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What is an emotion? William James’s theory of how our bodies affect our feelings

by bfoks on 9/8/23, 1:21 PM with 69 comments

• by dbspin on 9/10/23, 10:12 AM

  Really curious to read the negative responses to this. We now know a great deal about how the body stores affective learning somatically, and how systems from the endocrine system to the gut microbiome interact with the central nervous system and brain to generate and modify emotions. Emotions are to an extent cognitive interpretations of autonomic bodily responses. I can see the appeal of dualism, but it's in conflict with the measurable impact on emotional learning, memory and expression observed in numerous somatic disease processes.

  "Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colourless, destitute of emotional warmth."

  We can actually observe this in patients with severe quadriplegia, where affect becomes flattened over time as 'polling' somatic responses becomes muted. Similarly we see changes in emotional sensitivity and expression when the gut microbiome is disrupted, when the endocrine systems is dysfunctional, or from numerous other organic disease processes.

• by zaptheimpaler on 9/10/23, 9:02 AM

  The best theory Ive read is the theory of constructed emotion by Lisa Feldman Barrett. It directly contradicts this theory. Emotions are basically very fast predictions by the brain. The whole idea of emotions being completely independent from cognition just seems pretty dated today.

• by clarada on 9/10/23, 8:54 AM

  Came across a similar idea a few years ago: emotions are our perceptions of our bodies internal state.

  Our subconscious responds to external events, releasing hormones and making other internal changes to our bodies. Whilst we can directly feel the impact of those changes (breathing rate, alertness, blood pressure, ...), like with our other senses, what we consciously pay attention to - what we "feel" - is the perception, which are our emotions.

• by Daub on 9/10/23, 5:49 AM

  As someone who works with color theory and art, it fascinates me how emotion and color are classified in such similar ways: both as discrete values mapped on a circular plot.

  This diagram shows emotion catagogies overlaid a cooormwheel...

  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_classification#/medi...

• by pythonic_hell on 9/10/23, 1:31 PM

  This school of thought in the medical field is quite popular in the Netherlands and is picking up popularity within the UK; however from personal experience and that of others I’m noticing that it’s being used by doctors to dismiss people’s symptoms - particularly that of women (N<5)

  In one case I know someone who had chronic health issues who had to change doctors after one year because her former GP (who was quite young) kept insisting her health issues were phycological. Her new GP (quite experienced) was able to identify several of the physical root causes to her complaints within months of her first visit and provide appropriate treatment afterwards. I see this pattern repeated with May of my other friends who have chronic health conditions and have had to deal with both health care systems.

  I have two theories why this school of thought is gaining popularity in the west;

  * Allows over worked or inexperienced doctors to easily dismiss patients because in their view they’re triaging patients complaints.

  * Overloaded healthcare system is able to reduce the care patients need by effectively gas lighting them by saying “you need to need your lentils health”, “deal with your trauma” instead of seeing specialists and doing tests.

• by tgv on 9/10/23, 9:59 AM

  Embodied cognition as a theory is older than "the last decade", and makes much wider claims than James (and is just plain wrong). Contrasting it in the subsequent sentence with much older observations doesn't do either justice.

• by asimpleusecase on 9/10/23, 8:38 AM

  Many years ago I heard of someone who found they always had arguments in their kitchen. It was during a generation in the US where it was as very common for kitchens to be bright yellow. This person was told about the correlation between anger and the color yellow. They changed the color scheme and n their kitchen and the arguments stopped.

• by mongol on 9/10/23, 12:25 PM

  Last weekend I had a negative realization. Nothing major, just some bad personal news, something that basically was broken and required possible expensive repairs. I immediately got in a negative mood, it was visceral but it had also a physical effect on me. I only wanted to sleep, lost all energy, just wanted to handle the negative news which was only possible on a weekday. At the same time I thought, it is crazy I feel a physical impact because of a thought affecting my mood. I could think rationally about it, but my tiredness and lack of energy did not go away.

  During the week, I worked out the cause of the bad news, and this is no longer a problem. But I am somehow concerned that what was basicially a thought could have this impact on me.

• by jvm___ on 9/10/23, 5:42 PM

  The water in your body is just visiting. It was a thunderstorm a week ago. It will be the ocean soon enough. Most of your cells come and go like morning dew. We are more weather pattern than stone monument. Sunlight on mist. Summer lightning. Your choices outweigh your substance. - The CryptoNaturalist

  I think our moods are the same, they ebb and flow with what our body does.

• by BiteCode_dev on 9/10/23, 9:02 AM

  That can be tied to once aspect of vipassana meditation: observe the bodily sensations, as they are tightly linked to your mind state.

