Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 2

by Unknown

For subject K, the parts of the picture of the Horse Fair remained. The feeling of seriousness and quietness, foreign to it itself, was projected into it. Solemnity and the feeling of strength and power was accentuated. The gaiety originally present was very much lessened, and finally not noticed at all.

For subject C, a sacred feeling was aroused. Wars of the Bible were recalled. There was a fusion of the imagery. He saw the church on a battlefield near a cavalry fight. The feeling of active earnestness and the sacred moral character was reported as due to the retained feeling first brought about by the Angelus. The influence of the other starting-point is clear.

Subject B found the incongruity between the two feelings very strong. The Angelus was the stronger in influence. The other caused one to stress the lighter, more trivial character of the former. Meadows, streams, pools, and enchanted regions typified the fanciful mood thus brought about.

It is not a question as to whether such trains of thought would have occurred if only one starting-point had been used. It is rather that, in such cases as the above, two distinct feeling-tones were actually detected as playing their part in the resulting complex experiences. It is with some effort that both feeling-tones can be thus at first retained. The resulting undertone or general mood, however brought about, colors and determines to a certain extent the associations which follow. The feeling is more deeply seated than the image, and here also it is retained longer.

The above recorded account of the behavior of simple feelings fairly represents the accumulated data at our disposal. How they can be adjusted to modern theories of the relation of consciousness to movement may be briefly suggested. Yet the rudimentary state both of the psychology and of the physiology of feeling makes the present task a hazardous one. Psychologists are not agreed as to the best way to conceive of the relation of feelings to sensations. Feeling-tone is in some ways dependent upon sensations; and at the same time, in comparison with other sensation attributes, it is relatively independent. Physiologists are still farther from agreement with regard to the nervous processes involved.

But the deeply organic seat of feelings is unquestioned. However the concept of feeling itself may differ, all are looking for corresponding bodily processes by means of which to classify these affective states. Clearly, to say that feeling is of such a nature that one need never hope to be able to predict it from psycho-physical conditions, is no more justified than to say that we can never predict exactly the intensity nor the vividness of any stimulation. Feeling-tone is here simply on a par with other attributes ascribed to sensation.

According to Münsterberg's Action Theory the intensity of the sensation depends upon the strength of the incoming current. Its quality depends upon the position or location of this current in its particular neurone. The vividness depends upon the "openness" or "closedness" of the neurone conditioning the outgoing current. And finally to the feeling-tone shall correspond the local difference of this discharge in outgoing currents. For instance, the pleasant feelings have, related to them, central outgoing paths which lead to approach, and thus to the continuation of the stimulus, and the unpleasant feelings have related to them in turn central neurones which lead to withdrawal or escape, and thus to the breaking-up of the stimulus.

Our empirical data gathered from the experiments above reported demand not so much a modification as an elaboration of this theory. The tridimensionality of the feeling-tone itself must be physiologically described. We must conceive the feeling-tone itself as possessed of its own vividness, intensity, and quality.

It seems clear indeed that any explanation of the affective or feeling-character of experience must be sought somewhere in the outgoing currents from the motor region. This alone will serve to account for the inevitable volitional or "intent" aspect which invariably accompanies feeling, and I think may serve to account also for the organic or necessarily coördinating or functioning aspect required by some writers who so stoutly object to "barren atomistic or structural" psychological explanations.

The Action Theory might then be specialized in the following way: