(a) To describe as clearly as possible how the particular experience felt.
(b) To report always all the accompanying physiological or physical processes which seemed to mean, to result from, or apparently only accidentally to accompany the stimulus judged by him to have a feeling-tone.
The work of the experiment covers a period of two years, and fortunately several of the subjects were available for the whole period. No subject was used for more than two hours each week. In the preparatory training with sensations from only one sense-organ, the range of colors, odors, etc., was chosen as follows: Twenty colors, and as many tactual surfaces, etc., were presented in turn, and each subject was requested to make his judgment as to the relative degree of agreeableness or disagreeableness of the feelings arising in the several cases. The scale of numbers from 1 to 7 served in the traditional way to indicate approximately the hedonic value of the feeling-tones, 1 signifying highest degree of pleasure, 2 very pleasant, 3 slightly pleasant, 4 indifferent, 5 slightly unpleasant, 6 very unpleasant, and 7 the highest degree of unpleasantness. Though the personal differences were in some cases rather striking, the individual subject from day to day showed a relatively constant standard. This was done in order simply to be able to choose approximately the stimulus in the individual case likely to call up the kind of feeling one wished to study more in detail, and thus facilitate the progress of the investigation. In this preliminary stage pleasant or unpleasant seemed to the subjects more or less an exhaustive account of these faint feelings. This was a means of eliminating practically indifferent shades, as there is here no special interest in the psychology of color as such.
II. Following upon this preparatory training, the second part of the experiment consisted in a similar study of the mutual influences of simultaneous feelings accompanying sensations from different sense-organs. How does the feeling of pleasure obtained from contact with a smooth surface influence the feeling occasioned by the sight of a pleasant or unpleasant object? Here, for example, colors were exposed in a large black frame manipulated by means of shutters easily opened or closed, at the same time that a tactual surface was being applied, or a tone from a tuning-fork was being sounded.
The introspection method was essentially the same here as in Part I.
(a) First, the subject was requested, without the necessary distraction of directing his attention at all to the bodily processes, to give himself up to the situation and to report as accurately as he could the kind of affective state experienced.
(b) Next, as in Part I again, in a repetition of the same experience, he was requested to be on the lookout for any and all accompanying bodily changes. The problem here was to discover to what extent the more complex state now in question would correspond to the specific and noticeable bodily reactions such as were noted in Part I, where single experiences presumably resulted. If different feeling-elements are in experience at once, can one fix upon correspondingly different suggested actions? Does the organism react to more than one situation, or to two sources of stimulation at once? Is affection present only when the whole organism is, to use Titchener's expression, "tilted" one way? Is the Totalgefühl the single undifferentiated result always, or can we here also detect such phenomena as summation, fusion, inhibition, and partial or total mutual reënforcement of the different feeling-components? Do the new reactions which seem to mean the feelings always refer to actions so inclusive as to result in the inhibition of any other tendencies to response, or is there sometimes a clear strife between two simultaneously conflicting feelings, two kinds of relatively self-dependent reactions both going on at once? Or again, when the hedonic or algedonic characters of two given simultaneous stimuli, such as a soft, soothing, pleasant touch with an irritating, exhilarating, invigorating but also pleasant yellow color, do not differ as to their pleasant-unpleasant character, must one be pale and empty "intellectual perception" when the other is being enjoyed? These are some of the questions that suggest themselves at once.
Not at this point, however, considering the dimensionality of feeling, the four simple combinations were first studied; such, for example, as (1) a pleasant color with a pleasant touch, (2) pleasant color with unpleasant touch, (3) unpleasant color with pleasant touch, and (4) unpleasant color with unpleasant touch.