What Causes Feelings? Main Theories of Emotion

After figuring out what motivation and emotion are, the next big question is how they happen. Specifically for emotions, what causes them? If you see a bear in the woods, do you feel scared, which makes your heart race? Or does your racing heart tell your brain that you must be scared? It’s a classic chicken-and-egg problem, and it turns out, psychologists have been debating it for over a century.

Let's look at a few different perspectives –biological, cognitive, and social– that all try to explain the chain of events that leads to an emotion.

The Biological Perspective of Emotions

Our bodies as the source of emotions

This perspective suggests that emotions are, at their core, biological responses to important life events. The main theories here feel like a timeline of scientific thought.

James-Lange Theory

First up is the James-Lange Theory. Back in the 1880s, William James and Carl Lange proposed something that feels completely backward at first glance: the physical reaction comes before the emotional experience. Seeing the bear triggers a specific physiological response: your heart pounds, you start to sweat, your muscles tense up for action. According to James, our awareness of these specific bodily changes is the emotion of fear. The theory assumes that different events produce unique body reaction patterns, and without a body reaction, there is no emotion.

Cannon-Bard Theory

Then came the Cannon-Bard Theory, which challenged this idea. This theory suggests that when we experience an emotionally arousing event, our brain processes the emotion and triggers a physiological response at the same time, not one after the other. Unlike the earlier James-Lange Theory, which claimed that we feel emotions because of our bodily reactions (like feeling afraid because our heart races), the Cannon-Bard Theory argues that both the emotion (like fear) and the physical response (like a racing heart) happen simultaneously and independently. This theory emphasizes the role of the brain, particularly the thalamus, in sending signals to both the body and the emotional centers, creating a more immediate and holistic emotional experience.

Facial Feedback Hypothesis

A fascinating part of the biological view is the Facial Feedback Hypothesis. This theory suggests that the movements of our facial muscles can actually generate or intensify an emotion. Even forcing a smile can, to a small extent, make you feel a little happier. This is because the feedback from those muscles gets sent back to the brain and integrated into your emotional experience.

The Cognitive Perspective

Emotions are based on our interpretation

While biology explains our "basic" emotions pretty well, what about more complex ones like pride, gratitude, or envy? This is where the cognitive perspective comes in. It argues that events themselves don't cause emotions; rather, our appraisal (our interpretation of an event's personal significance) is what matters.

Lazarus's Appraisal Theory

Lazarus broke it down into two steps:

• Primary Appraisal: You first ask, "Is this event relevant to my well-being? Is there anything at stake for me?" If the answer is no, an emotion doesn't really follow. If yes, you move to the next step.

• Secondary Appraisal: You then ask, "Can I cope with this?"

Your emotional response depends on your answers. For example, facing a tough exam (the event) might lead to different emotions. If you appraise it as a threat to your grades and feel you can't cope, you might feel anxiety. But if you appraise it as a challenge you have the resources to handle, you might feel determination or even excitement. If the appraisal changes, the emotion changes, even if the event stays the same.

This perspective also explains why people have different emotional reactions to the same event and how we learn to distinguish between shades of an emotion (like annoyance, anger, and fury) through what's called emotion knowledge.

The Social & Cultural Perspective

We Learn and Share Emotions

How does our social world shape our feelings? We rarely experience emotions in a vacuum. Here are two interesting concepts:

Emotional Contagion:

This is the tendency to automatically mimic the expressions and moods of those around us, and in doing so, "catch" their emotion. Think about how a friend's laughter can make you laugh, or how a tense mood in a room can make you feel tense, too.

Social Sharing

After an emotional event, we have a strong impulse to share the story with others. Recounting what happened and how we felt helps us regulate our emotions, make sense of the event, and strengthen our social bonds.

So what causes an emotion?

It’s not one or the other

The modern view seems to be that it's not a simple case of biology or cognition. It's both. It's a "two-system view". A significant event triggers two simultaneous systems:

• An ancient, subcortical system that reacts automatically and unconsciously based on our evolutionary history (the biological part).

• A newer, cortical system that reacts consciously based on our learning and cultural history (the cognitive-social part).

These two systems interact to produce our full emotional experience. It’s a beautifully complex feedback loop where biology, thoughts, and even the people around us all play a part.

"The thing about life is that you have to live it. You can't just think about it." — Esther Perel

Sources:

Psychology of Motivation and Emotion, Unit 1. University of Valencia

• Chapter 2: Motivation and emotion in historical perspective (7ª Ed). Reeve, J. (2018). Wiley.

• Chapter 12: Nature of emotion (7ª Ed). Reeve, J. (2018). Wiley.

• Chapter 13: Aspects of emotion (7ª Ed). Reeve, J. (2018). Wiley.