• by knoke on 9/10/23, 1:42 PM

  I think you would make great strides in thinking about this if you differentiated between feelings and emotions, one being pretty primitive, bodily inner states and the other outward directed, complex scripts that’s are deeply social, learned and performed and shared ways to communicate feelings (take all the different ways for example “anger”, “mourning” or “lust” are performed with totally different modes of articulation and performance between cultures, times and locations. That is: mourning is not a feeling, it’s a complex, socially learned (socialized) script that is performed in a socially expected way, that is rooted in feelings but solved a communicative, social task.

  (I know nothing about this topic expect for one book about the socialization of emotions that I read a million years ago).

• by FollowingTheDao on 9/10/23, 12:13 PM

  TBH, I have not read the whole article yet, but to me emotions are, fundamentally an immune response.

  As I have discovered that my mood disorder is in fact, an immune disorder, I am seeing this true in all aspects of emotions. In Bipolar Disorder they find the M1/M2 polarization of macrophages directly reflect the manic or depressive state.

  https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5220016/#:~:tex....

• by robg on 9/10/23, 2:19 PM

  Unfortunately the neurosciences diverged in the 1940s and 1950s when lobotomies became increasing common and emotions got tied to what you said based on what you felt. Psych-sciences have been apart from the neurosciences ever since. Better techniques like fMRI and EEGs have meant more data that’s not getting used in diagnosing and treating diseases.

  Meanwhile the adrenal cortex and the autonomic nervous system has been largely forgotten. It regulates how we feel every second of every day, even when we are asleep. Good luck being happy when you are overstressed and underslept.

• by nitwit005 on 9/10/23, 7:13 PM

  The problem is, this is a testable idea.

  If the body is key to emotion, such as the cited furrowing of the brow, then people with a sufficient injury to the related body parts should no longer be able to feel that emotion at all. You'd have literally cut it out of them.

  While such injuries do have profound effects, it hardly erases emotions.

• by jschveibinz on 9/10/23, 3:49 PM

  Related topic: the gut-brain connection. The gut is essentially a “second brain”:

  https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/wellness-and-preventi...

• by robg on 9/10/23, 2:21 PM

  Fun fact: William James was a professor of physiology at Harvard. Now William James Hall is a literal and figurative ivory tower on campus. How many students are taught that the status of the brain in their body affects learning, memory, attention, and critical decision making?

• by lo_zamoyski on 9/10/23, 10:36 AM

  A recommended book on the development of the crude concept of emotion [0].

  [0] https://www.amazon.com/gp/aw/d/0521026695

• by johnsmith4739 on 9/10/23, 7:25 PM

  If instinct is level 0 response mode/feedback loop (strictly cause-effect) and intellect/cognition/self-awareness is level 2 (capable to plan and analyse), emotions are level 1.

  Instinct is just good enough to survive, if you want more complex behaviours you need to use a dynamic memory that is able to learn new information, thus updating its behavioural sophistication. Emotions are just that - the emotional trigger is stimulus + "perceptual filter" => emotion.

  Multiple possible emotions, multiplies the complexity of a possible response: for a given scenario, because of the perceptual filter, one can feel different things: Stimulus: "i see a friend" + perceptual filter "it is a pleasure to spend time with old friends" => joy, a deactivating emotion (meaning that the behaviour it determines is one of 'staying in place and savour). Anger? perceptual filter: "this one owes me money". Etc.

  Basically, emotions are quick routines that tell you what to do in a given situation. instead of just cause - effect, there is a updatable memory that by learning can give way to more and more sophisticated behavioural responses. There is a part of cognition there, as much cognition as any animal that has emotions can deliver. The installation of new perceptual filters happens through learning, as much as a dog learning new tricks, for example.

  But let's shift focus on how this memory works - the emotional memory is a somatic one, if you want. We never feel emotions, we feel feelings, somatic elements, if you want. Blood boiling? Fists clenched? Anger! that is a somatic memory. A feeling-state, if you want. The whole software works like this: image acquired through senses -> cognitive assessment = threat -> emotional response = fear. At this point 2 things happen as the emotion was triggered: 1 - you feel the feelings related to the emotion, somatic element = knot in the stomach -> you respond to this feeling state by running - this is 2 - the behavioural response.

  How much the rest of the systems can affect our emotional responses? Just see how easy is to get angry when you're hungry (low blood sugar).

  Fun fact: people who lost the ability to experience emotions also lost the ability to take decisions. Why? Because decisions are taken emotionally: the brain runs by us a series of scenarios and the one that makes us feel optimistic that we will succeed is then implemented. This happens very fast because the memory can retrieve very easily associated patterns. Also this is experienced in cases of "l'appel du vide." In our case, to no avail, because due to no emotional responses to the retrieved scenarios, this loop doesn't break. And yes, this means that our subconscious brains take the decisions way before we are aware of them.

  </rant>