Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of EducationOntario. Department of Education
Science
Ontario Normal School Manuals: Science of Education
Ontario. Department of Education
Education; Educational psychology
=Nature of Emotion.=--An emotion differs from sensuous feeling, not in
its content, but in its higher intensity, its greater complexity, and
its more elaborate motor response. It may be defined as a succession of
interconnected feelings with a more complex physical expression than a
simple feeling. On reading an account of a battle, one may feel sad and
express this sadness only in a gloomy appearance of the face. But if
one finds that in this battle a friend has been killed, the feeling is
much intensified and may become an emotion of grief, expressing itself
in some complex way, perhaps in tears, in sobbing, in wringing the
hands. Similarly, a feeling of slight irritation expressed in a frowning
face, if intensified, becomes the emotion of anger, expressed in tense
muscles, rapidly beating heart, laboured breathing, perhaps a torrent of
words or a hasty blow.
=Emotion and Instinct.=--Feeling and instinct are closely related. Every
instinct has its affective phase, that is, its satisfaction always
involves an element of pleasure or pain. The satisfaction of the
instincts of curiosity or physical activity illustrates this fact. On
the other hand, every emotion has its characteristic instinctive
response. Fear expresses itself in all persons alike in certain
characteristic ways inherited from a remote ancestry; anger expresses
itself in other instinctive reactions; grief in still others.
CONDITIONS OF EMOTION
An analysis of a typical emotion will serve to show the conditions under
which it makes its appearance. Let us take first the emotion of fear.
Suppose a person is walking alone on a dark night along a deserted
street. His nervous currents are discharging themselves uninterruptedly
over their wonted channels, his current of thought is unimpeded.
Suddenly there appears a strange and frightful object in his pathway.
His train of thought is violently checked. His nervous currents, which a
moment ago were passing out smoothly and without undue resistance into
muscles of legs, arms, body, and face, are now suddenly obstructed, or
in other words encounter violent resistance. He stands still. His heart
momentarily stops beating. A temporary paralysis seizes him. As the
nervous currents thus encounter resistance, the feeling tone known as
fear is experienced. At the same time the currents burst their barriers
and overflow into new channels that are easy of access, the motor
centres being especially of this character. Some of the currents,
therefore, run to the involuntary muscles, and in consequence the heart
beats faster, the breathing becomes heavier, the face grows pale, a cold
sweat breaks forth, the hair "stands on end." Other currents, through
hereditary influences, pass to the voluntary muscles, and the person
shrieks, and turns and flees.
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