THE INTERRELATIONS OF EMOTIONS
Emotions gain expression through discharges along the neurones of
the autonomic nervous system. The reader will recall that this
system has three divisions--the cranial and sacral, separated by
the sympathetic--and that when the neurones of the mid-division
meet in any organ the neurones of either of the end divisions, the
influence of the two sets is antagonistic. As previously stated (p.
35), there is evidence that arrangements exist in the central nervous
system for reciprocal innervation of these antagonistic divisions,
just as there is reciprocal innervation of antagonistic skeletal
muscles. The characteristic affective states manifested in the
working of these three divisions have been described. Undoubtedly,
these states have correspondents--activities and inhibitions--in
the central neurones. The question now arises, are the states which
appear in opposed divisions also in opposition?
Antagonism Between Emotions Expressed in the Sympathetic
and in the Cranial Divisions of the Autonomic System
The cranial autonomic, as already shown, is concerned with the quiet
service of building up reserves and fortifying the body against
times of stress. Accompanying these functions are the relatively
mild pleasures of sight and taste and smell of food. The possibility
of existence of these gentle delights of eating and drinking and
also of their physiological consequences is instantly abolished in
the presence of emotions which activate the sympathetic division.
The secretion of saliva, gastric juice, pancreatic juice and bile
is stopped, and the motions of the stomach and intestines cease at
once, both in man and in the lower animals, whenever pain, fear,
rage, or other strong excitement is present in the organism.
All these disturbances of digestion seem mere interruptions of
the “normal” course of events unless the part they may play in
adaptive reactions is considered. In discussing the operations of
the sympathetic division, I pointed out that all the bodily changes
which occur in the intense emotional states--such as fear and
fury--occur as results of activity in this division, and are in the
highest degree serviceable in the struggle for existence likely to
be precipitated when these emotions are aroused. From this point
of view these perturbations, which so readily seize and dominate
the organs that in quiet times are commonly controlled by the
cranial autonomic, are bodily reactions which may be of the utmost
importance to life at times of critical emergency. Thus are the
body’s reserves--the stored adrenin and the accumulated sugar--called
forth for instant service; thus is the blood shifted to nerves and
muscles that may have to bear the brunt of struggle; thus is the
heart set rapidly beating to speed the circulation; and thus, also,
are the activities of the digestive organs for the time abolished.
Just as in war between nations the arts and industries which have
brought wealth and contentment must suffer serious neglect or be
wholly set aside both by the attacker and the attacked, and all
the supplies and energies developed in the period of peace must be
devoted to the present conflict; so, likewise, the functions which
in quiet times establish and support the bodily reserves are, in
times of stress, instantly checked or completely stopped, and these
reserves lavishly drawn upon to increase power in the attack and
in the defense or flight.[*]
*[Footnote: One who permits fears, worries and anxieties to
disturb the digestive processes when there is nothing to be done,
is evidently allowing the body to go onto what we may regard as
a “war footing,” when there is no “war” to be waged, no fighting
or struggle to be engaged in.]
It is, therefore, the natural antagonism between these two processes
in the body--between saving and expenditure, between preparation and
use, between anabolism and catabolism--and the correlated antagonism
of central innervations, that underlie the antipathy between the
emotional states which normally accompany the processes. The desire
for food, the relish of eating it, all the pleasures of the table,
are naught in the presence of anger or great anxiety. And of the
two sorts of emotional states, those which manifest themselves
in the dominant division of the autonomic hold the field also in
consciousness.
Antagonism Between Emotions Expressed in the Sympathetic
and in the Sacral Divisions of the Autonomic System
The nervi erigentes are the part of the sacral autonomic in which
the peculiar excitements of sex are expressed. As previously
stated, these nerves are opposed by branches from the sympathetic
division--the division which is operated characteristically in the
major emotions.
The opposition in normal individuals between the emotional states
which appear in these two antagonistic divisions is most striking.
Even in animals as low in the scale as birds, copulation is not
performed “until every condition of circumstance and sentiment is
fulfilled, until time, place and partner all are fit.”[213] And
among men the effect of fear or momentary anxiety or any intense
emotional interest in causing inhibition of the act can be supported
by cases in the experience of any physician with extensive practice.
