The Body at Work: A Treatise on the Principles of PhysiologyHill, Alex
Science
The Body at Work: A Treatise on the Principles of Physiology
Hill, Alex
Physiology
internal organs caused by the cooling of the surface of the body, if it
occur when health is otherwise depressed, contributes to the production
of such a state.
The vaso-motor system is influenced by emotions. It is a little
difficult to express accurately the relation between emotion and
vaso-motor change. Some psychologists regard the vaso-motor change
as the emotion. “All emotions,” says a prominent exponent of this
view, “are wholly due to excitation of a particular kind of the
vaso-motor centre.” The person about to be subject to an emotion
of shame, anger, fear, disgust, recognizes a fact or circumstance,
or conjunction of circumstances, which justifies the emotion. (We
are assuming that emotions may be justified; that the intellectual
appreciation of a situation and reasoned decision regarding the
action which it demands is not sufficient.) This recognition as an
intellectual act of the higher brain is accompanied by certain forms
of enhanced activity or inhibition of activity of the vaso-motor
centre in the medulla oblongata which cause changes in the degree of
contraction of the bloodvessels of certain organs. The vascular changes
produce an alteration in the state of the organ which is reflected
in nerve-currents sent back to the brain, providing the background
of feeling which constitutes emotional tone. We are not prepared to
endorse this extreme view of the nature of an emotion. A maiden’s
blush is not an emotion of embarrassment or shame. It is its harmony.
Her mind plays the air. The sensations which originate in the flushed
skin of the face sustain it with their accompaniment. The emotional
tone keeps attention fixed on the fact or circumstance which led her
to conclude, by the exercise of her reason, that she was placed in an
awkward situation. This fixing of attention is frequently so pronounced
as to inhibit all other intellectual action. The maiden is less quick
than she would have been, had the emotion not glued her thoughts
together, in recognizing the readiest means of extricating herself
from embarrassment. All nerves found within the chest and abdomen
were in very early times termed “sympathetic.” The cord in the neck
was the “little sympathetic.” The name explains itself; but it will
be understood that it implied much more in the days when the liver,
spleen and heart were supposed to pour out emotions than it does now.
The vagus nerve was termed the “middle sympathetic.” Shame inhibits the
activity of the vaso-constrictor nerves of the face; dilation of the
vessels which they supply is accompanied with constriction of other
cutaneous nerves. Kipling must, we think, have embellished Nature
when he represents the very unimpressionable hero of Lungtungpen as
admitting “I niver blushed before or since; but I blushed all over
my carkiss thin.” Usually the carmine of the face contrasts with the
pallor and coldness of the hands. Still, we are not prepared to assert
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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