Skip to main content

More on Emotions



Recently I made the comment that I found the James-Lange theory of emotions very wise.

Henry followed up, asking whether I was aware of contemporary work that supported that 1880s-era view.

I said "yes," and offered this link: Luca Barlassina.

That's an article published just this year by Dr. Barlassina, a scholar affiliated with Ruhr-Universitat Bochum's Center for Mind, Brain, and Cognitive Evolution, written with the assistance of  Dr. Albert Newen, who has a chair at the same Center.

Barlassina and Newen (B&N) title their paper "The Role of Bodily Perception in Emotion: In Defense of an Impure Somatic Theory." Some definition of terms is then in order.

A "somatic theory" is one that says that the body [that is, to avoid triviality, the set of non-brain portions of the body] plays a critical role in causing emotions (not just in expressing them).

B&N explicitly cite James as an early theorist of this sort and they add another example to those with which the reader of James would be familiar. They say that on a somatic theory, rotting food and unpleasant odors will cause nausea and visceral reactions, and those in turn lead upstairs, to the brain's experience of the emotion of disgust. Consider your reaction to the unpleasant photo above.  

Then, as you probably noticed in the subtitle of the paper, these authors distinguish between "pure" and "impure" somatic theories. Pure theories treat emotions as "entirely constituted by the perception of such bodily changes." Impure somatic theories allow for the direction of causality, but deny that this is all there is too emotions.

The authors cite a 2004 work by Jesse Prinz, Gut Reactions, which they see as an exposition of the pure somatic theory.

I found Gut Reactions on amazon, although the amazon page gives it a publication date of 2006. It could be that the book amazon is selling is a subsequent development from a peer-reviewed paper Barlassina and Newen are citing.

I have always thought that if one wanted to be a "purist" about the James-Lange theory, one would press it into the service of Skinnerian behaviorism. All one means by "fear" is the behavior, the act of running away from the bear!

But Prinz' view isn't Skinner's, and it is Prinz' view, not Skinner's, that B & N mean by the "pure somatic" theory with which they contend. Prinz view is that the brain's perception of what the body is doing is the whole of what one means by fear or disgust etc. That is still something other than the fact of running (even if we include under the word "running" such non-brain things/behaviors as the extra flow of adrenaline and the other physiological concomitants of the behavior of flight).

The point? just this: whether one sides with Prinz or with B&N, whether one offers a pure somatic or an impure somatic theory, somatic theories are very much alive in the 21st century. Nearly 130 years after their seminal papers, James and Lange remain forces with which to reckon in the study of the emotions.

Comments

  1. The edition of Gut Reactions that amazon is selling was published in 2004, notwithstanding amazon's claim that it was published in 2006. I determined that by using amazon's "Search Inside This Book" function and looking at the copyright page. I have learned not to rely upon the date that amazon gives. If you wish to know the date of a book that amazon does not provide the option to search inside of, then you can look it up in the Library of Congress catalog, at catalog.loc.gov. Google Books, at books.google.com, is another possibility, although I've found that, if amazon does not contain the text of a book, then Google Books probably does not either.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm passing along a comment from a correspondent named Isaac, who was apparently having trouble commenting in this space.

    Isaac says we might find interesting Eric Finzi's book on The Face of Emotion. He passes along a blurb from the Amazon page.

    "'William Shakespeare famously wrote that a face is like a book,
    and common wisdom has it that our faces reveal our deep-seated emotions. But what if the reverse were also true? What if our facial expressions set our moods instead of revealing them? What if there were actual science to support the exhortation, smile, be happy?

    "Dermatologic surgeon Eric Finzi has been studying that question for nearly two decades, and in this ground breaking book he marshals evidence suggesting that our facial expressions are not secondary to, but rather a central driving force of, our emotions."

    -----------

    Thanks.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story About Coleridge

This is a quote from a memoir by Dorothy Wordsworth, reflecting on a trip she took with two famous poets, her brother, William Wordsworth, and their similarly gifted companion, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.   We sat upon a bench, placed for the sake of one of these views, whence we looked down upon the waterfall, and over the open country ... A lady and gentleman, more expeditious tourists than ourselves, came to the spot; they left us at the seat, and we found them again at another station above the Falls. Coleridge, who is always good-natured enough to enter into conversation with anybody whom he meets in his way, began to talk with the gentleman, who observed that it was a majestic waterfall. Coleridge was delighted with the accuracy of the epithet, particularly as he had been settling in his own mind the precise meaning of the words grand, majestic, sublime, etc., and had discussed the subject with William at some length the day before. “Yes, sir,” says Coleridge, “it is a majesti

Five Lessons from the Allegory of the Cave

  Please correct me if there are others. But it seems to be there are five lessons the reader is meant to draw from the story about the cave.   First, Plato  is working to devalue what we would call empiricism. He is saying that keeping track of the shadows on the cave wall, trying to make sense of what you see there, will NOT get you to wisdom. Second, Plato is contending that reality comes in levels. The shadows on the wall are illusions. The solid objects being passed around behind my back are more real than their shadows are. BUT … the world outside the the cave is more real than that — and the sun by which that world is illuminated is the top of the hierarchy. So there isn’t a binary choice of real/unreal. There are levels. Third, he equates realness with knowability.  I  only have opinions about the shadows. Could I turn around, I could have at least the glimmerings of knowledge. Could I get outside the cave, I would really Know. Fourth, the parable assigns a task to philosophers

Searle: The Chinese Room

John Searle has become the object of accusations of improper conduct. These accusations even have some people in the world of academic philosophy saying that instructors in that world should try to avoid teaching Searle's views. That is an odd contention, and has given rise to heated exchanges in certain corners of the blogosphere.  At Leiter Reports, I encountered a comment from someone describing himself as "grad student drop out." GSDO said: " This is a side question (and not at all an attempt to answer the question BL posed): How important is John Searle's work? Are people still working on speech act theory or is that just another dead end in the history of 20th century philosophy? My impression is that his reputation is somewhat inflated from all of his speaking engagements and NYRoB reviews. The Chinese room argument is a classic, but is there much more to his work than that?" I took it upon myself to answer that on LR. But here I'll tak