In this video I describe 3 different theories of emotion which attempt to explain how emotional experiences occur. The James-Lange theory proposes that a stimulus causes physiological arousal which in turn causes the emotion. The Cannon-Bard theory of emotion proposes that stimuli can simultaneously cause physiological changes and emotional experiences, and the Schachter-Singer or Two-Factor Theory of Emotion suggests that a stimulus is combined with our interpretation in order to create an emotion.

William James (1884) What is an Emotion? http://psychclassics.yorku.ca/James/e…

Schachter & Singer (1962) Cognitive, Social, and Physiological Determinants of Emotional State: http://faculty.uncfsu.edu/tvancantfor…

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Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re going to ask the question, how do emotions happen? And to try to answer it, we’re going to look at three theories of emotion, all of which try to address the question of where emotions are coming from.

And so we’ll start with the James-Lange theory of emotion and this is based on the work of William James and Carl Lange, who was a Danish researcher who had similar ideas to James developed around the same time, although they were developed independently. So in the James-Lange theory of emotion there’s a great deal of importance on physiological activity, like the activity of the body, as being the source of where emotions are coming from.

Now it’s important to note that in his paper describing his views on emotion written in 1884 called “What is an Emotion” William James wrote that he was only concerned with those emotions that have distinct bodily expression. So he was already sort of narrowing his view down to emotions that have some physiological representation in the body. And the idea was that we have some stimulus in the environment, and this causes some bodily response, some level of physiological arousal, and then that physiological arousal causes the experience of an emotion. Or as James wrote his thesis was that “bodily changes followed directly the perception of the exciting fact” and that “our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion”.

So, in other words, you see a bear and you have changes that occur in your body; your heart starts beating faster you experience muscle tension, you start running from the bear, and then that is what causes you to feel afraid. It’s not the case that you see the bear, feel afraid, and run, but as James described you see the bear, you start to run, and you feel afraid. right? Now he also raised the idea that this physiological activity was fundamental to having emotions at all; that without physiological activity you wouldn’t have emotions. And so he suggests trying to imagine something really funny and then thinking would it be as funny if you didn’t laugh, if you didn’t have that physiological response in your body, if you didn’t have that bodily expression of the feeling, would it be the same feeling? He suggests that it wouldn’t be. And he uses another example of feeling enraged. He asked would you, would you really say that rage is the same if you’re not clenching your fists, and you know, not having your blood pressure skyrocket, and all these things? He says maybe the emotion wouldn’t really exist without those physiological representations.

Now the James-Lange theory is criticized and one of the criticisms is the idea that, well we can have similar levels of physiological activity, and not have the same emotion we experienced. So my heart can be pounding because I just saw a bear, or my heart can be pounding because I’m sprinting on a track as hard as I can. And when I’m sprinting on the track I’m probably not experiencing fear. I probably don’t have the same emotional reaction even though I have similar physiological activity.

Now another criticism of the James-Lange theory leads us to the next theory which is the Cannon-Bard theory of emotion. This is named after Walter Cannon and Philip Bard and so the idea of the Cannon-Bard theory is that we have a stimulus but that it causes the activation of the nervous system. It causes that physiological arousal, but it also causes the emotional experience and that the two are separate. And one of the ways that this differs from the James-Lange theory is when we think about an emotion like embarrassment. So when something happens to you that’s embarrassing, the idea is you feel embarrassed right away, and then you also have some physiological changes that occur.

But what the Cannon-Bard Theory points out is that those changes may be delayed; they might actually happen fairly slowly and yet you’re already experiencing the emotion. And so in the case of embarrassment, the idea is something happens, you feel embarrassed, and maybe 30 seconds later or so your cheeks become flushed and red. And that actually takes some time. So it’s not the case that you have to wait 30 seconds to feel your cheeks blush and then you say “oh my cheeks are flushed, I must be embarrassed” but rather you’re embarrassed as soon as the event occurs and then later you have some physiological changes in your body that occur more slowly.

Now the last theory that we’ll look at is the Schachter-Singer Theory of Emotion also known as Two-Factor Theory and this is based on the work of Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer. And this is called Two-Factor Theory because it considers that there’s two factors that are combining to give us the emotional experience; these are stimulus in the environment but then we also have our cognitive appraisal. In other words, our thinking about the situation and that it’s a combination of the stimulus and the appraisal that gives us the emotional experience.

Now in order to demonstrate this we’ll look at an experiment that was conducted by Stanley Schachter and Jerome singer in 1962. And so this is a little bit complicated because there’s a number of steps in this experiment but hopefully this will make sense. So participants came into the lab and they were told that they were going to get a vitamin injection and that it was related to eyesight. This was called Suproxin, this is a made-up name, but what it actually was was epinephrine. You might remember that epinephrine is another name for adrenaline. So this injection is, of course, going to cause some physiological changes in the bodies of the participants. But the participants were given different levels of information about this injection.

