Top row: basic emotions. Bottom row: complex emotions. Lighter colors indicate more intense sensations while the darker colors show cooler or less intense experience. The patterns shown here are consistent with other neural and behavioral studies. These maps constitute the most accurate representations of emotional body experience at present. From Nummenmaa et al., 2014.
We’ve been taught that emotions are mental experiences and they are all in our heads. I believe this comes from our culture which is based on the Cartesian separation of the body from the mind as well as from childhood learning reinforced by later education. One source of this brain-centric point of view is found in virtually every high school and college introductory textbook to psychology. These books with their standard line of the emotions being cognitive in nature have held sway for many generations now. One might point out that the body-emotion theory of William James (1842-1910) and Carl Lange (1834-1900) has been around since 1884 and 1885 respectively, but this discounts what happened next in the history of psychology. Their theory states that the body of a person will react with a physical response (e.g., running, crying, striking out), and so the experience of the emotion is the bodily sensation. The physical response is the emotion itself. A closer read of the James’s side of the theory shows that he had a much more complex and nuanced view of emotional experience than it being just a reflexive burst of peripheral motor activity (Ellsworth, 1994).
Unfortunately, the James-Lange theory was immediately attacked and invalidated by Walter Cannon (1871-1945), the eminent physiologist and discoverer of homeostasis, and then by the school of behaviorism which took over American psychology by the early 1930s. Cannon dismissed James on the grounds of simple stimulus-response: we experience a stimulus and have a corresponding emotion at the same time. Cannon’s model that physical reactions are not dependent upon the emotional reaction, or vice versa replaced James’s system very quickly. Alongside Cannon, the behaviorists taught that all emotions are just learned responses. Emotions were given their own chapter in the intro psych texts and no further mention of the body has been made since then… until recently,
A current re-iteration of the James-Lange theory is the somatic-marker hypothesis which states that emotional body signals unconsciously influence decision-making especially in ambiguous situations (Damasio, 1994, 2000, 2004). This is a very Jamesian view as it holds that emotion precedes conscious awareness. It confirms that James’s sequence of emotional response was largely correct (Freidman, 2010). Given that emotions are multiply determined as James originally pointed out, and are events that automatically activate much of the nervous system, a more holistic view of the concept of emotion is needed. It has recently been suggested that the term, emotion, is outmoded and that the more comprehensive term of emotional body experience is a more accurate depiction. Emotional body experience is defined as the multidimensional and dynamic experience of the emotional aspects of bodily experience which make the self understandable to itself (Gaete & Fuchs, 2016).
One very graphic illustration of this concept is found in Nummenmaa et al., (2014). The model of emotional experience they propose is based on a body sensation in response to a stimulus which then registers in consciousness via somatosensory feedback loop. Researchers had subjects of Western European and East Asian descent color their emotional body experiences on blank body outlines (n=701). The results were a set of body sensation maps (see graphic above). The body maps were correlated with results from brain imaging and behavioral studies meaning that subjective reports confirmed empirical findings.
Basic emotions are experienced in the upper chest area and likely associated with changes in breathing and heart rate. Sensations in the head area occurred in all emotions and possibly point to physiological changes in the head, face, and throat such as muscular tension, temperature change, sweating, and the like. Sensations in the upper extremities were central to approach-oriented emotions such as anger and happiness. Conversely, sensations of decreased limb activity were a defining feature of sadness and depression. Sensations in the throat and abdominal areas were essential in disgust. Unlike all of the other emotions, happiness was associated with sensations through the entire body. These results thus support models assuming that somatosensation and embodiment play critical roles in emotional processing (Nummenmaa et al., 2014).
Closing Thoughts
The James-Lange theory lives on thanks to modern researchers and theoreticians. And, the recent findings not only confirm the old theory, but they enhance it with a new principle of emotional body experience. The mainstream textbooks need rewriting, but I suspect it will be a long time before they do so as old ideas often die very hard deaths.
Paul Shane, Ph.D., LMT
Director, Academic Content
______________
References
Gaete, M. & Fuchs, T. (2016). From the body image to emotional body experience in eating disorders. Journal of Phenomenological Psychology 47, p. 17-40.
Nummenmaa, L., Glerean, E., Hari, R., & Hietanen, J. (2014). Bodily maps of emotions. PNAS 111(2), p. 646-651.