Indeed, as Prince[214] has stated, “the suppression of the sexual
instinct by conflict is one of the most notorious experiences
of this kind in everyday life. This instinct cannot be excited
during an attack of fear or anger, and even during moments of its
excitation, if there is an invasion of another strong emotion the
sexual instinct at once is repressed. Under these conditions, as
with other instincts, even habitual excitants can no longer initiate
the instinctive process.”
When the acme of excitement is approaching it is probable that the
sympathetic division is also called into activity; indeed, the
completion of the process--the contractions of the seminal vesicles
and the prostate, and the subsidence of engorged tissues, all
innervated by sympathetic filaments (see pp. 32, 33)--may be due
to the overwhelming of sacral by sympathetic nervous discharges.
As soon as this stage is reached the original feeling likewise has
been dissipated.
The other parts of the sacral division which supply the bladder
and rectum are so nearly free from any emotional tone in their
normal reflex functioning that it is unnecessary to consider them
further with reference to emotional antagonisms. Mild affective
states, such as worry and anxiety, can, to be sure, check the
activity of the colon and thus cause constipation.[215] But the
augmented activity of these parts (contraction of the bladder and
rectum) in very intense periods of emotional stress, when the
sympathetic division is strongly innervated, presents a problem of
some difficulty. Possibly in such conditions the orderliness of the
central arrangements is upset, just as it is after tetanus toxin or
strychnine poisoning, and opposed innervations no longer discharge
reciprocally, but simultaneously, and then the stronger member of
the pair prevails. Only on such a basis, at present, can I offer
any explanation for the activity and the supremacy of the sacral
innervation of the bladder and distal colon when the sympathetic
innervation is aroused, as, for example, in great fright.
The Function of Hunger
A summary in few words of the chief functions typically performed
or supported by each division of the autonomic would designate
the cranial division as the upbuilder and restorer of the organic
reserves, the sacral as the servant of racial continuity, and the
sympathetic as the preserver of the individual. Self-preservation
is primary and essential; on that depends racial continuity, and
for that all the resources of the organism are called forth.
Analogously the sympathetic innervations, when they meet in organs
innervated also by the cranial and sacral divisions, almost without
exception predominate over their opponents. And analogously, also,
the emotional states which are manifested in the sympathetic
division and are characteristically much more intense than those
manifested in the other divisions, readily assume ascendancy also
in consciousness.
It is obvious that extended action of the sympathetic division,
abolishing those influences of the cranial division which are
favorable to proper digestion and nutrition, might defeat its own
ends. Interruption of the nutritional process for the sake of
self-preservation through defense or attack can be only temporary;
if the interruption were prolonged, there might be serious danger to
the vigor of the organism from failure to replenish the exhausted
stores. The body does not have to depend on the return of a banished
appetite, however, before its need for restoration is attended
to. There is a secondary and very insistent manner in which the
requirement of food is expressed, and that is through the repeated
demands of hunger.
Unlike many other rhythmically repeated sensations, hunger is not
one that anybody becomes accustomed to and neglects because of its
monotony. During the period of his confinement in the citadel of
Magdeburg, the celebrated political adventurer Baron von Trenck[216]
was allowed only a pound and a half of ammunition bread and a jug
of water as his daily ration. “It is impossible for me to describe
to my reader,” he wrote in his memoirs, “the excess of tortures
that during eleven months I endured from ravenous hunger. I could
easily have devoured six pounds of bread every day; and every
twenty-four hours, after having received and swallowed my small
portion, I continued as hungry as before I began, yet I was obliged
to wait another twenty-four hours for a new morsel.... My tortures
prevented sleep, and looking into futurity, the cruelty of my fate
seemed to me, if possible, to increase, for I imagined that the
prolongation of pangs like these was insupportable. God preserve
every honest man from sufferings like mine! They were not to be
endured by the most obdurate villain. Many have fasted three days,
many have suffered want for a week or more, but certainly no one
besides myself ever endured it in the same excess for eleven months;
some have supposed that to eat little might become habitual, but I
have experienced the contrary. My hunger increased every day, and
of all the trials of fortitude my whole life has afforded, this
eleven months was the most bitter.”[*]
*[Footnote: In all probability the continued experience of hunger
pangs reported by Baron von Trenck was due to the repeated eating
of amounts of food too small to satisfy the bodily demand. The
reader will recall that persons who for some time take no food
whatever report that the disagreeable feelings are less intense
or disappear after the third or fourth day (see p. 238).]
