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.
Primary emotions become refined, first by modifications of the motor response, by which socially acceptable reactions are substituted for the primitive crying, screaming, biting and scratching, guffawing, dancing up and down in excitement, etc.; second by new attachments on the side of the stimulus, such that the emotion is no longer called out by the original simple type of situation (it takes a more serious danger, a subtler bit of humor, to arouse the emotional response); and third by combination of one emotion with another. An example of compound emotion is the blend of tenderness and amusement awakened in the friendly adult by the actions of a little child. Hate is perhaps a compound of anger and fear, and pity a compound of grief and tenderness. There are dozens of names of emotions in the language--resentment, reverence, gratitude, disappointment, etc.--which probably stand for compound emotions rather than for primary emotions, but the derivation of each one of them from the primary emotions is a difficult task. The emotional life cannot be kept apart from the life of ideas, for the individual is a good deal of a unit.
EXERCISES
1. Outline the chapter.
2. Make a list of 20 words denoting various emotional states.
3. Trace the expressive facial movement of pouting back to its probable origin in the history of the individual.
4. What internal nerves are concerned with digestion? With fear?
5. Show by diagrams the differences between (a) the common-sense theory of the emotions, (b) the James-Lange theory, (c) the James-Lange theory modified to take full account of the reaction-tendency.
6. Make a list of objections to the James-Lange theory, and scrutinize each objection carefully, to see