PSYC18H3 Chapter 5: Book/ Chapter 5
Document Summary
William james turned the field of research on emotions on its head. Most writers until that time had argued that the experience of an emotion follows the perception of an emotionally exciting event. James altered this sequence locating the origins of emotional experience in the body. He contended that an emotionally exciting fact provokes bodily responses, which in turn lead to the experience of an emotion. My thesis, he said, is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion. It is that every emotion, from anger to sympathy to the rapturous delight of hearing a favourite musician, involves a distinct bodily reverberation detected by the autonomic nervous system and by neural signals from the workings of our muscles. James"s rather counterintuitive analysis points to five questions.
