Cognitive, social, and physiological determinants of emotional state.

Abstract

The problem of which cues, internal or external, permit a person to label and identify his own emotional state has been with us since days that James (1890) first tendered his doctrine that the bodily changes follow directly perception of exciting fact, and that our feeling of same changes as they occur is (p. 449). Since we are aware of a variety of feeling and emotion states, it should follow from James' proposition that various emotions will be accompanied by a variety of differentiable bodily states. Following James' pronouncement, a formidable number of studies were undertaken in search of physiological differentiators of emotions. The results, in these early days, were almost uniformly negative. All of emotional states experi-