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Four Theories of Emotion

Introduction

In this chapter, I shall compare and contrast some existing accounts of emotion. I am not going to try to present a comprehensive survey of the field: that would be a mammoth task. Rather, I shall focus on just four accounts (with a very brief nod to a fifth). The accounts that I have chosen represent some key positions in the philosophy of emotion, and they have played a crucial role in shaping the current debate. In investigating these accounts, I shall try to draw out some particular points of comparison and contrast. This will enable me to flag up some fundamental questions that have helped to drive the philosophical debate about emotion - questions that I shall pursue in the chapters that follow. It will allow me, too, to provide some background to the discussions later in the book, helping to put them in a broader context. As I go, I shall flag up some objections that have been raised to the accounts that I describe; but detailed critical discussion is a task for later chapters.

I shall begin with the philosopher and psychologist William James. James's account, developed at the end of the nineteenth century, has played a pivotal role in the history of the topic: many of the theories that followed can be seen as reacting in one way or another to his views. I shall then move on to consider the views of three more recent theorists: Robert Solomon, Peter Goldie and Jesse Prinz; I shall also make very brief reference to the views of the psychologist Paul Ekman.

William James: Emotions as Bodily Feelings

James's Hypothesis

In 1890, James published The Principles of Psychology. The book included a bold new thesis about the nature of emotion.1 James does not simply assert his thesis: rather, he presents it as a hypothesis, standing in need of empirical confirmation. He begins by focusing on what he calls the 'coarser' emotions. These are emotions that nearly everyone believes involve bodily changes. They include, he says, fear, rage, grief and love:

Our natural way of thinking about these coarser emotions is that the mental perception of some fact excites the mental affection called the emotion, and that this latter state of mind gives rise to the bodily expression. My theory, on the contrary, is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion. (James, 1890: 449-50, italics in the original)

To understand what James means, it helps to think about a particular case. Consider Alice's angry reaction to the slamming door, described in Chapter 1. Hearing the door slam causes Alice to undergo certain bodily changes: her heart speeds up, her muscles tense; she frowns and clenches her fists. These bodily changes, in turn, produce certain bodily feelings: Alice feels tense and agitated. But where in this sequence of events is Alice's anger to be found? According to James, we naturally suppose that Alice's anger sits between her hearing the door slam and the bodily and behavioural changes that follow: the slamming door causes Alice's anger; and her anger, in turn, causes her to tense up and frown. James thinks that this gets things the wrong way round. The true order of events is this: the slamming door causes Alice to tense up and frown; and these bodily changes, in turn, cause Alice's anger. This is because, in James's view, Alice's anger consists of the feelings produced by the bodily changes. Hence her anger is the effect, not the cause, of those bodily changes.

Although James begins by making this claim specifically about the coarser emotions, it soon becomes clear that he thinks it is true of the 'subtler' emotions too. These include, for example, wonder or admiration at the aesthetic qualities of a work of art, at the intellectual qualities of a mathematical proof, or at the moral qualities of another person. In these cases, also, James thinks, 'the bodily sounding board is at work' (James, 1890: 471). According to James, then, an emotion is essentially a feeling; and, in particular, it is a bodily feeling. On this view, anger, fear, grief and love can be compared with other types of bodily feeling, such as pain, nausea, drowsiness or hunger. These bodily feelings, he thinks, are not bare sensations, devoid of meaning: rather they are ways in which we perceive or become aware of changes that are happening in our bodies.

The Causes of Emotion: Bodily Changes

What kinds of bodily change give rise to emotions, according to James? They include internal, physiological changes - for example, the quickening of the pulse and tensing of the muscles. But James also refers to various kinds of expressive behaviour: blushes, tears, flared nostrils and gritted teeth. In describing rage, he mentions what seems to be a motivational change - an impulse to violent action. This diversity, he thinks, helps to explain the extraordinary richness and subtlety of emotional experience (James, 1890: 450-2).

These bodily changes, James holds, are typically instinctive, automatic reactions to a particular type of situation or event - like blinking in sunlight or flinching at a loud noise. This is not to say, though, that our bodily responses to changes in our environment are necessarily innate or hard-wired. How an individual reacts to a particular situation, he suggests, depends on a range of factors, including their personal history. When a walker meets a bear in the wood, 'fight or flight' is likely to be the default reaction; but someone who is familiar with bears might well react quite differently - with curiosity and pleasure. The walker's emotional response, James says, is a response not just to the bear, but to the total situation; and this includes their past experiences (James, 1884: 454, 518).

Nor does James hold that these bodily changes are wholly outside our control. Just as we can put off blinking or hold our breath, we can control the bodily changes that generate our emotions. This is significant, he thinks, because it means that we are able to control our emotions too. Admittedly, James's theory implies that we have no direct control over our emotions: once Alice's heart is racing, her teeth are clenched, and so on, she cannot help feeling these changes, any more than she can help feeling pain if she cuts her hand. Nevertheless, James thinks, she can still try to overcome her anger by controlling the changes that are happening in her body: by making an effort to relax, to breathe more slowly and to smile, she can cause herself to feel more relaxed and friendly. Conversely, she might deliberately stoke up her anger by exaggerating her angry frown and posture, by shouting or shaking the desk (James, 1890: 462-3). On James's account, then, we can control our emotions indirectly - by controlling the bodily changes that cause them.

James's Argument

As we have seen, James gives pride of place to emotion's phenomenology - how it feels. He emphasizes, too, the role of the body in generating emotional experience. This is not to say that he locates emotions in the body. Emotions, for James, are not bodily changes, but bodily feelings, and these are psychological states. Nor does he think that emotions are simply 'gut feelings': they are generated by a range of physiological and behavioural changes, which produce a rich and subtle range of emotional experience.

Why, though, does James think that this is the right view to take? His argument relies on the claim that feeling is what is essential to emotion:

If we fancy some strong emotion, and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind, no 'mind stuff' out of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains..What kind of an emotion of fear would be left if the feeling neither of quickened heart-beats nor of shallow breathing, neither of trembling lips nor of weakened limbs, neither of gooseflesh, nor of visceral stirrings, were present, it is quite impossible for me to think..In like manner of grief: what would it be without its tears, its sobs, its suffocation of the heart, its pang in the breastbone? A feelingless cognition that something is deplorable and nothing more. (James, 1890: 452, italics in the original)

Exactly the same point, James thinks, can be made about the 'subtler' emotional responses:

[U]nless we actually laugh at the neatness of the demonstration or witticism; unless we actually thrill at the case of justice or tingle at the act of magnanimity; our state of mind can hardly be called emotional at all. It is in fact a mere intellectual perception of how certain things are to be called - neat, right, witty, generous and the like. (James, 1890: 471)

Without feeling, James thinks, there would be no emotion, but only a dispassionate thought or judgement of some kind. And this, he thinks, is reason enough to conclude that the emotion is the feeling.

Some Worries for James

There are several kinds of objection that might be raised to James's view. First, it is important to remember that he presents his account as an empirical hypothesis, which might be disproved by scientific evidence. Indeed, he mentions a...