PSYC18H3 Chapter Notes - Chapter 5: Rectum, Small Intestine, Large Intestine
Document Summary
Until 1884, people argued that the experience of an emotion follows the perception of an emotionally exciting event. Emotional experience, in turn, generates emotion-related bodily changes. William james (principal founder of american psychology) changed this he located the origins of emotional experience in the body. He contended that at emotionally exciting fact provokes bodily responses, which in turn lead to the experience of emotion. He said that every emotion involves a distinct bodily reverberation detected by the autonomic nervous system and by neural signals from the workings of our muscles. If you took away the physiological sensations of an emotion, james argued you would only be left with an intellectual state. His counterintuitive analysis points to five questions: Is the body really the primary organ of emotional experience. Neural signals from the cortex communicate with the limbic system and the hypothalamus. These brain regions send signals through ans neurons to the target organs, glands, muscles, and blood vessels.