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The emotion comes before the feeling
The bear and the feeling
That sequence describes the conscious experience of emotion well, and it depends on perceiving every change in the body. The insula, a part of cortex that gets input from the heart, liver, kidney, and other organs, is a leading candidate for the substrate of that experience. The same region handles nausea, pain, and the tight chest of sadness.
What counts as emotion
Something has to trigger the changes in the body and the running in the first place. That is the emotion: a state that motivates the behaviors and all the bodily changes, while the conscious experience may come later and unfold over time.
Studying without consciousness
Defining emotion by how it feels would turn the study of emotion into the study of consciousness, and there is currently no scientific way to test whether animals have conscious experiences. Vision and memory are studied in horseshoe crabs without anyone needing to settle that question. Emotion can be studied the same way, across mice, flies, and humans.
How did experiments test James's idea?
In 1962 psychologists Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer injected volunteers with epinephrine, which raises heart rate, and then placed them with an actor who behaved either euphorically or angrily. The volunteers reported feelings that matched the actor's mood, which the researchers took as evidence that the body's arousal gets its emotional label from context. Later attempts to replicate the results have been mixed. The study remains a classic in the history of emotion research.
Why are horseshoe crabs used in vision research?
The horseshoe crab Limulus has large photoreceptor units in its compound eyes, and each one feeds a nerve fiber thick enough for a single fiber to be recorded. Physiologist Haldan Keffer Hartline used those fibers beginning in the 1930s to show how a single visual cell responds to light. He also found lateral inhibition, in which a stimulated cell dampens its neighbors and sharpens contrast. Hartline shared the 1967 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for this work on the eye.
Who else proposed the same theory?
Danish physician Carl Lange put forward a very similar idea in 1885, working independently of William James. Lange stressed changes in the blood vessels as the source of emotion. The two accounts were later combined and became known as the James-Lange theory. Physiologist Walter Cannon criticized the theory in the 1920s, arguing that bodily changes were too slow and too similar across emotions.
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