Thus, although the taking of food may be set in abeyance at times
of great excitement, and the bodily reserves fully mobilized, that
phase of the organism’s self-protecting adjustment is limited,
and then hunger asserts itself as an agency imperiously demanding
restoration of the depleted stores.
The Similarity of Visceral Effects in Different
Strong Emotions and Suggestions as to its
Psychological Significance
The dominant emotions which we have been considering as
characteristically expressed in the sympathetic division of the
autonomic system are fear and rage. These two emotions are not
unlike. As James[217] has indicated, “Fear is a reaction aroused by
the same objects that arouse ferocity.... We both fear and wish to
kill anything that may kill us; and the question which of the two
impulses we shall follow is usually decided by some one of those
_collateral circumstances_ of the particular case, to be moved by
which is the mark of superior mental natures.” The cornering of an
animal when in the headlong flight of fear may suddenly turn the
fear to fury and the flight to a fighting in which all the strength
of desperation is displayed.
Furthermore, these dominant emotions are states into which many
other commonly milder affective states may be suddenly transformed.
As McDougall[218] has pointed out, all instinctive impulses when
met with opposition or obstruction give place to, or are complicated
by, the pugnacious or combative impulse directed against the source
of the obstruction. A dog will bristle at any attempt to take away
his food, males will fight furiously when provoked by interference
with the satisfaction of the sexual impulse, a man will forget
the conventions and turn hot for combat when there is imputation
against his honor, and a mother all gentle with maternal devotion
is stung to quick resentment and will make a fierce display of her
combative resources, if anyone intentionally injures her child.
In these instances of thwarted or disturbed instinctive acts the
emotional accompaniments--such as the satisfaction of food and of
sexual affection, the feeling of self-pride, and the tender love
of a parent--are whirled suddenly into anger. And anger in one is
likely to provoke anger or fear in the other who for the moment
is the object of the strong feeling of antagonism. Anger is the
emotion preëminently serviceable for the display of power, and fear
is often its counterpart.
The visceral changes which accompany fear and rage are the result of
discharges by way of sympathetic neurones. It will be recalled that
these neurones are arranged for diffuse rather than for narrowly
directed effects. So far as these two quite different emotions are
concerned, present physiological evidence indicates that differences
in visceral accompaniments[*] are not noteworthy--for example,
either fear or rage stops gastric secretion (see pp. 10, 11). There
is, indeed, obvious reason why the visceral changes in fear and
rage should not be _different_, but rather, why they should be
_alike_. As already pointed out, these emotions accompany organic
preparations for action, and just because the conditions which
evoke them are likely to result in flight or conflict (either one
requiring perhaps the utmost struggle), the bodily needs in either
response are precisely the same.
*[Footnote: Obvious vascular differences, as pallor or flushing
of the face, are of little significance. With increase of blood
pressure from vasoconstriction, pallor might result from action
of the constrictors in the face, or flushing might result because
constrictors elsewhere, as, for example, in the abdomen, raised
the pressure so high that facial constrictors are overcome. Such,
apparently, is the effect of adrenin already described (see
p. 107). Or the flushing might occur from local vasodilation.
That very different emotional states may have the same vascular
accompaniments was noted by Darwin (The Expression of Emotions
in Man and Animals, New York, 1905), who mentioned the pallor of
rage (p. 74) and also of terror (p. 77).]
In discussing the functioning of the sympathetic division I pointed
out that it was roused to activity not only in fear and rage, but
also in pain. The machinery of this division likewise is operated
wholly or partially in emotions which are usually mild--such as joy
and sorrow and disgust--_when they become sufficiently intense_.
