Feelings and the Body: William James and Autonomic Specificity of Emotion

1. Feelings and the Body: William James and Autonomic Specificity of Emotion Bruce H. Friedman Department of Psychology Virginia Tech October 20, 2007, SPR, Savannah, GA

2. The James-Lange theory of emotion • James: What is an emotion? (1884); The emotions (1890); The physical basis of emotion(1894) • Independently proposed by Lange (1887) • Lumped together historically, in spite of separate emphases • Physiological responses causal in emotional experience • Emotional stimuli evoke somato-visceral reactions • Sensory feedback from reactions generates feelings • Emotions have different bodily response patterns • Anecdotal/case study evidence, but led to testable hypotheses & much research • Criticized by the structuralists (Wundt, 1891; Titchener, 1896)

3. Cannon-Bard theory • Feelings & physiological responses are independent (Cannon (1927, 1931); Bard (1929, 1934)) • Experimental test: severing animal sympathetic afferents does not eliminate emotional behavior • SNS activity is relatively undifferentiated across emotions • Afferent ANS activity is diffuse; organs lack sensitivity • Visceral organs respond too slowly to induce emotion • Artificial visceral changes do not induce emotional states • Centralist model: Emotional stimuli activate the thalamus • Simultaneously relays info to the cortex (experience) and the hypothalamus/ANS (physiology)

5. “…devastating attack…(the) historical importance (of Cannon’s criticisms) is not so much that they destroyed the James-Lange theory, but rather that they were influential in producing an extensive research tradition in the psychophysiology of emotion.” -George Mandler, 1979 The first century of experimental psychology (E. Hurst, ed.)

6. Activation theory • Further support for undifferentiated arousal • ‘Emotion’: variations in activation under goal-directed behavior (Duffy, 1934, 1941) • Reticular activating system: CNS mediator of activation (Lindsley, 1951) • Activation continuum: sleep → intense affect • Little differentiation among intense affective states

7. The psychophysiological approach:Visceral patterning • The physiological differentiation between fear and anger in humans(Ax, 1953) • Anger- and fear-producing conditions yielded distinct autonomic response patterns • Greater between- than within-subject variance; fits Stimulus-Response Specificity vs. Individual Response Stereotypy(Lacey, 1949; Malmo et al, 1950; Graham et al, 1958) • Greater response integration in anger • Epinephrine (E) response dominant in fear, norepinephrine (NE) in anger (Ax, 1960; Funkenstein, 1956; J. Schachter, 1957) • NE response to cold pressor in schizophrenia (Ax et al., 1969)

8. Social-Cognitive view of emotion • Cognitive, social, and physiological determinants of emotional state(Schachter & Singer, 1962) • Creative experiment finds no support for distinct ANS patterns

9. Experimental Conditions(Schachter & Singer, 1962) • EUPHORIAANGER • Epi Inf Epi Inf • Epi Ign Epi Ign • Epi Mis • Placebo Placebo • Epi Mis condition not run in anger; conceived as a control to assess artifactual effect of the Epi Inf instructions, use in euphoria would suffice for this purpose

10. Social-Cognitive view of emotion • Cognitive, social, and physiological determinants of emotional state(Schachter & Singer, 1962) • Creative experiment finds no support for distinct ANS patterns • Fit cognitive zeitgeist of the 1960’s – 1970’s • Methodological, conceptual flaws noted (Ax & Plutchik, 1967) • “…findings…in accord with James' hypothesis that different emotions are related to differential patterns of bodily change ” (Fehr & Stern, 1970) • Such papers largely ignored; concept of non-specific, diffuse autonomic arousal dominated this era • Failures to replicate led to debate (Maslach, 1979; Marshall & Zimbardo, 1979; Schachter, 1979)

11. Modern era of ANS specificity research • Autonomic nervous system activity distinguishes among emotions (Ekman, Levenson, & Friesen, 1983) • Further support (Levenson, Ekman, & Friesen, 1990; Miller et al., 1987; Schwartz et al., 1981; Sinha et al., 1992) • (a) Explained variance minimal (b) discordance among subjective & physiological responses (c) large individual variability (Lang, 1994) • James appreciated the complexity of emotion (Ellsworth, 1994) • Pattern classification approach (Fridlund, Schwartz, & Fowler, 1984; Thayer, 1986; Friedman, 1988; Nyklicek, Thayer, & van Doornen, 1997; Christie & Friedman, 2004; Rainville et al., 2006; Kreibig et al, 2007)

12. William James(Harvard, 1868) G. Stanley Hall(Harvard, 1878) Joseph Jastrow (Johns Hopkins, 1886) Clark L. Hull (Wisconsin 1918) Neil E. Miller (Yale 1935) Edgar E. Coons (Yale 1964) Julian F. Thayer (New York University 1986) Bruce H. Friedman (Penn State 1992) Israel C. Christie (Virginia Tech, 2005) Chad L. Stephens (Virginia Tech, 2007)

13. Conclusion • The debate continues • Somatovisceral afference model (Cacioppo et al., 1992, 2000) • Are there “natural kinds” of emotion? • Yes (Izard, 2007; Panskepp, 2007); No (Feldman Barrett, 2007) • James’ theory: prolifically generative • ANS specificity tenet particularly influential in psychophysiology • Mixed support stimulates new conceptualizations of emotional processing • Future research • Person-situation variables that moderate ANS specificity • Expansion to include endocrine, CNS measures