Copyright 1995 by the American Psychological Association, Inc.

Psychological Review
1995, VoLl02, No. 4, 757-761

James and the Physical Basis of Emotion: A Comment on Ellsworth

Rainer Reisenzein, Wulf-Uwe Meyer, and Achim Schutzwohl
Universitat Bielefeld
It is argued that P. Ellsworth's (1994) interpretation of William James's theory of emotions is not
supported by his writings. On the basis of textual evidence and systematic considerations, the authors
try to show that, in line with the traditional view, James's theory holds that emotions are identical
with feelings of bodily changes, of which autonomic changes are by far the most important ones (i.e.,
the only ones necessary and sufficient for emotions). Furthermore, the authors argue that James's
question of the temporal priority of emotions versus bodily feelings makes good sense even if one
acknowledges that these events usually show temporal overlap.

est, because it touches on a number of problems that continue

to be relevant to today's psychology of emotion.2

In a recent article commemorating the centennial of the Psychological Review, Phoebe Ellsworth (1994) suggested that, for
a century, William James's theory of emotions has been fundamentally misunderstood. We share Ellsworth's concern with an
accurate interpretation of historically important psychological
formulations, particularly if, as in the case of James's theory
of emotions, they continue to influence today's theorizing and
research (see, e.g., Izard, 1990; Laird & Bresler, 1990; Winton,
1990). We also agree with one of Ellsworth's specific claims
concerning James's theory, namely that subsequent emotion researchers have for the most part (but see Arnold, 1960; Winton,
1990) ignored the fact that by 1894, James had come to believe
that "emotional" bodily changes are in typical cases elicited by
what amounts to a process of cognitive appraisal (cf. Meyer,
Schutzwohl, & Reisenzein, 1993). However, we think that, in
her effort to set the historical balance straight, Ellsworth has
in other respects imposed on James an interpretation that his
writings do not support. This interpretation concerns, in particular, James's views on (a) the nature of emotions and (b) the
relative importance of autonomic changes for emotions.1 We
fear that Ellsworth's article may therefore only serve to create a
new James myth to replace the old one.
The main goal of the present article is to prevent this from
happening. On the basis of textual evidence and systematic considerations, we try to show that the traditional interpretation of
James's views of the nature of emotions is essentially correct:
According to James, emotions are (a) identical with feelings of
bodily changes, of which (b) feelings of autonomic changes are
by far the most important ones, in that they are the only ones
necessary and sufficient for emotions. In a final section, we address Ellsworth's suggestion that the question of the temporal
priority of bodily changes versus emotions raised by James may
no longer be very meaningful if one acknowledges that these
events are processes that usually show temporal overlap.
We believe that our discussion is not only of historical inter-

James on the Nature of Emotions

Acknowledging James's (1894) cognitive-appraisal view of
emotion generation certainly makes an important difference to
the traditional interpretation of his theory; however, it does not
necessarily mean that this interpretation was amiss with respect
to James's views on the nature of emotions. This, however, is
what Ellsworth (1994) suggests. She claims that, in contrast to
the prevailing view, James never wanted to say that emotions
are identical with (particular kinds of) bodily feelings (which
entails that bodily feelings are necessary and sufficient for
emotions); his actual claim being that, although "the sensation
of bodily changes is a necessary condition of emotion"
(Ellsworth, 1994, p. 222), "the interpretation of the situation
. . . [is] essential to the emotional experience" (p. 225) too,
and that "the bodily processes combine with the perception of
the object to produce the emotion" (p. 223). In short, Ellsworth
suggests that James's theory of the nature of emotions is, to a
fair degree, a precursor of cognition-arousal theories (e.g., Maranon, 1924; cf. Cornelius, 1991; Mandler, 1984; Schachter,
1964). To support her interpretation, Ellsworth (1994) advances three arguments, which we examine in the following
paragraphs.
Ellsworth's (1994) first argument consists of the claim that
the traditional reading of James draws support nearly exclusively from the one famous paragraph where he wrote "ourfeel1
In addition, we found problematic Ellsworth's suggestion that
"James would nevef have endorsed a theory that classifies emotions into
a limited number of discrete categories" (Ellsworth, 1994, p. 226); for,
in our view, James thought of emotions such as anger, fear, and so on, as
feelings of ultimately inherited, prototypical patterns of bodily
(possibly only autonomic) changes. However, because of space constraints and because Ellsworth has clarified that she did not mean her
suggestion to exclude this "fuzzy category" view, we forgo discussion of
this issue.
2
Yet another issue raised by Ellsworth's article (related to the point
addressed in Footnote 1) concerns the question of what, precisely, the
difference is between "categorical" and "dimensional" theories of emotion. However, a discussion of this issue must be left to another occasion.