Thus, for instance, the normal course of digestion may be stopped
or quite reversed in a variety of these emotional states.
Darwin[219] reports the case of a young man who on hearing that a
fortune had just been left him, became pale, then exhilarated, and
after various expressions of joyous feeling vomited the half-digested
contents of his stomach. Müller[220] has described the case of a
young woman whose lover had broken the engagement of marriage.
She wept in bitter sorrow for several days, and during that time
vomited whatever food she took. And Burton,[221] in his _Anatomy of
Melancholy_, gives the following instance of the effect of disgust:
“A gentlewoman of the same city saw a fat hog cut up, when the
entrails were opened, and a noisome savour offended her nose, she
much misliked, and would not longer abide; a physician in presence
told her, as that hog, so was she, full of filthy excrements, and
aggravated the matter by some other loathsome instances, insomuch
this nice gentlewoman apprehended it so deeply that she fell
forthwith a vomiting, was so mightily distempered in mind and body,
that with all his art and persuasion, for some months after, he
could not restore her to herself again, she could not forget or
remove the object out of her sight.”
In these three cases, of intense joy, intense sorrow and intense
disgust, the influence of the cranial division of the autonomic
has been overcome, digestion has ceased, and the stagnant gastric
contents by reflexes in striated muscles have been violently
discharged. The extent to which under such circumstances other
effects of sympathetic impulses may be manifested, has not, so far
as I know, been ascertained.
From the evidence just given it appears that any high degree of
excitement in the central nervous system, whether felt as anger,
terror, pain, anxiety, joy, grief or deep disgust, is likely to
break over the threshold of the sympathetic division and disturb
the functions of all the organs which that division innervates. It
may be that there is advantage in the readiness with which these
widely different emotional conditions can express themselves in this
one division, for, as has been shown (see p. 276), occasions may
arise when these milder emotions are suddenly transmuted into the
naturally intense types (as fright and fury) which normally activate
this division; and if the less intense can also influence it, the
physiological aspect of the transmutation is already partially
accomplished.
If various strong emotions can thus be expressed in the diffused
activities of a single division of the autonomic--the division
which accelerates the heart, inhibits the movements of the stomach
and intestines, contracts the blood vessels, erects the hairs,
liberates sugar, and discharges adrenin--it would appear that the
bodily conditions which have been assumed, by some psychologists, to
distinguish emotions from one another must be sought for elsewhere
than in the viscera. We do not “feel sorry because we cry,” as James
contended, but we cry because when we are sorry or overjoyed or
violently angry or full of tender affection--when any one of these
diverse emotional states is present--there are nervous discharges
by sympathetic channels to various viscera, including the lachrymal
glands. In terror and rage and intense elation, for example, the
responses in the viscera seem too uniform to offer a satisfactory
means of distinguishing states which, in man at least, are very
different in subjective quality. For this reason I am inclined to
urge that the visceral changes merely contribute to an emotional
complex more or less indefinite, but still pertinent, feelings of
disturbance in organs of which we are not usually conscious.
This view that the differential features of emotions are not to be
traced to the viscera is in accord with the experimental results of
Sherrington,[222] who has demonstrated that emotional responses occur
in dogs in which practically all the main viscera and the great bulk
of skeletal muscle have been removed from subjection to and from
influence upon the brain, by severance of the vagus nerves and the
spinal cord. In these animals no alteration whatever was noticed in
the occurrence, under appropriate circumstances, of characteristic
expressions of voice and features, indicating anger, delight or
fear. The argument that these expressions may have been previously
established by afferent impulses from excited viscera was met by
noting that a puppy only nine weeks old also continued to exhibit
the signs of emotional excitement after the brain was disconnected
from all the body except the head and shoulders. Evidence from
uniformity of visceral response and evidence from exclusion of the
viscera are harmonious, therefore, in minimizing visceral factors
as the source of differences in emotional states.[*]
*[Footnote: The paucity of afferent fibres in the autonomic system,
and the probability of an extremely low degree of sensitiveness
in the viscera (for evidence, see Cannon: The Mechanical Factors
of Digestion, London, 1911, p. 202), likewise support this
conclusion.]
