Going with your gut: How William James' theory of emotions brings insights to risk perception and decision making research

The basic premise of William James' theory of emotions – that bodily changes lead to emotional feelings – ignited debate about the relative importance of bodily processes and cognitive appraisals in determining emotions. Similarly, theories of risk perception have been expanding to include emotional and physiological processes along with cognitive processes. Taking a closer look at The Principles of Psychology, this article examines how James' propositions support and extend current research on risk perception and decision making. Specifically, James (1) described emotional feelings and their related cognitions in ways similar to current dual processing models; (2) defended the proposition that emotions and their expressions serve useful and adaptive functions; (3) suggested that anticipating an emotion can trigger that emotion due to associations learned from past experiences; and (4) highlighted individual differences in emotional experiences that map on well with individual differences in risk-related decision making.     

论威廉·詹姆斯对胡塞尔现象学的影响

詹姆斯在描述宗教经验时所采用的现象学方法;对心理主义的的拒斥;在诸如意识流、意向性、实在、自我等具体内容上在现象学领域所做的虽是无意但却是开创性的探索都表明詹姆斯的哲学思想对胡塞尔现象学有启发和影响的意义。     

詹姆斯心理学的现象学转向及其理论意蕴

本文在阐明詹姆斯心理学的出发点、并考察其心理学思想的探索和突破的基础上指出,詹姆斯关于心理学的思想历程无疑经历了一个根本的转向;又结合与胡塞尔现象学的比较认为,转向之后的詹姆斯的心理学思想的潜在意义,只有借用胡塞尔现象学的思想框架和概念工具,才能得到有效的表达和进一步的发展。文章最后还暗示了詹姆斯心理学思想的现象学转向对于理解并构建心理学的学科同一性的潜在意义。     

Jung before Freud, not Freud before Jung: the reception of Jung's work in American psychoanalytic circles between 1904 and 1909

A review is first presented of the new Jung scholarship – that Jung is to be properly understood, not as a disciple of Freud, but as the twentieth century exponent of the symbolic hypothesis in the tradition of the late nineteenth century psychologies of transcendence. This is followed by an outline of the so-called French-Swiss-English and American psychotherapeutic alliance, of which Jung was a part, and the cross-cultural mediumistic psychology of the subconscious it promoted, chiefly through the works of William James, F. W. H. Myers, and Théodore Flournoy. Focusing on the experimental work of the Swiss-American pathologist Adolph Meyer and the American neurologist Frederick Peterson, evidence is then produced to show that Jung, before Freud, was more important in American psychotherapeutic circles. His experimental researches into the association method and the psychogalvanic reflex, his study of mediums and connection to Swiss psychiatry had numerous unique alliances with the American scene, particularly because of their similar historical relation between psychology and religion. Therefore, to understand Jung, one must consider the archetypal significance which America held for Jung's own individuation process, as well as the Americanization of Jungian ideas that followed.     

Religion and Science in America: Struggling for Coherence

James Gilbert has provided fascinating and valuable historical sketches of the interactions of science and religion in American culture in this century, especially those taking place between 1945 and 1962. Yet, taken together, it is unclear what conclusion is to be drawn from these interactions. Ambiguity about the variety of forms of the science-and-religion relationship and about the referent of the term religion make the task of apprehending a coherent pattern among these sketches very difficult.     

Measuring the visual angle of the mind's eye

People in these experiments claimed to be able to imagine moving only a given distance toward some imaged object before it seemed to “overflow,” not remaining all visible at once in their mental images. In addition, the larger the imaged object, the further away it seemed at the point of overflow. Although the angle subtended by the imaged objects at the point of overflow did not vary systematically with the size of the object, it did vary with different stimuli and instructions. These disparities in the size of the angle estimated seemed partly due to differences in criterion of “overflow”: Images seem to fade off gradually toward the periphery and not to occur in a spatial medium with sharply defined edges. When subjects were given a relatively strict definition of “overflow,” similar estimates of the “visual angle of the mind's eye” were obtained with three distinct methods: (1) Asking subjects to estimate the apparent distance at which an imaged horizontal ruler began to overflow; (2) Measuring how much time subjects required to scan across each degree of an imaged line, and then inferring the maximal angle from the time required to scan an image of a longest nonoverflowing line; and, (3) Simply asking subjects to hold up their hands to indicate the subjective size of an image of the longest possible nonoverflowing line. Finally, the maximal subjective size of images seemed related to the scope of “focal” vision, and images tended to be constructed spontaneously at about the maximal size.     

Social judgments of spurious and causal relations between attributes and outcomes

People can learn about relations between attributes and outcomes by observing the attributes and outcomes of others, but, as this experiment indicates, such learning is not always veridical. Each subject received information about the ages, educations, and salaries of groups of employees in a fictitious corporation. Within a group, either age or education was related to salaries and the two attributes were either orthogonal or correlated. In each case, subjects judged the strength of the causal relation between each attribute and salaries. The results confirmed our hypothesis that observers are more likely to view a causally relevant attribute as irrelevant, and a causally irrelevant attribute as relevant, when relevant and irrelevant attributes are correlated. However, this tendency seemed to be mediated by subjects' bias to prefer education as an explanation of salary differences: That is, when age and education were correlated, subjects tended to view education as relevant even when it was irrelevant and age as irrelevant even when it was relevant. The results suggest that when attributes are correlated, factors extraneous to observed data may have a major influence on inferred attribute-outcome associations.     

Effects of initial success or failure in a stressful or relaxed environment on subsequent task performance

Forty male and 40 female undergraduate subjects worked on anagram problems in either a stressful or a relaxed environment after having experienced either success or failure on a similar task. Internal arousal, which was expected to be minimal following success in a relaxed setting and maximal following failure in the stressful environment, was assumed to bear an inverted U-shaped relation to performance. Consistent with the implications of these assumptions, achievement in a stressful setting was lower following initial failure than following initial success, while initial failure in a relaxed environment facilitated subsequent performance. The interpretation of these results was supported by the effects of the experimental variables on indirect measures of arousal as well as by the relationship between direct measures of arousal and task performance. In addition, the achievement of female subjects tended to be facilitated by failure while the performance of males was consistently debilitated by it.