Cannon Bard Theory

3 Key excerpts on "Cannon Bard Theory"

• 

  eBook - ePub

  Principles Of Biopsychology

  • Simon Greene(Author)
  • 2013(Publication Date)
  • Psychology Press

    (Publisher)
• If peripheral arousal is sufficient to produce emotions, then simply taking physical exercise should be effective. But running up the stairs is not, by and large, an emotional experience.
Emotion: James-Lange Peripheral Theory (panel A).
Emotion: Cannon’s Central Theory (panel B).
In fact some of these criticisms have themselves fallen by the wayside. Hohmann (1966), studying a group of 25 patients with spinal cord damage, reported that they did experience reductions in feelings of anger, fear, and sex, in line with predictions from the James-Lange model.
Cannon’s alternative model gave a major role to the thalamus in the diencephalon. Based mainly on research with animals (see last section), much of it by Bard and so referred to as the Cannon-Bard model, Cannon proposed that sensory input from the environment passes to the cortex, which, after processing it, passes the results to the thalamus. Thalamic activity produces the experience of emotion, while connections from the thalamus to the hypothalamus are responsible for the eventual behavioural expression of emotional states.
In support of Cannon’s position, Maranon (1924) had systematically manipulated arousal and failed to affect emotion. He used the drug adrenaline (known as epinephrine in the USA); this is also the hormone released from the medulla of the adrenal gland which stimulates and sustains peripheral arousal. Maranon argued that even if a state of arousal was produced artificially, by the injection of adrenaline, the James-Lange model would still predict that subjects should feel emotions.
Of his 210 subjects, 71% reported only the physical consequences of adrenaline—such as increased heart-rate, dry mouth etc—whereas 29% reported “as if” emotions, i.e. not genuine experiences, but as if they were afraid or angry etc. Thus the James-Lange model was not supported.
The next major contribution to the debate on the role of peripheral arousal in emotion was a study that has become one of the most famous in the whole of psychology. In 1962 Schacter and Singer attempted to resolve the James-Lange / Cannon debate in a single experiment. They were convinced that although peripheral arousal was necessary for emotions to occur, it needed to be combined with a cognitive appraisal of the situation. This appraisal allows the subject to interpret the bodily arousal appropriately; if the situation involves a raging bull, you interpret the arousal as fear, whereas if it involves someone recording over your favourite video you would interpret it as anger. They point out that in Maranon’s study the subjects had an obvious explanation for their state of arousal, as they knew that they had been injected with adrenaline. Their cognitive appraisal would not involve emotion-inducing stimuli, so they did not feel emotional.