Rainer Reisenzein, Wulf-Uwe Meyer, and Achim Schutzwohl, Department of Psychology, Universitat Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany.
Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to
Rainer Reisenzein, Abteilung Psychologic, Universitat Bielefeld, Postfach 100131, 33501 Bielefeld, Germany.
757

758

THEORETICAL NOTES

ing of the same [i.e., bodily] changes as they occur IS the

emotion" (James, 1890/1950, p. 449)3; a paragraph where
James, "tempted by the extravagant phrase" (Ellsworth, 1994,
p. 222), allegedly did not convey his true intentions.
In contrast to what Ellsworth suggests, there are in fact numerous other passages in James's pre-1894 statements of his
theoryfrom which the famous paragraph stemsthat support the traditional interpretation of his central dictum (see
James, 1884, 1890/1950, 1892). For example, James repeats
his central assumption in the following passages: "The emotion
is nothing but the feeling of the reflex bodily effects of what
we call its 'object'" (James, 1884, p. 194); "the more closely I
scrutinize my states, the more persuaded I become that whatever moods, affections, and passions I have are in very truth
constituted by, and made up of, those bodily changes which we
ordinarily call their expression or consequence" (James, 1890/
1950, p. 452); "each emotion is the resultant of a sum of elements, and. . .the elements are all organic changes" (p. 453);
and "[bodily changes] are the very general cause of our emotional feelings" (James, 1892, p. 242). In addition, James reiterates his central claim when discussing special cases of emotion generation. For example, as a "necessary corollary" of his
theory, he states that "any voluntary and cold-blooded arousal
of the so-called manifestations of a special emotion ought to
give us the emotion itself" (James, 1890/1950, p. 462). When
describing a case of an emotional feeling that, in his view, is
elicited directly by the imagination of a stimulus, without the
intervening of appraisals (two steel blades crossing each other
at right angles and moving to and fro), James writes "the entire
fund and capital of the emotion here is the senseless bodily effect
which the blades immediately arouse" (p.458).And when discussing apparently objectless emotions, such as objectless
fearswhich James interpreted quite literally as cases of fear
where people are not afraid of anything, but are simply afraid
he holds that "the emotion here is nothing but the feeling of a
bodily state, and it has a purely bodily cause" (p. 459). Note
also that these noncognitive cases of emotion generation were
taken by James as being of great significance to his theory. Cases
where emotions arise without, before, or together with opposing
appraisals were in fact so much stressed by him in his original
writings (cf. in particular James, 1890/1950, pp. 457-458)
that nearly all of his early critics were misled into thinking that
he took such cases to exemplify the typical way of emotion generation (cf. Gardiner, 1896). Similarly, objectless emotions
were regarded by James as prototypical cases of emotion "pure
and simple" that, in his view, afford "the best proof that the
immediate cause of emotion is a physical effect on the nerves"
(James, 1890/1950, p. 458). Furthermore, he saw it as "one
of the chief merits" (p. 458) of his theory that it treated both
objectless and object-directed emotions within the same general
framework. In fact, James's theory seems to be somewhat better
suited to explain objectless than object-directed emotion instances, because bodily sensations are intrinsically objectless
(i.e., they are not, in and of themselves, directed at or about
anything). Additional assumptions are therefore needed to reconcile this theory with the fact that the typical emotion instances, at least, seem to be object-directedthat is, people are
typically not just happy, angry, or afraid but are happy or angry
about something, afraid of something, and so on. Pursual of the
question of the nature of these additional assumptions leads, in

