Can we experience emotion without the feeling of accelerated heartbeats, perspiration, or other changes in the body? In his paper “What is an emotion”, William James famously claimed that “if we fancy some strong emotion and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind” (1884, p. 193). Thus, bodily changes are essential to emotion. This is known as the Subtraction Argument. The Subtraction Argument is still (...) used to support Embodied theories of emotion. Proponents of Disembodied theories, however, have different intuitions regarding the role of bodily changes in the experience of emotion. In order to advance this debate, I conducted a series of studies testing people’s intuitions regarding the Subtraction Argument. Results show that, against James’ claims, most people consider that their hypothetical (Study 1) and actual (Study 2) emotions persist in the absence of bodily feelings. Furthermore, Study 1 found that participants’ responses were not related to individual differences in reflection or interoceptive awareness. These results pose a problem for Embodied theories of emotion and challenge extant explanations for the persistence of emotional experience in cases of impaired interoception. (shrink)

Dynamic body feedback is used in dance movement therapy, with the aim to facilitate emotional expression and a change of emotional state through movement and dance for individuals with psychosocial or psychiatric complaints. It has been demonstrated that moving in a specific way can evoke and regulate related emotions. The current study aimed to investigate the effects of executing a unique set of kinetic movement elements on an individual mover’s experience of happiness. A specific sequence consisting of movement elements that (...) recent studies have related to the feeling of happiness was created and used in a series of conditions. To achieve a more realistic reflection of DMT practice, the study incorporated the interpersonal dimension between the dance movement therapist and the client, and the impact of this interbodily feedback on the emotional state of the client. This quantitative study was conducted in a within-subject design. Five male and 20 female participants participated in three conditions: a solo executed movement sequence, a movement sequence executed with a DMTh who attuned and mirrored the movements, and a solo executed movement sequence not associated with feelings of happiness. Participants were only informed about the movements and not the feelings that may be provoked by these movements. The effects on individuals were measured using the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule and visual analog scales. Results showed that a specific movement sequence based on movement elements associated with happiness executed with a DMTh can significantly enhance the corresponding affective state. An additional finding of this study indicated that facilitating expressed emotion through movement elements that are not associated with happiness can enhance feelings such as empowerment, pride, and determination, which are experienced as part of positive affect. The results show the impact of specific full-body movement elements on the emotional state and the support outcome of DMT on emotion regulation. (shrink)

Facial expressions influence our experience and perception of emotions—they not only tell other people what we are feeling but also might tell us what to feel via sensory feedback. We conducted three experiments to investigate the interaction between facial feedback phenomena and different environmental stimuli, by asking participants to remember emotional autobiographical memories. Moreover, we examined how people with schizotypal traits would be affected by their experience of emotional facial simulations. We found that using a directed approach (gripping a pencil (...) with teeth/lips) while remembering a specific autobiographical memory could successfully evoke participants’ positive (e.g. happy and excited)/negative (e.g. angry and sad) emotions (i.e. Experiment 1). When using indirective environmental stimuli (e.g. teardrop glasses), the results of our experiments (i.e. Experiments 2 and 3) investigating facial feedback and the effect of teardrop glasses showed that participants who scored low in schizotypy reported little effect from wearing teardrop glasses, while those with high schizotypy reported a much greater effect in both between- and within-subject conditions. The results are discussed from the perspective of sense of ownership, which people with schizophrenia are believed to have deficits in. (shrink)

Norms are standards against which actions, dispositions of mind and character, states of affairs and so forth can be measured. They also govern our behaviour, make claims on us, bind us and provide reasons for action and thought that motivate us. J. L. Mackie argued that the intrinsic prescriptivity, or to-be-pursuedness, of moral norms would make them utterly unlike anything else that we know of. Therefore, we should favour an error theory of morality. Mackie thought that the to-be-pursuedness would have (...) to be built into mind-independent moral reality. One alternative, however, is that the to-be-pursuedness is built into our faculty of moral sensibility. There is a large body of empirical evidence demonstrating that the emotions play a central role in making moral judgments. I shall argue that this helps to explain how normative judgments are reliably and non-accidentally related to motivation. I shall also argue that emotional experience has the right structure and properties to provide us with a defeasible warrant for normative knowledge. The role of the emotions in our moral psychology does not obviously support anti-realism. Rather, emotional experience can be intentional, evaluative, evaluable, and quasi-perceptual. This makes emotional experience a plausible candidate for constituting a non-queer faculty of moral sensibility. (shrink)

