Emotions seem to rule our every day life. We make all of our decisions based on whether we feel happy, sad, scared, angry or disgusted. An emotion is a complex psychological state that involves three distinct components: a subjective experience, a psychological response, and a behavioural or expressive response (Hockenbury & Hockenbury, 2007). Charles Darwin (1809-1882) is the father of emotion; he published the first ever book about the study of biopsychology of emotion – “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals” (Darwin, 1872).
In his book he made two major contributions, one, that animal emotions are similar to human emotions, and the other, that there are fundamental and basic emotions present across all species. For him, emotion had an evolutionary history that is traced across all cultures and species. Darwin believed that facial expressions of motions are innate. It was recently found that he performed small experiments on emotion in his house with the help of his wife Emma (Snyder, 2010).
Today, many psychologists agree with his theory about emotions being universal and basic, and they use almost the same techniques and event stimuli to study emotions. In fact, in 1972 psychologist Paul Eckman suggested that there are six basic emotions that are universal throughout all humans. There are many theories of emotion, but three of them are perhaps the most commonly discussed. They are called the James-Lang theory, the Cannon- Bard theory and the Schachter-Singer theory.
First, I am going to look at the James-Lang theory of emotion, which was proposed only 10 years later than the Charles Darwin theory. This theory states that your brain interprets specific physiological responses as emotions (James & Lang, 1887). Simply meaning that, you first experience the physiological response, which makes you feel a certain emotion, for example, you are sad because you are crying. Even though this theory was developed individually by the two psychologists it is interesting that they came up with the same idea around the same time.
William James explained: “My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion”. The Facial Feedback Hypothesis (FFH) (Eckman, Levenson & Friesen, 1983) backed up their theory, as it focused on facial expressions alone and their influence on emotional experience. This study suggested that there is a direct link between muscles of your face and emotional processing. In other words, when we smile, we then experience pleasure and happiness, and when we frown, we then experience sadness.
They came to this conclusion after they had people hold a pencil in between their teeth and watch cartoons and later rate how funny they were. They found that the people holding the pencil in between their mouth rated the cartoons as much funnier that the people who didn’t have a pencil in their mouth. This is because holding a pencil with your teeth created a smile like facial expression. According to their hypothesis, without facial feedback there can be no emotional experience (Keillor, Barrett, Crucian, Kortenkamp & Heilman, 2002).
However, Keillor et al. studied a woman with total facial paralysis, who nevertheless demonstrated typical emotional responses, effectively ruling out this hypothesis. Today, the James-Lange theory is very much discounted by modern researchers, but it is still believe that there are some instances where physiological responses do lead to the experience of emotions. For example, the development of panic disorders and specific phobias. In the 1920’s, Walter Cannon and Philip Bard directly challenged the James-Lange theory.
The Cannon-Bard theory instead proposed that emotional experience and expression happens at the same time. They believed that the feeling of emotion and the physiological reaction happens simultaneously. This means that one doesn’t necessarily trigger the other, but they happen at the same time. Their evidence to back up their theory is very crucial in learning more about this theory. The thalamus produced both physical and emotional presentation of these messages simultaneously, since it is the sensory relay station of the brain.
It sends these messages to the autonomic nervous system and cerebral cortex at the exact same time. An example of this theory would be when you are walking down the street an not concentrating and all the sudden someone grabs your hand, your muscles tense all the sudden and you feel surprised at the same time. Another example to back up the Cannon-Bard theory is the fact that people can experience physiological arousal without experiencing emotion, such as when they have been running. Your increased heart rate is not an indicator of fear in this situation, so you do not feel fear but instead you are tired.
Another, example to support their theory is that people can experience very different emotions even when they have the same physiological responses. For example, a person may have an increased heart beat and rapid breathing both when he is angry and feeling afraid. However, the brain regions that both Cannon and Bard suggested for being responsible for the emotional processes were incorrect, which led to more studies to be done between emotions and the brain. The third fundamental theory of emotion was proposed in the 1960’s by Stanely Schachter and Jerome Singer, called the Two-factor theory of emotion.
They suggested that people’s emotions depended on physiological arousal as well as the cognitive interpretation of that arousal. According to this theory, individuals use personal and social queus to label arousal as an emotion. For example, they scan the environment to understand how to label the specific emotion or, they assess their knowledge, which allows them to label the emotion in a specific way. There are huge individually differences when labeling emotions according to this theory, as everyone has different interpretation of past experiences and how they have labeled these specific emotions.
In order to test their theory they hypothesized that in the absence of an appropriate explanation for arousal participants could be manipulated into experiencing an emotion by manipulation aspects of the available cognitive circumstances (Schacter & Singer, 1962). They allocated participants to random groups: adrenalin ignorant, adrenalin informed, adrenalin misinformed and placebo. Participants were then allocated to either the euphoria condition or the anger condition, which were carried out by the actor in the room with them.
The study showed that in the anger condition, the ignorant group felt the angriest and the least angry group was those who were informed. This is because the participants who were told that they were given the drug, were already prepared to label their emotion as anger, therefore it was much stronger than those who didn’t quite know how to label their emotional responses. Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron (1974) carried out a second highly influential study providing experimental support for the Schachter-Singer theory of emotion.
Their study showed that through misattribution of arousal induced feelings of arousal can be converted into sexual attraction. Schachter and Singer agree with the James-Lange theory that people infer emotions when they experience physiological arousal, but they also agree with the Cannon-Bard theory that the sane pattern of physiological arousal can give rise to different emotions. In fact, Richard Lazarus (1982) has shown that people’s emotional experience depends on the way they appraise or evaluate the events around them, which is very similar to Schachter and Singer’s theory.
Modern theories of emotion include judgments, desires, physiological changes, feelings and behavior as possible constituents of emotion (Leighton, 1988). A tentative conclusion that can now be drawn is that is unlikely that any single theory will ever prevail anytime soon. Some of them are compatible, like Darwin’s evolutionary theory and the theory that states that emotion process can easily complement each other. Whilst others, are contradictory, like the cognitive and non-cognitive theories. All theories of emotion fall somewhere in between, agreeing with some features of a specific theory, whilst disagreeing about another.
In the last forty years a huge amount of data has been collected by cognitive and social psychologists. As we know, to study emotions we use functional neuroimaging, behavioural experiments, electrophysiological recording and animal and human behavioural studies. In the last decade, especially the technological side of these studies has been developing so much giving us greater access to the brain functioning when experiencing emotion, which has lead to all sorts of new modern theories of emotion.