Emotions and Biology: Remarks on the Contemporary Trend

TLDR: For instance, Damasio and LeDoux as mentioned in this paper defined emotion as feeling "nothing but the feeling of the reflex bodily effects of what we call its object" and argued that feeling is a reflex, simply a trigger for the emotion into which it quickly disappears.

Abstract: THE PAST DECADE has seen a tidal wave of publications on emotion. The topic has engaged the energy and the imagination of the professionals to whose fields it belongs, and some of these have delivered it to the reading public in a series of highly successful books. Antonio Damasio and Joseph LeDoux are probably the best known (1) among those whose writings have displayed the topic and driven the interest in it. I intend to analyze several of their works in order to make some judgments about what can be considered an important contemporary trend. Damasio and LeDoux are neurobiologists, that is, brain scientists who work in the tradition begun by William James. I will introduce James from time to time (as do both Damasio and LeDoux) for his historical importance and also because of the valuable schematization of the issues which his relatively uncomplicated view of the human organism allows. James considered what he was doing to be psychology, while Damasio and LeDoux regard themselves as biologists. James was also committed to understanding emotion strictly as a function of the nervous system. (2) Brain science still does, though this focus is distressed by the need, faced by any theory of emotion, to deal with feeling. Feeling--or consciousness generally--is something that brain science is still struggling to accommodate. William James defined emotion as feeling "emotion is nothing but the feeling of the reflex bodily effects of what we call its object." (3) More famously he said: If we fancy some strong emotion, and try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its characteristic bodily symptoms, we find that we have nothing left behind, no "mind stuff" out of which the emotion can be constituted, and that a cold and neutral state of intellectual perception is all that remains. (4) The emotions that he has in mind are those characterized by a "wave of bodily disturbance," (5) and he names surprise, curiosity, rapture, fear, lust, greed, and others without suggesting that the list is exhaustive and without attempting to distinguish among the items listed. The bodily symptoms, apparently taken as common to all, are the intensified actions of the heart, the circulatory system, bladder, bowels, glands of the mouth, throat, skin and liver, (6) activities which are today recognized as controlled by the autonomic nervous system. The latter concept had not yet emerged when James wrote. Speaking of the body in which this is going on, he says, "every one of the bodily changes, whatsoever it be, is felt, acutely or obscurely, the moment it occurs." (7) Consciousness in emotion is not only the feeling of the body, it is also the perception of what we are emotional about; for example, the bear in the woods which frightens us. For James, that is a reflex, simply a trigger for the emotion into which it quickly disappears. His physiology of emotion, however, is more than an account of visceral and muscular stirrings. His starting point was not gut or sinew but brain, as he makes clear in the summary remark with which the article concludes: To return now to our starting point, the physiology of the brain. If we suppose its cortex to contain centers for the perception of changes in each special sense organ, in each portion of the skin, in each muscle each joint and each viscus, and to contain absolutely nothing else, we still have a scheme perfectly capable of representing the process of the emotions. (8) Notice the simplicity of the patterns of location and connection. The later development of the discipline will reveal a nervous system far more complex than that indicated here. Later theorists will be challenged to do more than James did with the problem of how feeling, the consciousness of the body, combines with perception, the awareness of the triggering object. He was quite vague about this, saying only that the bodily changes, "apperceived like the original object in as many specific portions of the cortex, combine with it in consciousness and transform it from an object-simply-apprehended to an object-emotionally-felt. …