CHAPTER XV
THE EMOTIONS
Feeling and emotion are not to be looked upon as two different kinds of mental
processes. In fact, emotion is but a feeling state of a high degree of intensity and
complexity. Emotion transcends the simpler feeling states whenever the exciting
cause is sufficient to throw us out of our regular routine of affective experience.
The distinction between emotion and feeling is a purely arbitrary one, since the
difference is only one of complexity and degree, and many feelings may rise to
the intensity of emotions. A feeling of sadness on hearing of a number of
fatalities in a railway accident may suddenly become an emotion of grief if we
learn that a member of our family is among those killed. A feeling of gladness
may develop into an emotion of joy, or a feeling of resentment be kindled into an
emotion of rage.
1. THE PRODUCING AND EXPRESSING OF EMOTION
Nowhere more than in connection with our emotions are the close inter-relations
of mind and body seen. All are familiar with the fact that the emotion of anger
tends to find expression in the blow, love in the caress, fear in flight, and so on.
But just how our organism acts in producing an emotion is less generally
understood. Professor James and Professor Lange have shown us that emotion
not only tends to produce some characteristic form of response, but that the
emotion is itself caused by certain deep-seated physiological reactions. Let us
seek to understand this statement a little more fully.
Physiological Explanation of Emotion.—We must remember first of all that all
changes in mental states are accompanied by corresponding physiological
changes. Hard, concentrated thinking quickens the heart beat; keen attention is
accompanied by muscular tension; certain sights or sounds increase the rate of
breathing; offensive odors produce nausea, and so on. So complete and perfect is
the response of our physical organism to mental changes that one psychologist
declares it possible, had we sufficiently delicate apparatus, to measure the
reactions caused throughout the body of a sleeping child by the shadow from a