William James and my opinion on the james-lange theory.
Hi dear steemians!
Psychology has given birth to a large number of theories and theoretical models through which it seeks to explain human behavior.
These are concrete proposals that in most cases only seek to explain a small plot of the set of topics that psychology can explain, since they are based on the work that has been carried out by many researchers months, years and decades ago. However, all this framework of proposals had to start at some point where we knew almost nothing about how we behave and perceive things.
And this time I want to have a little interest on this important theory and some objections that I have had in mind and I want to share them with you besides talking a little about this great psychologist, Regards.
What was it like to face the study of Psychology in those years? What was it that had to lay the foundations of modern psychology?
To answer these questions it is convenient to look back and review the life and work of William James, a philosopher and psychologist who set out to investigate one of the most basic and universal concepts in regard to the study of the mind: consciousness.
Who was William James?
The life of William James began as that of any representative of the American upper classes. He was born in 1842 in New York, in the bosom of a well-to-do family, and the fact of being able to avail himself of the considerable financial resources of his parents allowed him to train in good schools, both in the United States and in Europe, and get soaked in the different tendencies and philosophical and artistic currents that characterized each place visited. His father, moreover, was a famous theologian very well connected, and the bourgeois culture that surrounded the whole family probably helped that William James was ambitious when it was time to set vital goals.
In short, William James had everything to become a well-positioned person: the material resources and also the influences of the New York elites related to his relatives accompanied him in it. However, although in 1864 he began to study medicine at Harvard, a series of academic parentheses and health complications meant that he did not finish his studies until 1869 and, in any case, he never got to practice as a doctor.
There was another area of study that called his attention: the binomial formed between Philosophy and Psychology, two disciplines that in the nineteenth century had not yet separated completely and that at that time studied matters related to the soul and thought.
The William James psychologist is born...
In 1873, William James returned to Harvard to teach Psychology and Philosophy. Certain things had changed since he graduated in medicine. He had submitted his life experience to a philosophical examination, and he had taken such great pains to see that he had the strength to become a professor despite not having received formal education on the subject.
However, despite not having attended philosophy classes, the topics he was interested in were of the type that had marked the beginnings of the history of great thinkers. Since he could not base his studies on previous research in Psychology because it had not yet been consolidated, he focused on studying consciousness and emotional states. This is, two universal themes and intimately linked with philosophy and epistemology to be present in all our ways of interacting with the environment.
Now...
The James Theory - Lange: Do we cry because we are sad or are we sad because we cry?
Having made these basic considerations about what is and what is not consciousness, William James could begin to propose concrete mechanisms by which our thought flows guide our behavior. One of these contributions is the Theory of James - Lange, devised by him and Carl Lange almost simultaneously, according to which the emotions appear from the consciousness of the own physiological states.
So, for example, we do not smile because we are happy, but we are happy because our conscience has been informed that we are smiling. In the same way, we do not run because something has scared us, but we feel scared because we see that we are running away.
This is a theory that goes against the conventional way in which we conceive the functioning of our nervous system and our thoughts, and the same happened in the late nineteenth century. Today, however, we know that it is most likely that William James and Carl Lange have only part of reason, since we consider that the cycle between perception (seeing something that scares us) and action (running) is so fast and with so many neural interactions in one direction and another that one can not speak of a causal chain in only one sense. We run because we are scared, and we are also scared because we run.
Talk about Emotions
According to this theory, if a certain physiological response is provoked, it will contribute to the emotion, even if the physiological response is inhibited as well as the emotion will cease to be experienced.
For example, crying in front of an event would provoke the experience of an emotion of grief. On the contrary, if we avoid the response of crying, it would provoke a different emotional experience.
At present, the control of physiological responses has been used as a psychotherapeutic strategy for the management of emotions.
Emotion: produced by the feelings that cause us to be aware of the bodily changes that occur after a stimulus. Thanks to the varied changes and the combinations of which these organic activities are susceptible, it is possible in an abstract way, that no nuance of Emotion, no matter how slight, occurs without a corporal repercussion too, takes in its totality as the mental state itself.
The importance of corporal expression lies with James in that if we represent a strong emotion and immediately try to abstract from the consciousness that we have all the sensations of his bodily symptoms, we find that we have nothing left.
Sensation: occurs through the nervous system. Each emotion is the result of a sum of elements, and each element is caused by a specific physiological process.
From the moment in which the genesis of an emotion is explained as the awakening by an exciting object, a number of reflex actions that are immediately felt, we immediately see why there are no limits in the number of different emotions that can be experienced, and that the emotions of different individuals can vary indefinitely at the same time as to their constitution.
Objections to the Theory:
- 1 First Objection: There is no evident proof in support of the postulate that particular perceptions actually produce bodily effects prior to the appearance of an emotion or an emotional idea.
- 2 Second Objection: All voluntary and calm production of the alleged manifestations of a special emotion, should give us this same emotion.
- 3 Third Objection: The manifestation of an emotion, far from increasing it, makes it cease. (We must remember that the emotion while it is expressing does not stop, what happens is that the nervous centers are running out, so fatigue leads to calmness, but it is not that emotion is erased).
Delicate emotions
Be understood as moral, intellectual and aesthetic feelings. Feelings that are due to the form, under which ideas can be combined.
The aesthetic emotion is pure and simple, the pleasure that certain lines cause us, certain masses, certain combinations of colors and sounds, is an absolutely sensitive fact.
Emotion and knowledge appear dissociated, and feeling is almost completely absent as far as we can judge, of the brain processes as long as they do not ask for help from the lower parts.
There are no special brain centers for emotion
A stimulus excites a sensory organ, affects the cortical part and is perceived, or this last part excited internally gives birth to the idea of this object.
The nervous currents descend through their pre-established ways modifying the state of the muscles, of the skin and of the viscera, and these modifications perceived as the original object, in other so many parts of the cortex, combine with it in a state of consciousness and transform it, from an object simply represented in an emotionally felt object.
Emotional differences between individuals
We can remember that we have experienced some emotion in the past, for example sorrow, but not in the exact way we have felt it. Which means that we can arouse grief (or any emotion) by simply looking for a new pain (or any emotion) that evokes a new living idea of the cause.
The cause is no more than an idea but this idea produces the same organic radiations or almost the same as the original idea, in such a way that the emotion is again a reality.
Sweet dreams friends.
Summary references:
- https://www.biography.com/people/william-james-9352726
- https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-James
- https://www.thefamouspeople.com/profiles/william-james-117.php
- https://www.verywellmind.com/what-is-the-james-lange-theory-of-emotion-2795305
- https://www.psychologynoteshq.com/jameslangetheoryofemotion/
- own analysis