Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [319]
Carney Landis, a psychologist interested in the physiological sources of severe emotional upsets, must have been a remarkable salesman. In the early 1920s, he was able to persuade three volunteers to fast for forty-eight hours, go without sleep for the last thirty-six of them, be hooked up to blood-pressure and chest-expansion monitors, swallow a small balloon attached to a rubber tube to allow gastric contractions to be measured, have a similar device inserted into their rectums, and breathe into an apparatus that measured their carbon dioxide output as an index of metabolic rate—and at that point receive an electric shock as strong as they could bear without struggling until they signaled that they could stand it no longer.
The shock caused the blood pressure to shoot up, the pulse to race and become irregular, and the rectal contractions to cease. (The data on stomach contractions were not consistent.) But despite the volunteers’ commendable suffering for science, the results of the procedure were unclear. Although all three said they felt anger, they had little or no awareness of any specific physiological changes associated with and possibly causing the emotion. The only physical response Landis could find that regularly corresponded to a subjective state was that of surprise. An eye blink and a complex facial-bodily reaction immediately preceded awareness of the emotion and that, at least, was in accord with the James-Lange theory.20
But by 1927 other physiological experiments were yielding powerful evidence that contradicted the theory. They were the work of Walter Cannon (1871–1945), a distinguished investigator and theorist. Cannon was, like John B. Watson and James Gibson, one of those impecunious small-town youths who, though lacking important connections, was able in that era to scale the scientific heights through hard work and genius. He published research papers that attracted wide attention even before receiving his M.D. at Harvard, and, without any close links such as William James had had to the powers at that university, was appointed its George Higginson Professor of Physiology at the age of only thirty-five.
Although Cannon’s discipline was physiology, he had studied under James and was a friend of Robert Yerkes. It may have been these influences that led him, after years of exploring the control of digestion by the ANS, to turn to the physiology of the emotions. After much investigation, he came to regard the James-Lange theory as thoroughly wrong, and in 1927 he published a historic paper that seemingly demolished it.21 In the paper he offered five kinds of evidence based on his own and others’ research. Of the five, the following three were particularly convincing:
—Visceral changes usually occur one to two seconds after a stimulus, but emotional reactions generally take less time; they therefore precede the physical changes. (Although this was based on laboratory evidence, it is a common experience that immediately after a near-accident we feel fear—after which our heart pounds, we feel weak, we have a strange taste in our mouth, and more.)
—There are some differences among the visceral responses associated with various emotions, but they are not so differentiated or sensitive as to provide distinctive cues for the range of emotions that human beings experience.
—Cannon surgically severed the viscera of cats from the sympathetic nervous system, as C. S. Sherrington, a British physiologist, had previously done with dogs. In both cases all messages from the heart, lungs, stomach, bowels, and other viscera in which, according to James, emotions originate, were cut off from the brain. Nonetheless, wrote Cannon:
These extensively disturbing operations had little if any effect on the emotional