a natural way, to a discussion of the second piece of evidence

adduced by Ellsworth (1994) for her cognition-arousal interpretation of James.
This second piece of support consists of a quotation of the
following passage from James's Principles of Psychology
(James, 1890/1950; see also James, 1884): "[The bodily
changes] perceived, like the original object. . . combine with
it in consciousness and transform it from an object-simply-apprehended into an object-emotionally-felt" (p. 474). This passage, Ellsworth (1994) proposed, should be read as: "the bodily
processes combine with the perception of the object to produce
the emotion" (p. 223); and because "perception" can be understood here as "appraisal," Ellsworth suggests that this sentence describes, in effect, a precursor of cognition-arousal theories (although, of course, in contrast to the latter theories, James
thought of bodily changes as emotion-specific).
In view of the strong evidence in favor of the traditional interpretation, one might simply discard the quoted passage as
nondiagnostic of James's views on the matter. However, it is not
necessary to do this, for there is an alternative plausible reading
that is consistent with the traditional interpretation of James's
theory. According to this alternative reading, the critical passage
is not an anticipation of cognition-arousal theory but an attempt by James to account for object-directed emotion instances. James assumes that, although emotions are intrinsically objectless bodily feelings, in those (the typical) cases where
the emotions (i.e., bodily feelings) are caused by perceptions or
appraisals of objects, emotions "borrow" their objects from the
latter mental states. This kind of theorywhich may be called
the theory of derived object-directedness of emotionscan already be found in Hume (1739/1978); it was not uncommon
at James's times (cf. Irons, 1897), being held, for example, by
Wundt (1896; see Reisenzein, 1992) and Hoffding (1908). This
theory can be regarded as the standard way of how the objectdirectedness of typical emotion instances is handled by those
authors who assume, like James, that emotions are intrinsically
objectless mental states (cf. also Reisenzein & Schonpflug,
1992; and see Green, 1992, for a discussion of some problems
of this theory).
In addition to being consistent with the aforementioned passages in which James insists that emotions are just bodily feelings, our interpretation is supported by a close inspection of
the critical sentence. The transformation process alluded to by
James is not described by him as a transformation of two mental states (object perception and bodily feelings) into a third one
(emotion); rather, the transformation refers to the object of the
perception, that is, to the perceived thing (e.g., the proverbial
bear). This object, James says, is transformed from "an objectsimply-apprehended" into "an object-emotionally felt." It
seems natural to read this in the following way: If an emotional
quale (i.e., an emotion-specific bodily feeling) is added to the
perception, the object of the perception also becomes the object
of the emotion.
One might object that, for the described theory of derived
object-directedness to work, one must additionally assume a
process of fusion of bodily feelings and cognitions into a new
3
Unless indicated otherwise, all references to James's (1890/1950)
Principles of Psychology refer to Volume 2.

THEORETICAL NOTES
mental state and that in this case, it would be legitimate to identify the emotion with this new mental state. However, this is not
so: The most that is needed is the person's belief that the felt
arousal is caused by his or her appraisal of the object (cf. Reisenzein, 1994). Such a causal attribution is of course also assumed in some interpretations of cognition-arousal theory
(e.g., Ross, Rodin, & Zimbardo, 1969; cf. Reisenzein, 1983,
1994). However, whereas according to the latter theory, both
appraisal and arousal are necessary for emotions, and the main
function of the causal attribution is to cognitively "integrate"
these elements (which is presumably sufficient for an emotional
state), the theory of derived object-directedness assumes that
appraisals are not necessary for emotions and that the function
of the causal attribution is only to provide the bodily feelings
with an object in the typical cases of emotions.4 It fits nicely
with our interpretation that although James, by 1894, had come
to believe that emotional bodily changes are elicited by what
amounts to (see Arnold, 1960) a process of cognitive appraisal
in typical cases, there is no indication that he entirely abandoned his earlier belief that these changes can also be elicited
by "mere perceptions" of objects (e.g., fear can be elicited by
particular loud sounds).
As final support of her cognition-arousal interpretation, Ellsworth (1994, p. 222) suggested that James, in his 1894 article,
made clear that the traditional exegesis of his central dictum
had been a misunderstanding when he wrote "all the force of
such objections lies in the slapdash brevity of the language used,
of which I admit that my own text set a bad example when it
said 'we are frightened because we run'" (p. 519).
However, we think that the context makes clear that this particular rejoinder of James (1894) was not intended to correct
his earlier claim that emotions are simply bodily feelings, but it
was meant as an answer to Worcester's (1893) objection that a
specific class of bodily feelings, those derived from instrumental
(goal-directed) behaviors, cannot play the role in emotions that
James (1890 /1950) seemed to have assigned to them. (James's
reply consisted, essentially, of diminishing the importance of
actions relative to that of autonomic changes.) Furthermore, a
close reading of James's (1894) article indicates to us that, like
his earlier works, it does not contain a single unambiguous
statement of the position attributed to him by Ellsworth
(1994), but it contains several statements that reinforce the traditional interpretation (cf. e.g., James, 1894, pp. 516,518,520,
525). Perhaps of greatest relevance is a passage where James
attributes to Worcester (1893) and Irons (1894)at least in
Iron's case erroneously, we thinkvery nearly the cognitionarousal theory of emotion imputed to James by Ellsworth
(1994): "Both Dr. Worcester and Mr. Irons insist on the fact
that consciousness of bodily disturbance, taken by itself, and
apart from its combination with the consciousness of an exciting object, is not emotional at all" (James, 1894, p. 521). One
should think that, if Ellsworth were right with her cognitionarousal interpretation, this would have been the ideal opportunity for James to make clear this fact, by agreeing with Worcester and Irons. Instead, James (1894) explicitly rejected their
view: He argued that the reason why the nonemotional bodily
changes (e.g., hiccoughing) brought up against this theory by
Worcester and Irons do not give rise to emotions is by no means
that there is no consciousness of an exciting object, but that
these changes cause only localized bodily sensations, whereas

