William James wrote that he would ‘as lief read verbal descriptions of the shapes of the rocks on a New Hampshire farm’ as toil again through the classic works on emotion, which lacked a ‘central point of view, a deductive or generative principle’. Over one hundred years after James’s (1884) famous essay in Mind, we are still debating the issues posed by James, in particular the role of physiological changes in emotions, and the central components that determine an emotion. Since James, many theories of emotion and definitions of emotion have been advanced, but there is still a lack of consensus on central issues that preoccupy the emotion area. This diversity of views is due partly to an upsurge during the past two decades of interest in emotion from scholars in different disciplines, all advocating a particular perspective on emotions. In this respect the area of emotion research has changed from a situation in which physiologists and psychologists dominated the field, to a multidisciplinary endeavour in which sociologists and anthropologists are also heavily engaged.
The issues that preoccupy modern emotion theory are in some respects similar to those that arose from James’s theory of emotion. Three major disputes may be distinguished. The first concerns the role of physiological changes in emotion. James advocated what has come to be called a peripheral theory of emotion, in which he argued that the perception of an arousing stimulus causes changes in peripheral organs such as the viscera (heart, lungs, stomach, and so on) and the voluntary muscles, and that emotion is quite simply the perception of these bodily changes. To use James’s own example, it is not that we tremble and run because we are afraid; rather, we are afraid because we tremble and run. This view clearly implies that there should be as many discrete patterns of physiological activity accompanying emotion as there are discernible emotional states. Cannon (1927) published what was widely regarded as a devastating critique of James’s theory, although subsequent research has shown that some of Cannon’s objections were ill founded. Although Cannon’s critique reduced the influence of James’s peripheral theory of emotion, this theory has by no means been completely discarded. In particular, the idea that the perception of bodily changes may elicit an emotion still inspires various contemporary researchers. Indeed, there is recent experimental evidence (Laird and Bresler 1992; Strack, Martin and Stepper 1988) that the induction of a mere posture or facial expression may elicit or enhance emotional feelings. However, evidence for the existence of discrete physiological patterns that differentiate the various emotions is still rather weak and this limits the extent to which James’s ideas are accepted by modern researchers.
The essence of Cannon’s critique was that the visceral changes that occur during emotion are too non-specific to serve as the basis for differentiated emotional experience. This point led later researchers to abandon the search for an explanation of emotion couched exclusively in terms of bodily changes, and to consider more carefully the role played by cognitive factors—the individual’s interpretation of external and internal events.
There are several theories that pay attention to cognitive factors, and the question of the precise role played by cognition in emotion is a second major issue in current emotion theory and research. A classic theory is Schachter’s (1964) two-factor theory. Schachter reasoned that the mere awareness of bodily changes does not necessarily result in emotional experience: emotion is the joint product of two factors, namely a general state of physiological arousal, and the cognition that this arousal is caused by an emotional stimulus. The arousal creates the condition necessary for any emotion to be experienced, while the cognition determines which emotion is actually experienced. Thus the same physiological arousal could, in principle, be experienced as any of a variety of emotions, depending on cognitive factors. Although this theory has an appealing elegance and simplicity, there is little evidence to support it (Manstead and Wagner 1981). More complex cognitive theories are proposed by Lazarus and his associates (Lazarus and Folkman 1984) and others (e.g. Frijda 1986). They agree that emotions should be seen as temporally extended processes in which cognitions are one of the central components. More specifically, people appraise their circumstances with respect to their well-being, and these appraisals elicit different emotions. This means that different emotions can be distinguished by different appraisal patterns. Indeed, there is abundant evidence that emotions are characterized by different patterns of appraisal. For example, anger is associated with the appraisal of a negative event caused by another person who is held responsible for this, whereas anxiety is characterized by a negative event with an uncertain outcome, and which is mainly situationally caused; guilt is linked to the appraisal of a negative event for which one blames oneself. Although there is consensus about the major dimensions of these appraisal patterns, debates in the early 1990s centred on the question of whether the role of appraisal really is a causal one (Parkinson and Manstead 1992). Much of the empirical evidence does not preclude a different conclusion, namely that appraisal is the result of the emotion, rather than its cause.
