Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

 THE JAMES-LANGE THEORY: DO GUT 
REACTIONS EQUAL EMOTIONS? 
To William James and Carl Lange, who were among the fi rst researchers to explore 
the nature of emotions, emotional experience is, very simply, a reaction to instinctive 
bodily events that occur as a response to some situation or event in the environment. 
This view is summarized in James’s statement, “We feel sorry because we cry, angry 
because we strike, afraid because we tremble” (James, 1890). 
James and Lange took the view that the instinctive response of crying at a loss 
leads us to feel sorrow, that striking out at someone who frustrates us results in our 
feeling anger, that trembling at a menacing threat causes us to feel fear. They sug-
gested that for every major emotion there is an accompanying physiological or “gut” 
reaction of internal organs—called a visceral experience . It is this specifi c pattern of 
visceral response that leads us to label the emotional experience. 
In sum, James and Lange proposed that we experience emotions as a result of 
physiological changes that produce specifi c sensations. The brain interprets these 
sensations as specifi c kinds of emotional experiences (see the fi rst part of Figure 2). 
This view has come to be called the  James-Lange theory of emotion  (Laird & Bresler, 
1990; Cobos et al., 2002).
The James-Lange theory has some serious drawbacks, however. For the theory 
to be valid, visceral changes would have to occur relatively quickly because we 
experience some emotions—such as fear upon hearing a stranger rapidly approaching 
on a dark night—almost instantaneously. Yet emotional experiences frequently occur 
even before there is time for certain physiological changes to be set into motion. 
Because of the slowness with which some visceral changes take place, it is hard to 
see how they could be the source of immediate emotional experience. 
The James-Lange theory poses another diffi culty: Physiological arousal does not 
invariably produce emotional experience. For example, a person who is jogging has 
an increased heartbeat and respiration rate as well as many of the other physiological 
changes associated with certain emotions. Yet joggers typically do not think of such 
changes in terms of emotion. There cannot be a one-to-one correspondence, then, 
between visceral changes and emotional experience. Visceral changes by themselves 
may not be suffi cient to produce emotion. 
Finally, our internal organs produce a relatively limited range of sensations. 
Although some types of physiological changes are associated with specifi c emo-
tional experiences, it is diffi cult to imagine how each of the myriad emotions that 
people are capable of experiencing could be the result of a unique visceral change. 
Many emotions actually are associated with relatively similar sorts of visceral 
changes, a fact that contradicts the James-Lange theory (Davidson et al., 1994; 
Cameron, 2002).