Is your body too slow to be the source of your feelings?
Cannon cut the nerves linking a cat's organs to its brain. The cat still snarled at a barking dog.
▶ Start the storyIf your emotions were just your body's reactions, they would have to wait for the body. The Harvard physiologist Walter Cannon and his doctoral student Philip Bard argued that this could not be right, and built a rival to William James's idea. In their model, the physiological changes and the subjective feeling of an emotion are separate and independent. Arousal does not have to occur before the emotion.
One of Cannon's tests involved cats. To check the James-Lange theory he needed emotion with no feedback from the body's organs, so he severed the nerves of the sympathetic nervous system in cats. Destroying those bodily functions had little or no effect on the animals' emotional responses. The cats still showed the typical signs of rage in response to a barking dog.
He added three more objections. The same bodily changes appear in fear, in rage, and also in fever, asphyxia and cold, so they seem too uniform to tell emotions apart. The body is also slow. One skin response takes about 3 seconds, yet an emotional reaction to a photo can end within 0.8 seconds. And when people were injected with adrenaline, which causes the bodily changes of strong emotion, they experienced no specific emotion.
Too slow? Body response versus emotional reaction
seconds
| Latent period | |
|---|---|
| Skin response (psychogalvanic) | 3 seconds |
| Emotional reaction to a photo | 0.8 seconds |
So where do emotions come from? Cannon and Bard pointed to the thalamus, deep in the brain. In their theory, emotional expression comes from hypothalamic structures and emotional feeling from stimulation of the dorsal thalamus, and when the thalamus discharges, the bodily changes and the emotional experience occur almost simultaneously.
The argument has not made the earlier theory disappear: a 2002 paper on the autonomic nervous system called the James-Lange theory hard to disprove.
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Recap
Cannon and Bard held that the brain, not the body's feedback, produces the feeling, and that the two happen together.
💡 A trick to remember it · Cannon's cats still snarled: the brain fires the feeling and the body at the same time.
Surprising fact · Cats whose body-to-brain nerves were cut still showed rage at a barking dog.
Sources (2)
No source, no claim. Every fact in this lesson (13 claims) cites at least one of these.