To paid subscribers, this is the kind of follow-up on the “Prophet of Causation” lecture series that I promised you, where I present some of the material I’m coming across as I do further research as part of the process of turning this (eventually) into a book.
For those on the free list, this is a teaser—if you want to catch up on the course and get more material like this, you know what to do.
I covered a lot of material during the tenth lecture, perhaps too much, so I didn’t have much time to spend on alternative theories of emotion—theories about where emotions come from and what they mean.
Thanks to the person in class who reminded me of the psychologist who preceded Ayn Rand, or more likely followed along a parallel path, in her view of emotions: Magda Arnold. Her Wikipedia entry describes Arnold as “the first contemporary theorist to develop [the] appraisal theory of emotions,” which in turn is described as “the theory in psychology that emotions are extracted from our evaluations (appraisals or estimates) of events that cause specific reactions in different people.”
Essentially, our appraisal of a situation causes an emotional, or affective, response that is going to be based on that appraisal. An example of this is going on a first date. If the date is perceived as positive, one might feel happiness, joy, giddiness, excitement, and/or anticipation, because they have appraised this event as one that could have positive long-term effects, i.e., starting a new relationship, engagement, or even marriage. On the other hand, if the date is perceived negatively, then our emotions, as a result, might include dejection, sadness, emptiness, or fear. Reasoning and understanding of one's emotional reaction becomes important for future appraisals as well.
This is pretty closely related to the Objectivist theory of emotion (though it doesn’t seem to understand the role of “sense of life”). Arnold’s biography also indicates a potential line of influence: She was active in Toronto, where she might have influenced Nathaniel Branden and certainly his cousin, Allan Blumenthal, who (according to my research) studied at the University of Toronto, both of whom became prominent among Ayn Rand’s circle of intellectuals. At the very least, we know that Magda Arnold’s two-volume 1960 work, Emotion and Personality, was favorably reviewed by neurologist Robert Ephron in the January 1966 issue of The Objectivist.
But it was the Wikipedia entry on Arnold that directed me to an area that is going to require some future research. So far, I’ve have found it so fascinating that I wanted to share my early results with you.
I expected that the other prevailing theories on emotion would be bad. I did not know how bad. Wikipedia contrasts the appraisal theory of emotion with the James-Lange theory, developed by John Dewey but named after William James and Carl Lange.
The basic premise of the theory is that physiological arousal instigates the experience of emotion. Previously people considered emotions as reactions to some significant events or their features, i.e., events come first, and then there is an emotional response. James-Lange theory proposed that the state of the body can induce emotions or emotional dispositions. In other words, this theory suggests that when we feel teary, it generates a disposition for sad emotions; when our heartbeat is out of normality, it makes us feel anxiety. Instead of feeling an emotion and subsequent physiological (bodily) response, the theory proposes that the physiological change is primary, and emotion is then experienced when the brain reacts to the information received via the body's nervous system. It proposes that each specific category of emotion is attached to a unique and different pattern of physiological arousal and emotional behaviour in reaction due to an exciting stimulus.
Apparently, William James attributed special importance to the role of the “viscera,” i.e., the internal organs of the abdomen, i.e., your gut. Every emotion, in this view, is literally a “gut feeling,” and your subjective experience of the emotion is just a post facto rationalization that projects a deeper meaning onto indigestion.
The other alternative is the Cannon-Bard theory, which holds “that emotional expression results from the function of hypothalamic structures, and emotional feeling results from stimulations of the dorsal thalamus.”
The physiological changes and subjective feeling of an emotion in response to a stimulus are separate and independent; arousal does not have to occur before the emotion. Thus, the thalamic region is attributed a major role in this theory of emotion. The theory is therefore also referred to as the thalamic theory of emotion.
The popular form in which you have probably heard this is the “lizard brain” theory.