Theories of emotion. One of the contemporaries of William James was a very famous probably equally famous physiologist named Walter Cannon. Walter Cannon was one of the great systems physiologists. He wanted to understand how the various systems in the body worked and functioned to support the survival of various creatures. He wrote a marvelous book called The Wisdom of the Body to show how all of these things that are going on, many of them internal and unconscious, to help preserve and protect and promote the well-being of the creature. One of the areas that he went into, a little bit later in his career, was trying to understand emotion. He got into this because he was actually instrumental in discovering adrenaline. One of the prime hormones that gets involved to cause emotional responses. And he and his colleague Bard developed the Cannon-Bard theory of emotion, which was really, just pretty much a straightforward explanation of what happens. You see a snake. You feel scared. The body is aroused and goes into action. Heart rate quickens, blood pressure goes up. The blood moves from the intestines, where it might be digesting food, to the muscles, it moves from the skin, where it's not needed, to the muscles. Adrenaline pours out, we have more red blood cells circulating, our lungs breath deeper, and a whole host of things go on in the body getting us ready for this flight or fight reaction. And it's a marvelous set of responses and really gets us ready to engage in some brief, intense period of activity. And you run. This is so simple, so straightforward, so obvious, that why would anybody challenge it? But William James and his colleague Lange did challenge it. And James said, I don't think you've got it quite right here. That the way I see it is that you see the snake. And then quite involuntarily, unconsciously, your body gets aroused. Then you, in some sense, look at what's going on in your body and become frightened, and then you run. And I'm sure that Walter Cannon, if he had today's jargon, would say, really? That's what you think? That can't possibly be that it would work that way. He said first of all, this physiological response that gets us ready for fight or flight is a little bit sluggish. It doesn't take a minute, but it takes at least a few seconds to start working, and it might take a minute or two to really get ramped up. And Cannon is saying, are you really trying to tell me you have to wait for the emotional feeling until all of that stuff has happened? And James says, yes. That's exactly what I'm saying. They didn't have cars then, but if they did, I'll give you a modern day example of what William James might have said. You're driving down Route 18, almost bumper to bumper traffic, 60 miles an hour, and some idiot cuts you off. You slam on the brakes, swerve towards the median, honk the horn, give an almost universal hand gesture to express your feelings to the person who did that, and an accident narrowly averted. A minute or two down the road, you come to an intersection, and there's a red light there, and you stop, and all of a sudden, you recognize that your heart is pounding, you've got this death grip on the steering wheel. You're perspiring, and you're just drenched with this whole mixed emotion of anger and fear that is already over. So these types of experiences sometimes if you really look at them carefully, do have a delay built in before we feel the full impact, full emotional impact of what was going on. Well, this was an argument mostly about physiology. By the two leaders of the field in physiology was Cannon and then psychology was James, and it was pretty much agreed that Cannon won that debate. And it would've stopped there except psychologists are so proud of William James and just couldn't stop talking about him. So all of the textbooks that were written after this little argument went on at least talked about the argument, even though they didn't really think that James could possibly have been right. But James was a brilliant guy, and when you have someone who's that brilliant, you also want to at least give them some credence, and so the story lived on. And it was good that it lived on because, eventually, bit by bit, piece by piece, information began to accrue. But you know, James might have had something to say, after all, about this. And one of the other models that developed as a result of this, and now we're all the way back to the, I don't know, 1970s when this research really began to be cranked out. A two factor theory of emotion that relied heavily on some of the ideas that William James had put forth more than a hundred years earlier. And that's the and Singer's two factor theory of emotion. And the two factors are cognitive label plus physiological arousal, and then you get emotion. So the cognitive label is you need something to emote about, whether it be a sunset or snake. And you need physiological arousal and if you have both of those together, then you can have emotion. A nice little theory but as in many cases you have to start out thinking about things, and imagining how they might be dissected. What are the parts of this emotional situation that we have? It seems like having something to emote about, and an emotional response to it, are two good things to have. But, is there any way of separating them? Is there any way to begin to better understand what the parts of this complex emotional situation might be? And Schachter and Singer did a whole bunch of experiments. I'm going to tell you a couple of them to begin to give you a flavor of how these things worked. I refer to them as wastebasket experiments, not because they're experiments that need to be thrown away but because