Charles Darwin's Theory Of Emotions

Emotions seem to rule our every day life. We make all of our decisions based on whether we feel happy, sad, scared, angry or disgusted. An emotion is a complex psychological state that involves three distinct components: a subjective experience, a psychological response, and a behavioural or expressive response (Hockenbury & Hockenbury, 2007). Charles Darwin (1809-1882) is the father of emotion; he published the first ever book about the study of biopsychology of emotion - “The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals” (Darwin, 1872). In his book he made two major contributions, one, that animal emotions are similar to human emotions, and the other, that there are fundamental and basic emotions present across all species. For him, emotion
Today, many psychologists agree with his theory about emotions being universal and basic, and they use almost the same techniques and event stimuli to study emotions. In fact, in 1972 psychologist Paul Eckman suggested that there are six basic emotions that are universal throughout all humans. There are many theories of emotion, but three of them are perhaps the most commonly discussed. They are called the James-Lang theory, the Cannon-Bard theory and the Schachter-Singer theory. First, I am going to look at the James-Lang theory of emotion, which was proposed only 10 years later than the Charles Darwin theory. This theory states that your brain interprets specific physiological responses as emotions (James & Lang, 1887). Simply meaning that, you first experience the physiological response, which makes you feel a certain emotion, for example, you are sad because you are crying. Even though this theory was developed individually by the two psychologists it is interesting that they came up with the same idea around the same time. William James explained: “My thesis on the contrary is that the bodily changes follow
Some of them are compatible, like Darwin’s evolutionary theory and the theory that states that emotion process can easily complement each other. Whilst others, are contradictory, like the cognitive and non-cognitive theories. All theories of emotion fall somewhere in between, agreeing with some features of a specific theory, whilst disagreeing about another. In the last forty years a huge amount of data has been collected by cognitive and social psychologists. As we know, to study emotions we use functional neuroimaging, behavioural experiments, electrophysiological recording and animal and human behavioural studies. In the last decade, especially the technological side of these studies has been developing so much giving us greater access to the brain functioning when experiencing emotion, which has lead to all sorts of new modern theories of