ABSTRACT
More than one century ago, William James argued that physiological changes are able to cause specific emotions rather than being their consequence (James, 1890). The so-called James-Lange hypothesis has generated controversy and has been proposed again in different forms and extended in many ways. While the majority of philosophers and scientists of the time held that emotions are a disorder of consciousness that induces instability in the organism, James, in contrast, suggested that neurovegetative manifestations are responsible for the disorder of consciousness. In other words, human beings are thought of as a “reverberation chamber” in which physical changes, however subtle, reverberate until they reach the level of the conscious experience of emotion. This original perspective has given rise to a number of current theoretical approaches. Opposing James’s peripheral approach, Cannon (1927) proposed a more central theory of emotions based on various scientific and experimental facts. For instance, he emphasized that the total separation of the viscera and the central nervous system does not lead to any absolute impairment of emotional behavior. This opposition between a visceral and an abstractive approach to emotions can still be observed in modern theoretical trends: the theory of appraisal and embodiment theory. For example, Damasio and Carvalho (2013) suggested that changes in body state cause automatic physiological reactions as well as mental experience (i.e., feelings) such as hunger, thirst, pain or fear. Similarly, based on theories of embodied simulation (Barsalou, 1999; Niedenthal, 2007, for reviews), Niedenthal et al. (2010) hold that the processing of emotional information is grounded in the brain’s perceptual, affective and sensory-motor systems, which are activated when the emotion is experienced (Wilson-Mendenhall et al., 2013).
