Experimentation on Emotion

Abstract

OF points where physiology and psychology touch, the place of one lies at the phenomenon “emotion.” Built upon sense-feeling much as cognition is built upon sense-perception, emotion may be regarded almost as a “feeling” —a “feeling” excited, not by a simple unelaborated sensation, but by a group or train of ideas. To such compound ideas it holds relation much as does “feeling” to certain species of simple sense-perceptions. It has a special physiological interest in that certain visceral reactions are peculiarly concomitant with it. Heart, blood-vessels, respiratory muscles and secretory glands play special and characteristic rôles in the various emotions. These viscera, though otherwise remote from the general play of psychical process, are affected vividly by the emotional. Hence many a picturesque metaphor of proverb and phrase and name— “the heart is better than the head,” anger “swells within the breast.” “Richard Coeur de Lion.” It was Descartes who first relegated the emotions to the brain. Even this century Bichat wrote, “The brain is the seat of cognition, and is never affected by the emotions, whose sole seat lies in the viscera.” But brain is now admittedly a factor necessary in all higher animal forms to every mechanism whose working has consciousness adjunct.