Cited by T. Quick, 'Disciplining Physiological Psychology: Cinematographs as Epistemic Devices, 1897-1922', Science in Context 30 (4), pp. 423-474.
Description:

'The vital body played a critical role in James’s understanding of emotion. In a phrase that had strong parallels with Bergson’s protoplasmic conception of life, James referred to the body as a ‘sounding board’ through which emotions were conveyed and experienced (Wassmann 2014, 173-174. See also Deigh 2014).

 

'James challenged the physiological psychological claim that emotions could be identified with a specific part or region of the body or nervous system. Though Wundt for example accorded a greater role to emotion in the perceptual process that either Spencer or Bain, he had like them contended that it was primarily a property of the brain. Emotion (Gefül) for Wundt was not simply a report of the vital situation of the body, as James claimed, but in fact caused change within it. Emotion in this latter sense could be a means by which the body became passive to the nervous mind, and controlled by it (Wassmann 2014, 169-171). For James in contrast, emotion was the bodily accompaniment of external sensation, and as such constituted an active component of perception itself.'

 

'That Sherrington was during the first decades of the twentieth century recognised as having published one of the most incisive studies to cast doubt on the scientific plausibility of James’s theory (Wassmann 2014, 178-179) should therefore be read as having significance beyond the immediate claims that it made concerning James himself.'

 

'James’s Harvard colleague Walter B. Cannon’s Bodily Changes in Pain Hunger Fear And Rage (1915), a publication that set the tone for subsequent physiological work in the field, relied on kymographic recordings almost to the exclusion of other forms of evidence. This work re-affirmed Sherrington’s contention regarding the continuation of emotional expression following the dissociation of the brain from the body. Further, it compounded objections to James’s theory: quite different emotions, Cannon contended, produce physiologically similar effects; the physiological processes that accompanied emotional experience did not act quickly enough to provide ‘sensory’ information; and even when such visceral changes did in fact take place, the relevant emotion was not according to Cannon necessarily experienced (Wassmann 2014, 179-180; See also Dror 2014).'