelings neither of quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of goose-flesh nor of visceral stirrings, were present, it is quite impossible to think. Can one fancy the state of rage and picture no ebullition of it in the chest, no flushing of the face, no dilatation of the nostrils, no clenching of the teeth, no impulse to vigorous action, but in their stead limp muscles, calm breathing, and a placid face? The present writer, for one, certainly cannot. The rage is as completely evaporated as the sensation of its so-called manifestations. Physician Carl Lange developed similar ideas independently in 1885. Although James did talk about the physiology associated with an emotion, he was more focused on conscious emotion and the conscious experience of emotion. For example, a person who is crying reasons that he must be sad. Lange reinterpreted James's theory by operationalizing it. He made James's theory more testable and applicable to real life examples. However, both agreed that if physiological sensations could be removed, there would be no emotional experience. In other words, physiological arousal causes emotion. The specific pathway involved in the experience of emotion was also described by James. He stated that an object has an effect on a sense organ, which relays the information it is receiving to the cortex. The brain then sends this information to the muscles and viscera, which causes them to respond. Finally, impulses from the muscles and viscera are sent back to the cortex, transforming the object from an "object-simply apprehended" to an "object-emotionally felt." == Reception ==

In Mortimer J. Adler's first attempt to earn a PhD in Experimental Psychology, he conducted a research study aligned with the postulates of James-Lange Theory of Emotions along with George Schoonhoven. Adler and Schoonhoven hypothesized that emotions could be grouped into two separate classes: pleasant and unpleasant. In order to demonstrate this hypothesis, they submitted their Psychology graduate students to some laboratory tensions that they could distinguish said emotions based on their physiological reactions. On unpleasant emotions, they tested anger, shock and fear. Each of these emotions were tested by the following methods. In order to instill anger, Schoonhoven would kick the subject's sheen; shock, by firing a revolver far from the subject's vision field; fear, by involving the subject's head with a boa constrictor from the zoology lab of the Columbia University. According to Adler, however, the pleasant emotions tests, hunger and sexual desire, were not well envisaged. On the hunger side, the researchers instructed their subjects not to eat for 24 straight hours, and would go to the lab. There, they would be submitted to smelling and seeing a bacon sandwich with a cup of coffee, but would not be permitted to eat it, so the downfall of that was that they would experience the sensations of anger afore-mentioned, such as dilated pupils, and so on. On the sexual desire side, the participants were enclosed with women with which they had already had sexual encounters before, girls which were instructed to engage in mild forms of fondling, accompanied by affectionate speech, which only caused the subject to feel embarrassment. Unfortunately, the research could not attain to an end, nor would be published, because Schoonhover was diagnosed with cancer, and died thereafter. ==Criticism==

Early criticism Since the theory's inception, scientists have found evidence that not all aspects of the theory are relevant or true. Barrie, who wrote the Peter Pan stories, was a good friend of Henry James, William’s brother and had met William James. Modern criticism In 2017, Lisa Feldman Barrett reported that the James-Lange theory was created by neither William James nor Carl Lange. It was indeed named by the philosopher John Dewey, who misrepresented James' ideas on emotion. She concludes that this means there is more going on when a person feels an emotion than just a physiological response: some kind of processing must happen between the physiological response and the perception of the emotion. Further, Barrett says that the experience of emotion is subjective: there is no way to decipher whether a person is feeling sad, angry, or otherwise without relying on the person's perception of emotion. A study in 2009 found that patients who had lesions to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex had impaired emotional experiences, but unaffected autonomic responses while patients with lesions to the right somatosensory cortex had impaired autonomic responses without affected emotional experiences. This argued that autonomic responses were dissociated with emotional experiences. The researchers argued that this dissociation between autonomic responses and emotional experiences clashed with James's assertion that physiological responses are required to experience emotions. ==See also==