Psychology 101: Intro to Psychology

Have you ever wondered how your emotions are related to your physical reactions? Does your heart beat fast because you're excited, or are you excited because your heart is beating fast? Psychologists have taken a turn at figuring out how our the physiological reactions are connected to emotions. Take a look at this lesson for more on the most important theories of emotion.

So we're going to talk about theories of emotion. What a lot of the most prominent ones are trying to do, they're trying to parse out the exact nature of the relationship between physical sensations and what's going on in your mind. They're trying to figure out how the body and the mind are related to each other and influence each other in the experience of emotion. So we're going to go through some of the theories and trace how thinking about this has changed over time, sort of where we've gotten to now in terms of how much is physical and how much is mental in the experience of emotion.

So we're going to start out with what's known as the James-Lange theory of emotion. This is named after two psychologists, William James and Carl Lange, and basically what they believed was that physiological things - physiological arousal they called it, that would be a racing heart when you're scared. They think that the physiological part of that, so the actual racing heart, actually comes before you feel scared. So the body is doing things before the mind tells you that you're scared. It's an interesting theory and it certainly has a lot of merit and we'll see how it comes back in some of the later theories, but it has some obvious problems.

The first problem is that different physiological symptoms can be associated with all kinds of emotions. I used the example of racing heart and fear, but a racing heart can happen for all sorts of reasons that aren't just fear. Even if you're just really attracted to someone or you get excited because you're about to compete, those aren't fear (well, they could be fear), but they're love, they're excitement. So a racing heart is a non-specific symptom that can be associated with lots of things. So there's clearly something else going on in the experience of emotion.

Another problem is that your body actually can react relatively slowly compared to how quickly you can identify an emotion. So sometimes your body wouldn't have sent the signals to feel a certain way before you might notice that you're feeling sad, for example. It isn't always the case, but sometimes that's the case. So again, there's more going on; the physiological part is definitely a huge role, but there's more going on than just that.

The next people who came up with a unified way of thinking about this were two psychologists called Walter Cannon and Philip Bard and they developed, predictably, the Cannon-Bard theory of emotion. This was a direct response to James Lange; they were looking at that and they were like, 'We're gonna come up with our own theory. We're gonna say that you experience emotions at the same time as you experience physiological arousal.' The racing heart and the fear, those are happening at the same time that you see the spider, and immediately you're feeling scared and your heart is racing. That's what Cannon and Bard are thinking.

You can see this doesn't have as much weight and thought behind it and some of the problems are still there. How can that really happen at the same time? Why the racing heart and all these different emotions? This theory still has problems although it's trying to address some of the problems that were present in James Lange.

So the final theory we're going to talk about is the one that's the most modern and most comprehensive. The two-factor model is named after another pair of dudes - they're not just named Two and Factor, sorry. It's also called the Schachter-Singer model. It's named after two dudes named Stanley Schacter and Jerome Singer. The two-factor model is kind of a modification on James Lange; it's a similar idea, which is that we experience the physiological arousal (the racing heart, the sweating, then you process the context that you're in to figure out what you should be feeling.

In the example of the fear versus love versus excitement, if my heart was racing and I was about to jump in the pool to start a race, with that context, my brain is going to say, 'Oh, wait a second, I'm feeling physiologically aroused. What's going on? Oh, I'm about to do a race; I'm probably excited, I'm probably not terrified or in love.'

They did a really interesting experiment to figure this out and tease all these factors apart. What they did, they had someone come in and they told him he was going to do an eye test and they were going to give him a drug to make him better at it. What they actually gave him was adrenaline. You can imagine that would make you feel pretty funky and you would know that something was going on if you got shot with adrenaline. You're probably going to know. No, people did not actually know, it's kind of amazing. Because what they did is they told some people - they didn't tell them it was adrenaline - but they told them that the side effects of this thing they were injecting them with are going to make you jittery, going to make your heart race, they're going to give them all the symptoms that adrenaline would give you. They told some people that it would have side effects that weren't that, and to some people, they said it wouldn't have any side effects at all.

And then what they did is they put these people, as they were waiting to do their eye test, they put them in a waiting room with a stooge (a guy the researchers hired) and they had this guy act either really entertaining and funny or really annoying and aggravating.

And what they found was that the people who knew that they were supposed to be feeling physiologically aroused - they knew that their hearts would be going and stuff like that - their moods were the least affected by the guy being really annoying or being really funny.

The people who had no idea that they were going to feel side effects and the people who were misinformed about the side effects, when they were sitting in the room with they guy who was being really annoying, they got super mad. And when they were sitting in the room with the guy who was being entertaining, they got super happy. What was going on here was that they were feeling the same side effects, the same symptoms of the adrenaline as the people who knew they were going to be feeling that, but since they didn't understand what was going on, they processed their context to say, 'Oh yeah, this guy must be making me laugh; this guy must be making me angry,' even though it was just the drug. So you see they had the physiological feeling, but they don't know where it comes from so they have to process it by context.

And that's the same thing as when I was saying before: if I were feeling amped up and I realized I was about to run a race instead of running from a bear, I feel excitement rather than fear. These people felt angry or really happy more so than the people who had the same drug but knew that the drug was making them feel amped up.

So I know that's kind of long and complicated but it's really important for thinking about how we process emotion and this was really the seminal experiment for Schachter and Singer to develop this two-factor model. And what they called this cognitive processing was appraisal. The people who were in the condition where they were with the annoying guy, they were basically deciding that they were feeling really angry and that's why their bodies were doing that.

So we've seen the evolution of thinking about emotions. And we end up in a similar place that we start. James Lange is saying that physiological arousal precedes emotion, but they're not really saying how or why. Cannon and Bard say it happens at the same time, and then the two-factor model with Schachter and Singer says that physiological arousal does precede emotion, but it's context dependent. So you, as you're feeling the thing in your body, you're going to look around you to see what makes the most sense for the reason why you're feeling that, and then that's the emotion you're going to feel.