Psychology : $b A study of mental lifeWoodworth, Robert Sessions
Science
Psychology : $b A study of mental life
Woodworth, Robert Sessions
Psychology
thing at the office has "made him so cross."
In the same way, let a group of people get into a very mirthful state
from hearing a string of good jokes, and a hearty laugh may be aroused
by a feeble effort that at other times would have fallen flat.
In such cases, the organic state, once set up in response to a certain
stimulus, persists after the reaction to that stimulus is finished and
predisposes the individual to make the same sort of reaction to other
stimuli.
{134}
Emotion and Instinct
Anger, fear, lust, the comfortable state appropriate to digestion,
grief (the state of the weeping child), mirth or amusement, disgust,
curiosity, the "tender emotion" (felt most strongly by a mother
towards her baby), and probably a few others, are "primary emotions".
They occur, that is to say, by virtue of the native constitution, and
do not have to be learned or acquired through experience. They are
native states of mind; or, as modes of behavior, they are like
instincts in being native behavior.
One distinction between emotional and instinctive behavior is that the
emotion consists of internal responses, while the instinct is directed
outwards or at least involves action on external objects. Another
distinction is that the emotional response is something in the nature
of a preparatory reaction, while the instinct is directed towards the
end-reaction.
The close connection of emotion and instinct is fully as important to
notice as the distinction between them. Several of the primary
emotions are attached to specific instincts: thus, the emotion of fear
goes with the instinct to escape from danger, the emotion of anger
goes with the fighting instinct, the emotion of lust with the mating
instinct, tender emotion with the maternal instinct, curiosity with
the exploring instinct. Where we find emotion, we find also a tendency
to action that leads to some end-result.
It has been suggested, accordingly, that each primary emotion is
simply the "affective" phase of an instinct, and that every instinct
has its own peculiar emotion. This is a very attractive idea, but up
to the present it has not been worked out very satisfactorily. Some
instincts, such as that for walking, seem to have no specific emotion
attached to them. Others, like anger and fear, resemble each other
very {135} closely as organic states, though differing as impulses.
The really distinct emotions (not impulses) are much fewer than the
instincts.
The most important relationship between instinct and emotion is what
we have seen in the cases of anger and a few others, where the emotion
represents bodily readiness for the instinctive action.
The Higher Emotions
We have been confining our attention in this chapter to the primary
emotions. The probability is that the higher emotions, esthetic,
social, religious, are derived from the primary in the course of the
individual's experience.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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