So there were three groups that got an injection of epinephrine and some of them were what Schachter and Singer called “informed”. They were told, you know, not that it was epinephrine, but they were told, you know, this is probably going to increase your heart rate, you’re going to feel some physiological arousal as a result of this injection. And that’s normal, you should expect that. So they were told the truth about the reaction that was going to occur in their body. Other participants, however, were “misinformed”. They were told that some of the effects of this injection were that their feet might become numb and they might experience some itchiness. Alright, so they were misinformed about what was going to happen after getting this injection. And then a third group was not told anything about the injection. We’re gonna give you this Suproxin and that’s really all they knew. And then there was actually a fourth group that was a placebo group. They got an injection but it didn’t actually have any drug in it, there was no epinephrine. So that was just to see, you know, well to have a placebo group to compare to.

Ok, so now the participants go into a waiting room they’re told oh the Suproxin is going to take twenty minutes or so to have an effect, so you can go into the waiting room here, and there’s another participant, you can fill out some forms, we need to get some information. And so while they’re doing this, they’re in the room with what they believe is another participant but this person is actually a confederate working for the experimenters.

So there’s now two different variations. So some of these participants whether they’re informed or misinformed or ignorant or got a placebo injection, they’re going to interact with confederate who is acting “euphoric”. And so what does that mean? Well, they’re filling out these forms and they’re in this waiting room and this confederate starts crumpling up some of the papers, you know? There’s like scrap paper for them to use and he starts making paper balls and playing basketball with the wastebasket and then he starts making paper airplanes and he throws one at the participant at some point. And he’s just acting really sort of giddy and silly and he moves some things around in the room and he finds some hula hoops and he starts playing with the hula hoop and there’s another one, I mean, you know, he tries to get the the participant to play with the hula hoop. And so he’s acting sort of in this giddy, euphoric way.

Now the other condition is that some participants interacted with a confederate who was angry. So there were some personal questions on these forms like asking “how often do you have sexual intercourse each week?” things like this, that were fairly personal. “What’s your father’s income?” questions like this and as a result this confederate acts angry, you know? He starts sort of muttering about these questions and “they have no right to ask this” and then eventually gets, you know, more and more angry and he rips up the paper. And, you know, sort of reacts to these personal questions. And so the idea was that, based on their interpretation of this situation, and based on their knowledge about the injection they had gotten, would these participants respond differently? So after this interaction with the confederate, which in the euphoric case was being watched through a one-way mirror, and then they gave a self-report of their emotional state and they also had some physiological measurements taken.

The idea was that if the situation could have mattered, then their knowledge about the situation would influence their emotional experience of interacting with this confederate. And this is what Schachter and Singer found. So what I’ve listed here is based on the self-report, which which looked at their level of happiness and their level of irritation. And so they got a score which combined these and the idea was that, you know, if they were happier in the euphoric condition that that they were more influenced by this happy euphoric confederate. And so this list here shows us who were happiest, which participants were happiest, and it started with the people who were misinformed about the drug.

The idea was that they didn’t know why they were feeling their heart beating more quickly and they were misinterpreting that as being “well, I guess I’m feeling happy too. I’m feeling kind of giddy and silly just like this confederate that I interacted with”. And the people who were ignorant of what the drug was going to do probably also making a similar mistake. But you know, maybe they had some suspicion it was from the drug or something. Remember, they didn’t know anything about the injection. So then next we have the placebo group, least, not impacted quite as much and then least affected were the people who were informed. And the idea here was they were able to explain their physiological arousal because they had been told that the injection of epinephrine was going to cause their heart to beat a little faster, was going to cause some physiological arousal. And so the idea was they didn’t feel as happy. They didn’t feel as euphoric when they interacted with this guy. They thought “he’s just kind of weird and being silly” but they didn’t think that they were feeling that way because they thought “well, I feel kind of, you know, amped up but it’s that injection you gave me. It’s not that I’m actually feeling happy”, right?

And so in the second condition where we have the anger condition, they didn’t actually have a group that was misinformed about this. It was originally meant to be a control condition and anyway they only were looking at three groups here; the people that were ignorant about the drug that they had been injected, the placebo group that was not injected with any drug, and the informed group which was injected but also told what the drug was going to do. And as we see here, the response that they had the people who felt most irritated after this were the people who didn’t know where their physiological arousal was coming from. They were ignorant about the drug. Next were the people who, you know, didn’t have any physiological arousal related to the drug and lastly were the people who were informed right?

So again they weren’t tricked into thinking that they were angry because they thought they knew where their anger was coming from, or where their physiological arousal was coming from I should say, and that it was coming from the injection that they had gotten. Ok, so what does all of this really mean? Well the idea is that it emphasizes the importance of our explanation for our bodily state. So we have some physiological arousal and we want to know, where is this coming from? And if we don’t know where it’s coming from we might think we’re experiencing some emotional state. But if we know it’s coming from an injection of adrenaline, for instance, then we say “Ok, I I have this feeling in my body but it’s coming from the adrenaline. It’s not an emotion”.

And so this raises the possibility that we can make mistakes as these participants did. That we can misinterpret things and this brings us to what’s called misattribution of arousal and this is something that we’ll look at in the next video. So I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!