they were experiments that actually involved waste baskets. Here's the way Schachter and Singer did these experiments. They had a drug that they could give to the subjects that was a stimulant drug that worked in much the same way that adrenaline would work and they were able at that time to give this drug to people without even having the people know that they might be receiving that drug. Once again these experiments would not pass muster. Today, because we are much more cautious with the way we treat our subjects in these experiences, be they laboratory rats, or college sophomores. But just the injection of a stimulant drug that causes the heart to race and the palms to sweat and your lungs to expand and do all of those things that go along with emotion, will not produce an emotional response. It just produces some weird feelings. [BLANK AUDIO] A cognitive label might also, not in itself, produce the response. So now let's look at the experiment that Schachter and Singer did. They brought people into the laboratory and had them separated into an experimental group and a control group and had them all filling out a long, boring questionnaire that just seemed to go on and on. So you have a group of people in there who had volunteered for the experiment, filling out the questionnaire. Only one of the people in the room is not a subject. It's someone pretending to be a subject and working for Schacter and Singer. And about halfway through the period, he gets up, stretches, walks over and sees a stack of old questionnaires on the desk there. Picks up one of them and tosses it to the wastebasket. Come on guys, come on. Let's take a little break, we need a break and have a little game of waste basket basketball. So with a lot of urging, got people involved in this waste basket basketball thing. Now for the results of that experiment. At the end of the session, in the post-session interview, they asked people to report on anything that might've gone on in the thing. The subjects who were just there on their own without any drug or anything would say something like, oh yeah, about halfway through we got bored and this one guy started playing waste basket basketball so we kind of joined in. I hope we didn't waste too many of your forms. But, that was it, just kind of a neutral report of what went on. The people in that same condition, except having been primed with a drug that gives them this emotional response, had the second factor. So they had the body's arousal plus this little competition. And they were filled with excitement. Oh yeah, we had this little break, and we had this great basketball game. I won, by the way, and just had a grand time in there. So they had the body arousal, one factor, this little game, a second factor. And now those two together produced an emotion. Whereas neither of the things alone, neither the drug alone nor the situation alone, would produce it. Euphoria. In another experiment, same type of design, subjects are in there. With one of them not being a subject. And they're filling out a kind of personal, provocative questionnaire about. One part of it was about the sexual experiences of your parents. There's a touchy topic for you. And, with how many people, other than your father, do you think your mother had sexual relations with? And it started at six or something like that. And finally, the guy, who was pretending to be a subject, got up, said we don't have to do this. [SOUND] I'm out of here. Walked out and slammed the door. Post session interview: the people who had not had a drug and did not have the body arousal said, well, we have this one guy who walked out in the middle. He seemed to be a little upset by the questionnaire. I can kind of understand why he might be, but it seemed like an overreaction. The people who had that same experience, but with the body arousal, because they had been surreptitiously injected with the drug, said, you know? One of the guys got angry at the questionnaire [LAUGH] and he actually tore up his Questionnaire, and left. And I was tempted to, because I agree with them. This is pretty bad, and you shouldn't be doing this type of research. I think you ought to just change what you're doing. So, separated out, the cognitive label, the thing to emote about. And the body's arousal. So experimentally separate these two and get a better handle on what goes into an emotion. Now we go back to Charles Darwin. Among psychologists, this book The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals is at least as important as his Origin of Species book, because this was a book that went back and began to, really, look at the origin of emotions as a process through evolution. And, he went into some considerable detail. He had a lot of wonderful drawings in there, as you can see here, of the cat that is in this fearful, defensive, arched-back posture with hair standing up and everything. And you see two dogs there expressing different emotions and one of them, you would probably want to walk up to and say, oh, it's okay. It's going to be okay. Don't be afraid. And the other, you would probably be just as soon try to back away and not approach the dog. So, we have these emotional expressions in creatures, especially those creatures that we understand and can read their emotions based on their body's posture and things. Now, Darwin's idea on this, was that, through the process of evolution, in the same way evolution went through a single chambered heart, to a double chambered, to a four chambered heart like we have, that the evolution of emotional expressions must also be linked across species and across time in the same way. So that we ought to be able to find clues to our own emotional states