759

emotional bodily feelings are based on widespread and diffuse

bodily changes that contain, as essential components, numerous
hard-to-locaUze visceral factors. James continues, "I have said
that where they also from any inward cause are added, we have
the emotion; and that then the subject is seized with objectless
or pathological dread, grief, or rage, as the case may be" (p.
522). And then James reaffirms his belief in the existence of
wholly objectless emotions.
In sum, the traditional interpretation of James's theory of the
nature of emotions ("emotions are bodily feelings") is strongly
supported by his writings, and Ellsworth's arguments give no
reason for revoking it. Nor do we know of any other convincing
reasons for revoking the traditional interpretation, including
those reasons that led some of James's early critics to conclude
that his 1894 paper amounted to an abandonment of his original theory (cf. in particular Baldwin, 1894; Gardiner, 1896;
Irons, 1895). Although space restrictions prevent us from going
into the details here, we think that these historical reinterpretations of James's theory were as erroneous as was Ellsworth's recent one. However, we would at least like to note that
the early revisionists disagreed among themselves as to what
James's presumed new theory exactly said and none of them
explicitly suggested that his theory was of the cognition-arousal
variety.5

James on the Importance of Different Kinds of Bodily

Changes for Emotions
Ellsworth (1994) suggested that James was not only misread
as saying that emotion is nothing but bodily feeling but was further misread as saying "emotion is (nothing but) autonomic
sensations" (p. 224), and that he would probably have responded to Cannon (1929) by insisting "that he never meant to
restrict bodily feedback to the autonomic nervous system" (p.
225). Ellsworth is certainly right that "emotion = autonomic
sensations" has been another traditional interpretation of
James, but was the interpretation really that far off the mark?
We think not.
4

In fact, James's theory of emotions (including the notion of the derived object-directedness of emotions) is more plausible than the attributional version of cognition-arousal theory on two counts. First, it is
difficult to see how the mere belief that one's arousal is caused by an
appraisal can transform one's formerly neutral mental state into a specific emotional quality. Mandler (1984), who has recognized this problem, accordingly postulates a more genuinely "Gestalt-like integration"
or "fusion" of cognition and arousal (cf. Reisenzein, 1994). Even then,
however, the problem remains of explaining how the integration of two
presumably unemotional mental states (appraisals and arousal) can result in an emotion. James's assumption that bodily feelings are intrinsically emotional, however problematic it is in itself, avoids this problem.
5
Significantly, the party of the "revisionists" did not include James's
friend Stumpf (1899), whom James valued as "an exceptionably clear
thinker" (James, 1890/1950, Vol. 1, p. 493). The ulterior motive behind Baldwin's, Gardiner's, and Irons's reinterpretations may have been
the same as Ellsworth's (1994, p. 225, Footnote 6): The interpreters
just could not believe that James really meant what he seemed to say. As
Gardiner (1896) noted: "[James] seemed to be advocating a paradox
which, like most paradoxes, contained perhaps an element of truth, but
which, in the sweeping form in which it was stated, suggested rather a
good joke than a serious scientific hypothesis" (p. 102).