If these differences are due to other than visceral changes, why
is it not always possible by voluntary innervations to produce
emotions? We can laugh and cry and tremble. But forced laughter does
not bring happiness, nor forced sobbing sorrow, and the trembling
from cold rouses neither anger nor fear. The muscle positions and
tensions are there, but the experiencing of such bodily changes does
not seem even approximately to rouse an emotion in us. Voluntary
assumption of an attitude seems to leave out the “feeling.” It
is probable, however, that no attitude which we can assume has
all the elements in it which appear in the complete response to a
stirring situation. But is not this because the natural response is
a _pattern reaction_, like inborn reflexes of low order, such as
sneezing, in which impulses flash through peculiarly coöperating
neurone groups of the central system, suddenly, unexpectedly, and in
a manner not exactly reproducible by volition, and thus they throw
the skeletal muscles into peculiar attitudes and, if sufficiently
intense, rush out in diffuse discharges that cause tremors and
visceral perturbations? The typical facial and bodily expressions,
automatically assumed in different emotions, indicate the discharge
of peculiar groupings of neurones in the several affective states.
That these responses occur instantly and spontaneously when the
appropriate “situation,” actual or vividly imagined, is present,
shows that they are ingrained in the nervous organization. At
least one such pattern, that of anger, persists after removal of
the cerebral hemispheres--the decorticated dog, by growling and
biting when handled, has the appearance of being enraged;[223] the
decerebrate cat, when vigorously stimulated, retracts its lips and
tongue, stares with dilated pupils, snarls and snaps its jaws.[224]
On the other hand, stroking the hair, whistling and gently calling
to produce a pleased attitude, or yelling to produce fright, have
not the slightest effect in evoking from the decorticated dog signs
of joy and affection or of fear, nor does the animal manifest any
sexual feeling. The absence of bodily indications of these emotions
is quite as significant as the presence of the signs of anger.
For since expressions of anger can persist without the cerebral
cortex, there is little reason why the complexes of other emotional
expressions, if their “machinery” exists below the cortex, should
not also be elicitable. That they are not elicitable suggests that
they require a more elaborately organized grouping of neurones than
does anger--possibly what the cortex, or the cortex in combination
with basal ganglia, would provide.
The contrast between the brevity of the “pseudo-affective reactions”
in the decerebrate cat, though the viscera are still connected with
the central nervous system, and the normal duration of emotional
expression in the dog with the body separated from the head region,
has been used by Sherrington to weigh the importance of the visceral
and other factors. And the evidence which I have given above, as
well as that which he has offered, favors the view that the viscera
are relatively unimportant in an emotional complex, especially in
contributing differential features.
REFERENCES
[Footnote 213: James: Principles of Psychology, New York, 1905, i,
p. 22.]
[Footnote 214: Prince: The Unconscious, New York, 1914, p. 456.]
[Footnote 215: Hertz: Constipation and Allied Intestinal Disorders,
London, 1909, p. 81.]
[Footnote 216: v. Trenck: Merkwürdige Lebensgeschichte, Berlin,
1787, p. 195.]
[Footnote 217: James, _Loc. cit._, p. 415.]
[Footnote 218: McDougall: Introduction to Social Psychology, London,
1908, p. 72.]
[Footnote 219: Darwin: _Loc. cit._, p. 76.]
[Footnote 220: Müller: Deutsches Archiv für klinische Medicin,
1907, lxxxix, p. 434.]
[Footnote 221: Burton: The Anatomy of Melancholy (first published
in 1621), London, 1886, p. 443.]
[Footnote 222: Sherrington: Proceedings of the Royal Society, 1900,
lxvi, p. 397.]
[Footnote 223: Goltz: Archiv für die gesammte Physiologie, 1892,
li, p. 577.]
[Footnote 224: Woodworth and Sherrington: Journal of Physiology,
1904, xxxi, p. 234.]