by looking at other creatures. And many of our human emotions are expressed in our face. One of the famous experiments was done by a psychologist named Ekman, E-K-M-A-N. When I was taking my social psychology course as an undergraduate, we saw a film of the work that this guy, Ekman, had done, taking pictures of people with various facial expressions all around the world to see if someone in China could tell if someone from New Jersey was happy or sad. And they could. And to see if someone in New Jersey could tell whether someone who's picture was taken in Africa was surprised or angry. And we can. They're called pan-cultural expressions of emotion, that we don't have to learn them. They're built in. And being built in, then that got Darwin and others interested in the muscles of the face, interested in the muscles of the face. And how they might be related. So what's the evidence for all of this? Some of you may suffer from exam anxiety. And psychologists recognize this. We don't care. We still give you exams. But if you had a serious anxiety and decided to seek help with it, which I would strongly urge you to do. Because clinical psychologists love anxiety disorders. Because they almost always have the opportunity to put a check in the successful treatment column. These are things that psychologists know how to deal with. So if you're afraid of an elevator or a cat or an exam, you don't have to be. But if you went to a psychologist and said, hey, I've got this problem, I just get so worked up about exams, it makes it so I can hardly function on the exam. One of the first things that the psychologist would probably have you do is make a fist. Not so you can go out and punch the professor who was giving you the exam, but to make a fist. And to feel the tension in the muscles of your arm. And now, just let it go limp, and feel the relaxation. Feel the tension, feel the relaxation. And then, would walk you through doing that with the muscles in your shoulder. And then the muscles in your forehead and the muscles in your jaw, feel the tension, feel the relaxation and basically train you. It seems weird that we would need training but we do, basically train you to recognize the difference between these and to bring that difference up into a higher level of your consciousness. So now, one of the things that you can do, which James recommended way back when. One of the things that you can do when you're feeling anxious is to act non-anxious. And your behaving in that contrary disposition will ease your anxiety. The other side of that coin, again, going back to James and back to Schacter and Singer, one of the ways that we decide how angry, how fearful, how anxious we are is to look at our body. So we see this cognitive label out there and recognize that it's causing us to have an emotion and the limbic system says, how bad is this? Looks at your muscles, looks at the turmoil in your internal milieu to determine how bad it is or how good it is. And now when you're driving down the highway and having had this training, you suddenly realize that you've got this death grip on the steering wheel and your shoulders are all tense and your forehead is all tense and you don't even know why. But, if you relax, you'll be a happier driver than you were moments before because you're giving the brain a different set of information about what's going on here. If you think about facial expressions They're kind of weird because mirrors are relatively new inventions. So, how do we know what our face is doing so that we can show the appropriate emotion and stuff? Well, it turns out, we have feedback from our face. You can close your eyes and move your arm around, and you know where your arm is because it's giving you proprioceptive feedback. You also know where your face is, it's just not quite as obvious as waving your arm around. And there have been a lot of experiments done on this emotional feedback from faces. And if you bring an actor into a laboratory, and actors are very good at moving their faces. So you can get an actor to raise their eyebrows. You can get them to move the muscles at the edge of their mouth. You can get them to raise their eyebrows while they move the muscles at the edge of their mouth. And they are very good at that because they're practiced at the art of moving their face. In experiment after experiment, if you bring an actor in and trick them step by step to putting their face into an angry position, they will often say, I don't know what's going on here, but we need to take a little break, doc. Suddenly, this experiment is just really pissing me off. And it's because they're getting the feedback from their face. Another famous set of experiments, it involves, they're the pencil experiments. And one way to hold a pencil in your mouth, there are many ways, but one way is like this. And another way is like this. With your lips or your teeth. And it turns out, I don't have an experiment here but if you want to try it, I'm going to show you a couple of cartoons. And one of the cartoons, I'm trying to move it with the wrong kind of buttons here. One of the cartoons. Tastes funny. And another one, little angel inside the dog saying, scratch on the door, scratch on the door. The little devil is saying, pee on the floor, pee on the floor. Neither of them very funny. But, if you show cartoons like this to a group of people where half of them have the pencil between their teeth, they think these are funnier than the group who has the pencil in their lips because holding a pencil in your teeth uses a lot of the same muscles that you use for smiling as opposed to frowning. And that contributes to your emotional experience of looking at these cartoons.
