PSYC 311 Chapter Notes - Chapter 11.8: Mirror Neuron, Classical Conditioning
9 Jun 2016
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The final aspect of emotion that needs to be examined is the subjective component of emotions, i. e. feelings of emotions. The james-lange theory states that emotion-producing situations elicit an appropriate set of physiological responses. The brain receives sensory feedback from the muscles and from the organs that produce these responses, and it is this feedback that constitutes our feeling of emotion. The patterns of emotional responses and the expressions of emotions give rise to the feelings of emotion: this can be counterintuitive to the feeling that emotions are experience directly and internally. Cannon criticized this theory: he stated the internal organs are not very sensitive and could not respond quickly and thus feedback from these organs could not account for feelings. James" theory is difficult to verify experimentally because it attempts to explain feelings which are private events. Thus, his emotional reaction was altered by surgery.
