Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [320]
Yet studies in succeeding decades, down to the present, continued to find evidence that in limited ways the James-Lange theory is correct. Three examples:
—A medical team at the Washington University School of Medicine found in 1969 that injections of lactate (a byproduct of energy metabolism in the cells) produce the physiological symptoms associated with anxiety plus the subjective sensation of anxiety, the latter most strongly in those who are anxiety-prone.23
—In 1966 George Hohmann, a psychologist who was a paraplegic because of a spinal injury, interviewed twenty-five war veterans, all of whom had suffered severed spinal cords two years or more earlier. Hohmann asked them to describe episodes of fear, anger, sexual excitement, and grief experienced both before and since their injuries. They said that, except for grief, their emotions were different since the severing of the spine; there was a decline in quality, a muting or coldness to their feelings. Strikingly, the higher the lesion—and therefore the greater the number of body systems disconnected from the brain—the greater the change. As one man with a cervical (high) lesion said:
I sit around and build things up in my mind, and I worry a lot, but it’s not much but the power of thought. I was at home in bed one day and dropped a cigarette where I couldn’t reach it. I finally managed to scrounge around and put it out. I could have burned up right there, but the funny thing is, I didn’t get all shook up about it. I just didn’t feel afraid at all, like you would suppose.24
—Psychologists have long debated whether emotions are universal or relative; that is, whether people in different cultures feel the same feelings. For more than two decades, Paul Ekman of the University of California, San Francisco, Medical School, and his colleagues have studied the matter. They asked people in different cultures to express six basic emotions (anger, disgust, happiness, sadness, fear, and surprise), and found that their facial expressions were basically similar, though somewhat modified by cultural rules. Both Ekman and his colleagues, and Carroll Izard of the University of Delaware, have shown to people in a number of very different cultures photographs of actors expressing a number of emotions. Almost always, the viewers identified them correctly.
While there are major differences in the cultural situations evoking particular emotions, the evidence strongly suggests that the basic emotions are universal and are accompanied by the same movements of facial muscles.25
This does not prove that physical sensations precede the perception of emotion, as James and Lange posited. But more than a dozen experiments by Ekman and by others have shown that when volunteers deliberately assume the facial expression of a particular emotion, the muscular efforts involved create small but measurable changes in pulse rate, respiration rate, and skin conductance, along with equally small but measurable changes in their feelings.26 Ekman considers these results a feedback effect: the deliberately assumed expression brings about bodily changes, which then create the emotional feeling the person has simulated.
The same principle sometimes enables psychotherapists to alter the emotions of patients. By changing facial expression, posture, and body movements, the patient can to some extent replace a despondent or defeated mood with a more positive and cheerful one.27 Again, this supports the James-Lange theory: What we sense in the body determines our feelings. (Make the experiment yourself. Wreathe