The third major issue governing current emotion research is concerned with its social and cultural aspects. One important question that elicits much theorizing and research is whether emotions are universal or culturally specific phenomena. The advocates of basic emotions (e.g. Ekman 1992) claim that there are a few basic emotions (among others fear, anger, sadness, happiness and disgust) that are expressed in similar ways across cultures and can therefore be recognized universally. Evidence for this claim comes mainly from studies on facial expressions: photographs showing faces posing particular emotional expressions appeared to be correctly recognized by people from a great variety of cultures (Ekman 1982). However, both theoretical and methodological objections have been raised against this view (Russell 1994). The opposite of the basic emotion view is defended by theorists who argue that emotions are simply social constructions. Harré (1986), for example, reasons that in order to gain more insight into emotions, we have merely to study the emotion vocabularies in different cultures. Although there is evidence that the richness, size and content of emotion language differs from one culture to another, there is little support for the view that emotion language is the major determinant of what we feel. However, emotions are influenced by social and cultural factors. Research, much of it conducted by sociologists and cultural anthropologists, has shown how culture socializes our emotions by means of emotion rules, beliefs about emotions, emotion rituals, and so on. Thus, the answer to the question of the cultural-specificity versus universality of emotions seems to lie somewhere in the middle: there are both cross-cultural similarities and differences in emotions. What one finds depends on the level of analysis and the specific aspects of emotions that are taken into account (Mesquita and Frijda 1992).
Agneta H.Fischer
University of Amsterdam
Antony S.R.Manstead
University of Amsterdam
References
Cannon, W.B. (1927) ‘The James-Lange theory of emotions: a critical examination and an alternative theory’, American Journal of Psychology 39.
Ekman, P. (ed.) (1982) Emotion in the Human Face, 2nd edn, Cambridge, UK.
——(1992) ‘An argument for basic emotions’, Cognition and Emotion 6.
Frijda, N.H. (1986) The Emotions, Cambridge, UK.
Harré, R. (ed.) (1986) The Social Construction of Emotions, Oxford.
James, W. (1884) ‘What is an emotion?’, Mind 5.
Laird, J.D. and Bresler, C. (1992) The Process of Emotional Experience: A Self-Perception Theory’, in M.S.Clark (ed.) Emotion(Review of Personality and Social Psychology 13).
Lazarus, R.S. and Folkman, S. (1984) Stress, Appraisal and Coping, New York.
Manstead, A.S.R. and Wagner, H.L. (1981) ‘Arousal, cognition and emotion: an appraisal of two-factor theory’, Current Psychological Reviews 1.
Mesquita, B. and Frijda, N.H. (1992) ‘Cultural variations in emotions: a review’, Psychological Bulletin 112.
Parkinson, B. and Manstead, A.S.R. (1992) ‘Appraisal as a cause of emotion’, in M.S.Clark (ed.) Emotion(Review of Personality and Social Psychology 13).
Russell, J.A. (1994) ‘Is there universal recognition of emotion from facial expression? A review of cross-cultural studies’, Psychological Bulletin 115.
Schachter, S. (1964) ‘The interaction of cognitive and physiological determinants of emotional state’, in L.Berkowitz (ed.) Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, vol. I, New York.
Strack, F., Martin, L.L. and Stepper, S. (1988) ‘Inhibiting and Facilitating Conditions of the Human Smile: A Non-obtrusive Test of the Facial Feedback Hypothesis’, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 54.
Further reading
Frijda, N.H. (1986) The Emotions, Cambridge, UK.
Oatley, K. (1992) Best Laid Schemes, Cambridge, UK.