Upcoming responses in the second of two subsequently performed tasks can speed up compatible responses in the temporally preceding first task. Two experiments extend previous demonstration of such backward compatibility to affective features: responses to affective stimuli were faster in Task 1 when an affectively compatible response effect was anticipated for Task 2. This emotional backward-compatibility effect demonstrates that representations of the affective consequences of the Task 2 response were activated before the selection of a response in Task 1 was (...) completed. This finding is problematic for the assumption of a serial stimulus-response translation stage. It also shows that the affective consequence of a response is anticipated during, and has an impact on stimulus-response translation, which implies that action planning considers codes representing and predicting the emotional consequences of actions. Implications for the control of emotional actions are discussed. (shrink)

Although early emotion theorists posited that bodily changes contribute to emotion, the primary view in affective science over the last century has been that emotions produce bodily changes. Recent findings from physiology, neuroscience, and neuropsychology support the early intuition that body representations can help constitute emotion. These findings are consistent with the modern psychological constructionist hypothesis that emotions emerge when representations of bodily changes are conceptualized as an instance of emotion. We begin by introducing the psychological constructionist approach to emotion. (...) With Schachter as inspiration, we next examine how embodied representations contribute to affective states, and ultimately emotion, with inflammation as a key example. We close by looking forward to future research on how body representations contribute to human experience. (shrink)

We first present a reconstruction of James’s theory of emotion (JATE) and then argue for four theses: (a) Despite constructivist elements, James’s views are overall in line with basic emotions theory. (b) JATE does not exclude an influence of emotion on intentional action even in its original formulation; nevertheless, this influence is quite limited. It seems possible, however, to repair this problem of the theory. (c) Cannon’s theory of emotion is a centralized version of JATE that inherits from the latter (...) theory a potentially fatal flaw, the insufficient physiological differentiation of emotions. (d) The core claim of JATE, that emotions are bodily feelings, is very likely false. (shrink)

Emotional contagion is a phenomenon that has attracted much interest in recent times. However, the main approach on offer, the mimicry theory, fails to properly account for its many facets. In particular, we focus on two shortcomings: the elicitation of emotional contagion is not context-independent, and there can be cases of emotional contagion without motor mimicry. We contend that a general theory of emotion elicitation is better suited to account for these features, because of its multi-level appraisal component. From this (...) standpoint, emotional contagion is viewed as a particular kind of emotional response that involves the same components and processes of emotional responses in general. (shrink)

The ancient practice of chanting typically takes place within a community as a part of a live ceremony or ritual. Research suggests that chanting leads to improved mood, reduced stress, and increased wellbeing. During the global pandemic, many chanting practices were moved online in order to adhere to social distancing recommendations. However, it is unclear whether the benefits of live chanting occur when practiced in an online format. The present study assessed the effects of a 10-min online chanting session on (...) stress, mood, and connectedness, carried out either in a group or individually. The study employed a 2 (chanting vs. control) × 2 (group vs. individual) between-subjects design. Participants (N= 117) were pseudo-randomly allocated across the four conditions. Before and after participation, individuals completed the Spielberg’s State Trait Anxiety Inventory, the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule, the Social Connectedness Scale and Aron’s Inclusion of Self in Other Scale. Online chanting led to a significant reduction in stress and an increase in positive affect when compared to the online control task. Participants who took part in group chanting also felt more connected to members of their chanting group than participants in the control group. However, feelings of general connectedness to all people remained similar across conditions. The investigation provides evidence that online chanting may be a useful psychosocial intervention, whether practiced individually or in a group. (shrink)

We argue that the main objections against two central tenets of a Jamesian account of the emotions, i.e. that (1) different types of emotions are associated with specific types of bodily feelings (Specificity), and that (2) emotions are constituted by patterns of bodily feeling (Constitution), do not succeed. In the first part, we argue that several reasons adduced against Specifity, including one inspired by Schachter and Singer’s work, are unconvincing. In the second part, we argue that Constitution, too, can withstand (...) most of the objections raised against it, including the objection that bodily feelings cannot account for the outward-looking and evaluative nature of emotions. In both sections, we argue that the kinds of felt bodily changes posited by a Jamesian account of emotions are best understood in terms of felt states of action-readiness. (shrink)