By Catherine A. Sanderson, Amherst College
Psychologists have established emotions as a complex pattern of feelings, which includes three components: arousal (heart racing), cognitions (thoughts, explanations), and expressive behavior (smiles, frowns, tears). There is a widespread agreement that emotions consist of all the three components. But there’s less consensus on how these different components work together to lead to emotions.
The James-Lange Theory
One theory describing how we experience emotions, dating all the way back to the 19th century American psychologist William James, is the James-Lange Theory.
According to this theory, we experience some stimulus, such as seeing a snake as we’re walking in the woods. That stimulus triggers physiological arousal—heart beating, rapid breathing, muscle tension—and it is how our body reacts that, in turn, causes a feeling of fear.
The James-Lange theory basically says that your arousal is based on the stimulus, and your resulting behavior after the stimulus, determines the emotion you feel.
If you notice your heart beating fast and then see an attractive person smiling at you in a bar, your facial muscles would smile back, and your immediate behavior would cause a feeling of happy attraction or lust, not fear. As William James put it, “We feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble.”
Questions on the James-Lange Theory
But another model describing how we experience emotion calls into question this theory. Sticking with the snake example, if you see a snake, but don’t register the emotion of fear until after your body has reacted physiologically (heart beating fast, and so on) you probably won’t react fast enough to avoid it.
In sum, our body’s physiological responses to a stimulus may occur too slowly to trigger sudden emotions.
This article comes directly from content in the video series Introduction to Psychology. Watch it now, on Wondrium.
The Cannon-Bard Theory of Simultaneous Arousal and Emotion
Another model, the Cannon-Bard theory, proposed in the 1920s that physiological arousal and emotional experience happen simultaneously.
As per this theory, you don’t have to wait for your body to register a physical reaction before you experience an emotion.
Impact of Findings From a Research
However, the starting point of the James-Lange theory of arousal before emotion is now more widely accepted. This is based in part on research with men who became paralyzed from the neck down as a result of injuries sustained during World War II. These men reported a lower intensity of emotions that are linked with physiological responses that occur below the neck, such as a racing heart and clammy hands, presumably because they couldn’t actually feel this arousal.
But they showed no changes in their ability to experience emotions that are linked with physiological responses that are mostly expressed in the head such as sadness, which is typically accompanied by lumps in the throat and tears.
On the other hand, the Cannon-Bard theory did add an important insight into our understanding of emotions; information about the situation we are in does, even apart from physiological arousal, influence the emotion we feel.
In other words, while James was correct that arousal comes first, it is also true that emotions are more than simply a function of the physiological arousal we feel.
The Two-factor Theory
A third model describing the experience of emotion, developed in the 1960s, builds upon this awareness that emotion is determined by a combination of our physiological response and cues from the environment we’re in.
According to this two-factor theory of emotion, physiological arousal definitely plays a role in the experience of emotion, but it’s not just the arousal, it’s also how we interpret or appraise, that arousal.
Going beyond the straightforward examples from the James-Lange theory, the physical experience of arousal, the fact your heart is beating faster, is not uniquely distinct for each emotion. So, if you feel your heart beating rapidly, you look to your environment to make sense of your arousal.
This theory is often referred to as the jukebox theory of emotion, with the idea that you put in your quarter, the quarter here is the arousal, then you push particular buttons, the buttons, in this case, are the situation that you are in, which determine your cognitive interpretation of that arousal.
Each of the three models talked about so far differs in how they describe the various possible roles arousal and interpretation play in determining emotions. But it should be noticed that all three of these models propose that we experience some kind of stimulus, which leads to physiological arousal and emotion.
Common Questions about How We Experience Emotions
Psychologists have described emotions as a complex pattern of feelings, which includes three components: arousal (heart racing), cognitions (thoughts, explanations), and expressive behavior (smiles, frowns, tears). Emotions consist of all the three components. But there’s less consensus on how these different components work together to lead to emotions.
The James-Lange theory says that your arousal is based on the stimulus, and your resulting behavior after the stimulus, determines the emotion you feel. We experience some stimulus, such as seeing a snake as we’re walking in the woods. That stimulus triggers physiological arousal—heart beating, rapid breathing, muscle tension—and it is how our body reacts that, in turn, causes a feeling of fear.
The two-factor theory builds upon this awareness that emotion is determined by a combination of our physiological response and cues from the environment we’re in. Physiological arousal definitely plays a role in the experience of emotion, but it’s not just the arousal, it’s also how we interpret or appraise, that arousal.
