Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [103]
Yet the James-Lange theory is still highly regarded by psychologists. It was correct in postulating that emotions have physical causes, although more recent and more complex explanations are based on physiological research with animals and psychological research with humans; evidence from these studies indicates that the arousing stimulus activates autonomic nervous processes in the brain, sending signals both to the body and to the mind, while other evidence shows that the experience of emotion is often the joint result of physiological arousal and cognitive appraisal based on experience and the situation.60 Despite the James-Lange theory’s shortcomings, it has practical applications. To the degree that we control a physiological response to a stimulus, we govern the associated emotion. We count to ten to control rage, whistle to keep up courage, go running or play tennis to shake off depression. Many contemporary psychotherapists teach their patients to perform relaxation exercises to reduce anxiety or fear and to practice standing, walking, and talking in a confident manner to engender a feeling of confidence in themselves. In the 1980s the psychologist Paul Ekman and his colleagues at the University of California School of Medicine, San Francisco, showed that when volunteers consciously make facial expressions associated with certain emotions—surprise, disgust, sadness, anger, fear, happiness—they affect their heart rates and skin temperatures and induce in themselves a modicum of the appropriate emotion.61 The
Jamesian Paradoxes
Anyone who reads James’s psychological writings is bound to be frequently puzzled: James is always clear and persuasive, but often equally so on opposing sides of an issue. He is chronically self-contradictory, not out of muddleheadedness but because he is intellectually too expansive to be confined within a closed or consistent system of thought. Gordon Allport, a leading psychological researcher and theorist of several decades ago, summed up James’s chameleonlike qualities:
In the Principles alone, we find brilliant, baffling, unashamed contradictions. He is, for example, both a positivist and a phenomenologist. On Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays, he points in the direction of behaviorism and positivism, although he seems more exuberantly natural on Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays, and Sundays, when he writes about the stream of consciousness, the varieties of religious experience, and the moral equivalent for war.62
Allport, however, found this inconsistency a virtue. He spoke of James’s “productive paradoxes”; seeing both sides of a question often laid open the kernel of a problem and left it ready for others to work on.63
But the result was that James’s influence on psychology, though great, was fragmented; though pervasive, was never dominant. James avoided creating a system, founded no school, trained few graduate students, and had no band of followers. Remarkably, however, a number of his ideas became part of mainstream psychology, particularly in America. Wundt won out over James as far as laboratory methods and experimentation were concerned; James’s psychology, with its richness, realism, and pragmatism, won out over the Wundtian system.64 As Raymond Fancher has said:
James transformed psychology from a somewhat recondite and abstract science that some students avoided because of the difficulty of introspective methodology, into a discipline that spoke directly to personal interests and concerns. James’s characterization of psychology as a “nasty little subject” that excludes all one would want to know is nowhere more clearly belied than in his own textbooks on psychology.65
Outside the mainstream, James influenced psychology in two other respects, both of them practical. One: His suggested applications of psychological principles to teaching became the core of educational psychology. The other: In 1909, James, as an executive committee member of the National Committee for Mental Hygiene, was largely responsible for getting the Rockefeller Foundation