760

THEORETICAL NOTES

Already in 1890, James had written that on "the visceral and

organic part... it is probable that the chief part of the felt
emotion depends" (James, 1890/1950, p. 465). Concerning expressive-motor behaviors such as facial expressions, he suggested that their presence is, at least, not sufficient for emotions,
because actors can apparently simulate them without experiencing emotions. Somewhat contradictory at first sight, he also
held that the voluntary display versus suppression of expressive
behaviors can intensify versus dampen emotional experience.
But he hinted (1890/1950, pp. 465-466; cf. also Irons, 1894)
that this might be due to the fact that the expressive changes
exert their effects through a kind of "sympathy," that is, indirectly, by affecting the autonomic changes and that some people,
such as professional actors, have learned to suppress the visceral
reactions that are normally elicited by expressive behaviors. If
we accept this interpretationwhich, again, has in its favor that
it makes James's views internally consistentthen expressivemotor behaviors are neither generally sufficient nor necessary
for emotions.
A similar argument can be made for goal-directed motor behaviors. Already in 1890, James had written that at least some
emotions, such as amusement and admiration, are normally
not associated with any actions directed at the eliciting objects
(James, 1890 /1950, p. 442); hence, at least for these emotional
experiences, motor actions were apparently not deemed necessary. In response to Worcester's (1893) critique mentioned earlier, James (1894) in effect conceded that voluntary behaviors
are not necessary for other emotions, too. Worcester had also
argued against their sufficiency by pointing out that the same
kind of motor action may occur in widely different emotions
(e.g., one may attack out of anger or out of fear). James did not
object; we may therefore conclude that James ultimately came
to believe that, like expressive-motor behaviors, instrumentalmotor actions are neither necessary nor sufficient for emotions.
If our interpretation is accepted, James's (1894) response to
Worcester (1893), that "invisible visceral. . . [changes] seem
by far the most essential" (p. 519) for emotions, can hardly be
interpreted as an occasional defensive retreat to a special emphasis on visceral feedback, as Ellsworth (1994, p. 225) suggested; rather, it was an accurate reflection of his beliefs. Even if
one assumes that James continued to believe that expressive and
instrumental-motor behaviors contribute something to emotional experiences despite being neither necessary nor sufficient
for them, it seems fair to say that those investigators (e.g., Cannon, 1929; Stumpf, 1899) who concluded that according to
James, emotions are exclusively feelings of autonomic changes,
were closer to his ultimate views than those who, like Ellsworth
(1994), assumed that he continued to assign a central role to
expressive and instrumental-motor behaviors.

James and the Order of Events

Finally, a word on Ellsworth's (1994) suggestion that James's
and later investigators' concern with "the order of events" in
emotion generation and the ensuing debates about the primacy
of cognition, bodily responses, or feeling "make little sense
when emotions are considered as a stream" (p. 228). What Ellsworth means is that it is no longer very meaningful to ask questions such as "Which comes first, emotional feelings or bodily
responses?" once it is realized that cognitive interpretation,

bodily responses, subjective feeling, and so forth, are "all processes, with time courses of their own" (p. 277) that normally
show temporal overlap.
Although we agree with Ellsworth that James, among others,
was responsible for making the sequence issue a major topic for
emotion psychology, we disagree with her that this issue becomes meaningless once the temporal overlap between the involved events is acknowledged. As already emphasized by Gardiner (1896) in response to a somewhat related point made by
Dewey (1895), "when we ask for the causal relation [between
cognition, bodily responses, and feelings]... we are bound to
face the question of a serial order. And it is here that James's
explanation is intelligible and Dewey's not" (p. 111). We agree
with Gardiner: If one believes that the question of the priority
of temporally overlapping events makes no sense, one will also
have to admit that the question of the causal relation of such
events does not make sense either. In fact, though, temporal
overlap of two events does not preclude calling one the cause of
the other, even though, seen from the systematic perspective,
this is perhaps a somewhat loose manner of speaking. Think,
for example, of a doorbell that starts ringing when the doorbutton is pressed and continues to ring until the button is released. Analogous to bodily changes and emotional feelings in
James's theory, the depression of the button temporally overlaps, for the most part of its duration, with the ringing of the
bell. However, this is no reason to deny a causal meaning to the
"because" in the explanation "the bell rang because the button
was depressed." Nor is it meaningless to ask which of these
events was first. One only has to move on to a more fine-grained
level of description: The button's initial depression at time Tl
is an initiating cause of the bell's starting to ring at T2; the button's continued depression at T2 is a sustaining cause of the
bell's continued ringing at T3, and so on (cf. Mackie, 1974).
Presupposing this understanding of the case, no harm is done if,
for simplicity, one calls the depression of the button the cause
of the bell's ringing or says that the depression of the button
precedes the ringing of the bell. Analogously, within James's
theory, one can say both that bodily changes cause and temporally precede emotional feelings, the temporal overlap of these
events notwithstanding.
To conclude, we believe that the traditional interpretation of
James's views on the nature of emotions and the role of visceral
changes were essentially correct. Admittedly, James was occasionally ambiguous, but if one heeds what we regard as the central maxim of textual interpretationnamely to interpret an
author in such a way that as many of his claims as possible are
consistent with one anotherthere is, we believe, little room for
interpretation. We have argued that there are good reasons to
resist the unorthodox interpretation of James's theory proposed
by Ellsworth, and, in so doing, we can ascribe to James's theory
of emotion, not only a century of fame but also a century of
basically correct exegesis.

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Received July 18,1994

Revision received February 15,1995
Accepted February 21,1995