PSYC18H3 Chapter 5: Chapter 5 Textbook
Document Summary
william james contended that an emotionally exciting fact provokes bodily responses, which in turn lead to the experience of emotion. My thesis 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 . that every emotion, from anger to sympathy to the rapturous delight of hearing a favorite musician, involves a distinct bodily reverberation detected by the autonomic nervous system and by neural signals from the workings of our muscles. neural signals from the cortex communicate with the limbic system and the hypothalamus. these brain regions send signals through clusters of neurons of the autonomic nervous system to the target organs, glands, muscles, and blood vessels. these structures, in turn, send signals back via the autonomic nervous system to the hypothalamus, limbic system, and cortex.
