(21) A scowl and puckering of the lips was descriptive of the attitude taken toward some unpleasant situations.
(22) A contraction or relaxation of the throat-muscles and of the vocal chords generally was not infrequently noticed. The tendency to swallow is spoken of. The throat is felt often to be "concave" when certain bad feelings are sufficiently pronounced. A contraction in the mucous membrane, with teeth on edge, such as one would experience in eating something sour, is frequent. A twitching of the ears, squinting of the eyebrows, and a "heavy feeling" through the neck and chest occur often, or again a pressing hard of the tongue against the roof of the mouth.
(23) Forms suggested a shrinking in the volume of the face, sometimes of the crown of the head, and even of the whole head.
(24) Upright or horizontal ovals especially provoked the impulse to imitate the figure itself, either with the lips or with the hands and arms. When the feeling was particularly strong, all these impulses often occurred together and appeared mutually to reënforce, or to intensify each other.
(25) Horizontal ovals gave one the feeling of being "flattened out," coupled with an impulse to adjustment altogether unlike the sprightly, alert, airy feeling aroused by the "trim," upright figures.
(26) Occasionally when the irregular shapes were presented directly after a subject had been enjoying one of the perfect figures, that side of his face or body corresponding to the distorted portion of the figure was felt to be in an abnormal and unpleasant position. This "caving-in" or "bulging-out" sensation, which accompanies the unpleasant feeling, happens when the whole muscular system at the time for the subject seems inert or externally controlled.
All these sensations of bodily processes, taken from the introspective descriptions given by the subjects, are distinctly reported by them as very faint. They by no means detect them in every experience, nor do they always seem to the subject himself to mean the whole of the feeling as experienced. Neither did any one subject find all the concomitant processes recorded above. Subject H failed throughout the whole period to detect anything whatsoever, except slight tendencies to frown, smooth the brow, or to open wide the eyes. This subject was unable to detect any special differences in his feelings, either in variety or in amount. For him neither soft red nor brilliant yellow was either exciting or soothing. They were and always remained for him more or less vaguely pleasant, and this description for him was both ultimate and exhaustive.
Subject B could get no kind of pleasant feeling from any tactual surface, while to Subject E even the coarsest sandpaper usually afforded pleasant stimulation. As spoken of above, articulatory impulses were characteristic of the motor tendencies of Subjects D and G. To Subject A the experiences seemed richest and fullest, and the corresponding bodily processes were likewise more pronounced and varied. In the great majority of the experiments, especially during the period of training, the feeling itself vanished when the subjects attempted to analyze the bodily processes. It was chiefly, however, a matter of training, and this more and more ceased to be a disturbing element.
Some subjects preferred often to speak of circulatory, or at least, decidedly internal and usually involuntary changes in addition to, and sometimes without, the controlled muscular actions. The mood of the time affects the amount of feeling, and occasionally, but far less frequently, the quality. The moral significance of the feelings was most prominent when the subject felt most interested in the experiment, as may be noted above in their descriptions of the feelings for red and yellow. What may be termed the "regularity element" would seem generally to serve as the test especially for the pleasant-unpleasant character of the feeling-tone. The feeling of expansiveness never accompanied unpleasant feelings. Feelings of contraction, on the other hand, very often occurred when the feelings were not at all disagreeable. In such cases there was a significance attached to the direction or meaning of the adjustment.