Emotions, in today’s neo-Jamesian view, are like perceptions and memories—they are reconstructed from the data at hand. Much of that data comes from your unconscious mind, as it processes environmental stimuli picked up by your senses and creates a physiological response. The brain also employs other data, such as your preexisting beliefs and expectations, and information about the current circumstances. All of that information is processed, and a conscious feeling of emotion is produced. That mechanism can explain the angina studies—and, more generally, the effect of placebos on pain. If the subjective experience of pain is constructed from both our physiological state and contextual data, it’s no surprise that our minds can interpret the same physiological data—the nerve impulses signifying pain—in different ways. As a result, when nerve cells send a signal to the pain centers of your brain, your experience of pain can vary even if those signals don’t.10
James elaborated on his theory of emotion, among many other things, in his book The Principles of Psychology, which I mentioned in Chapter 4 regarding Angelo Mosso’s experiments on the brains of patients who had gaps in their skulls following surgery. James had been given a contract to write the book in 1878. He began it, with a flurry of work, on his honeymoon. But once the honeymoon was over, it took him twelve years to finish it. It became a classic, so revolutionary and influential that, in a 1991 survey of historians of psychology, James ranked second among psychology’s most important figures, behind only his early inspiration, Wundt.11
Ironically, neither Wundt nor James was pleased with the book. Wundt was dissatisfied because James’s revolution had by then strayed from Wundt’s brand of experimental psychology, in which everything must be measured. How, for instance, do you quantify and measure emotions? By 1890, James had decided that since one couldn’t, psychology must move beyond pure experiment, and he derided Wundt’s work as “brass instrument psychology.”12 Wundt, on the other hand, wrote of James’s book that “It is literature, it is beautiful, but it is not psychology.”13
James had much more stinging criticism for himself. He wrote, “No one could be more disgusted than I at the sight of the book. No subject is worth being treated of in 1000 pages. Had I ten years more, I could rewrite it in 500; but as it stands it is this or nothing—a loathsome, distended, tumefied, bloated, dropsical mass, testifying to nothing but two facts: 1st, that there is no such thing as a science of psychology, and 2nd, that W. J. is an incapable.”14 After publication of the book, James decided to abandon psychology in favor of philosophy, leading him to lure Münsterberg from Germany to take over the lab. James was then forty-eight.
JAMES’S THEORY OF emotion dominated psychology for a while, but then gave way to other approaches. In the 1960s, as psychology took its cognitive turn, his ideas—now called the James-Lange theory—experienced a new popularity, for the notion that different sorts of data are processed in your brain to create emotions fit nicely into James’s framework. But a nice theory does not necessarily equate to a correct theory, so scientists sought additional evidence. The most famous of the early studies was an experiment performed by Stanley Schachter, the famed Dr. Zilstein in the University of Minnesota experiment, but then at Columbia. He partnered in the research with Jerome Singer, who would later be called the “best second author in psychology” because he held that position on a number of famous research studies.15 If emotions are constructed from limited data rather than direct perception, similar to the way vision and memory are constructed, then, as with perception and memory, there must be circumstances when the way the mind fills in the gaps in the data results in your “getting it wrong.” The result would be “emotional illusions” that are analogous to optical and memory illusions.
For example, suppose you experience the physiological symptoms of emotional arousal for no apparent reason. The logical response would be to think, Wow, my body is experiencing unexplained physiological changes for no apparent reason! What’s going on? But suppose further that when you experience those sensations they occur in a context that encourages you to interpret your reaction as due to some emotion—say, fear, anger, happiness, or sexual attraction—even though there is no actual cause for that emotion. In that sense your experience would be an emotional illusion. To demonstrate this phenomenon, Schachter and Singer created two different artificial emotional contexts—one “happy,” one “angry”—and studied physiologically aroused volunteers who were placed in those situations. The researchers’ goal was to see whether those scenarios could be used to “trick” the volunteers into having an emotion that the psychologists themselves had chosen.
Here is how it worked. Schachter and Singer told all their experimental subjects that the purpose of the experiment they were participating in was to determine how the injection of a vitamin called “Suproxin” would affect their visual skills. Actually, the drug was adrenaline, which causes increased heart rate and blood pressure, a feeling of flushing, and accelerated breathing—all symptoms of emotional arousal. The subjects were divided into three groups. One group (the “informed”) was accurately told about the effects of the injection, explained as the “side effects” of the Suproxin. Another group (the “ignorant”) was told nothing. Its members would feel the same physiological changes but have no explanation for them. The third group, which acted as a control group, was injected with an inert saline solution. This group would feel no physiological effects and was not told that there would be any.
After administering the injection, the researcher excused himself and left each subject alone for twenty minutes with another supposed subject, who was actually a confederate of the scientists. In what was called the “happiness” scenario, this person acted strangely euphoric about the privilege of participating in the experiment, providing the artificial social context. Schachter and Singer also designed an “anger” scenario, in which the person the subjects were left alone with complained incessantly about the experiment and how it was being conducted. The experimenters hypothesized that, depending on which social context they’d been placed in, the “ignorant” subjects would interpret their physiological state as arising from either happiness or anger, while the “informed” subjects would not have any subjective experience of emotion because, even though they had been exposed to the same social context, they already had a good explanation for their physiological changes and would therefore have no need to attribute them to any kind of emotion. Schachter and Singer also expected that those in the control group, who did not experience any physiological arousal, would not experience any emotion, either.
The subjects’ reactions were judged in two ways. First, they were surreptitiously watched from behind a two-way mirror by impartial observers, who coded their behavior according to a prearranged rubric. Second, the subjects were later given a written questionnaire, in which they reported their level of happiness on a scale from 0 to 4. By both measures, all three groups reacted exactly as Schachter and Singer had expected.
Both the informed and the control subjects observed the apparent emotions—euphoria or anger—of the confederate who had been planted in their midst but felt no such emotion in themselves. The ignorant subjects, however, observed the fellow and, depending on whether he seemed to be expressing euphoria or anger about the experiment, drew the conclusion that the physical sensations they themselves were experiencing constituted either happiness or anger. In other words, they fell victim to an “emotional illusion,” mistakenly believing that they were reacting to the situation with the same “emotions” the fake subject was experiencing.