7. Mental Attitude and Promotions in School

[FREEMAN, F. N., How Children Learn, pp. 305–306. Boston, Houghton Mifflin Co., 1917.]

Confidence in one's ability results in the stimulation of one's mental and physical power and in the release of energy for the task. The consciousness of failure and the expectation of failure, on the other hand, result in the drying up of the sources of one's energy. . . . Confidence is based upon previous success. However one may endeavor to work up artificially a feeling of confidence, one is always influenced to some degree by previous failure or success in this particular sort of work, or in work in general. As a consequence of this fact it is necessary that the work of the child be so managed that he shall possess the required degree of confidence in his ability. . . . This paralyzing effect of failure is evident in the case of children who have to repeat a grade. It is a matter of common observation that such children never work so hard as those who are taking the grade for the first time. Children who have failed in part of their work have been found to do better work if they were promoted than if they were made keenly conscious of their failure by being forced to repeat a grade.

8. Strengthening Ideals Through Emotional Experiences [VOELKER, Paul F., The Function of Ideals in Social Education, pp. 40-41. New York, Teachers College, Columbia University, 1921.]

.. No amount of reasoning can move a man to act unless his feelings are also involved. The feelings may not be violent, they may not be outwardly manifest, but they are ever present as satisfiers and annoyers, influencing the selective activities of the mind. It is therefore easy to believe that our ideals are influenced by means of literature and music and other forms of art which appeal to the emotions. Our actions are determined by our loves and hates. The more powerful these emotions, the more effective are the ideals to which they are attached . . . [Since] emotional effects are greatly heightened in the presence of a multitude . . . the wider use of celebrations, pageants, ceremonials, dramatic representations, and other public performances [has been suggested] as a means of stimulating emotional fervor in an assembled multitude and joining this fervor with such ideas of patriotism, religion, and human brotherhood as seem most desirable to be perpetuated.

9. Abundance of Emotions in Children

[HALL, G. Stanley, Adolescence, Vol. II, pp. 60-61, New York, D. Appleton & Co., 1908.]

Happily for our craft, the child and youth appear at the truly psychological moment, freighted, as they are, body and soul, with reminiscences of what we were so fast losing. They are abandoned to joy, grief, passion, fear, and rage. They are bashful, show off, weep, laugh, desire, are curious, eager, regret, and swell with passion, not knowing that these last two are especially outlawed by our guild. There is color in their souls, brilliant, livid, loud. Their hearts are yet young, fresh, and in the golden age. Despite our lessening fecundity, our overschooling, "city-fication," and spoiling, the affectations we instil and the repressions we practise, they are still the light and hope of the world especially to us, who would know more of the soul of man and would penetrate to its deeper strata and study its origins. . . . Hunger, love, pride, and many other instinctive feelings, to say nothing of pleasure and pain, can be traced far down through the scale of vertebrate and to invertebrate life.

10. Education Determines the Direction of Driving Forces

[COLVIN, Stephen and BAGLEY, W. C., Human Behavior, p. 152. Copyright, 1913, by the Macmillan Co. Reprinted by permission.] Moral culture consists primarily in shifting the emphasis which nature has placed upon certain acts and activities. We no longer need to fear the dark; the feelings of disgust and repulsion no longer need attach to certain objects that were dangerous in primitive life; but we do need to fear evil, and we do need to attach to certain tendencies that may have been very important in primitive life the feeling of disgust that will lead us to thrust them out of our presence. Aristotle, centuries ago, suggested that the primary problem of moral culture is to lead the individual to love the good and to hate the bad. Love and hate imply feelings and emotions that originally attach to certain instincts.

11. The James-Lange Theory of Emotions [JAMES, William, Psychology, Briefer Course, pp. 375-376. New York, Henry Holt & Co., 1892.]

An important theory in regard to the nature of the emotions was set forth by Professor James more than thirty-five years ago, and later further elaborated by him. Carl Lange, a Danish investigator, reached, independently, the same conclusions about the same time. The theory is based on the well-known fact that in emotions in any intensity there is a strongly marked accompaniment of certain bodily sensations, such as the palpitation of the heart, sinking of the stomach, and the like. According to the James-Lange Theory, these bodily sensations are the cause of the emotional excitement.

My theory, on the contrary, is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur Is the emotion. Commonsense says, we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep, we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations must first be interposed between, and that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colorless, destitute of emotional warmth.

While many psychologists would be unwilling to go to the extent of saying, as does James, that the sensations that accompany the bodily changes are the emotions, most would agree that they are a very important and integral part of the emotional experience.

12. Emotions; A Reconsideration of James's Theory [ANGELL, J. R., "A Reconsideration of James's Theory of Emotions in the Light of Recent Criticisms," Psychological Review, July, 1916, Vol. 23, pp. 259-261.]

Professor James, so far as I recall, nowhere set himself the task of attempting to differentiate emotions on exactly the

basis suggested by Dr. Cannon's statement. Quite the contrary; he says (Principles, Volume II, p. 454): "Now the moment the genesis of an emotion is accounted for, as the arousal by an object of a lot of reflex acts which are forthwith felt, we immediately see why there is no limit to the number of possible different emotions which may exist, and why emotions of different individuals may vary indefinitely, both as to their constitution and to the objects which call them forth. For there is nothing sacramental or eternally fixed in reflex action. Any reflex effect is possible, and reflexes actually vary indefinitely, as we know." That there are marked differences even in the visceral processes is perhaps sufficiently suggested by Pavlov's classical experiments on the flow of gastric juice which is provoked by hunger coupled with pleasurable emotion, and checked by fear or rage. This checking by fear and also by rage is cited by Cannon as an instance of an identical visceral reaction occasioned by different emotions. . . . James himself, it should be added, regards these two emotions as very similar and closely related.

James would certainly have to hold that, however much emotions may vary in their expression in different individuals and in the same individual, when all the reflex effects were taken into account, distinguishable emotions would always have variant bodily expressions. But this does not by any means preclude a considerable matrix of substantially identical visceral excitement for some different emotions. Their distinction from one another in such cases may be found in extravisceral conditions, and particularly in the tonus of the skeletal muscles. Fear and joy may both cause cardiac palpitations, but in one case we find high tonus of the skeletal muscles, in the other case relaxation and the general sense of weakness. Many other illustrations of the same sort of thing will suggest themselves.

We would therefore submit that, so far as concerns the critical suggestions (of Cannon and Sherrington), James's essential contentions are not materially affected. That the instinctive impulses in the head segment of the dog should be literally unaffected by the removal of the central connections with the viscera is striking evidence of the physiological independence of this anterior segment; but it certainly affords no evidence that visceral organic sensations of human beings play no part in emotional psychoses-a conclusion which Sherrington does not draw in this extreme form, but which careless readers have so drawn and which is flagrantly at variance with daily experience.

Nor does it prove in any way that the psychic state dubbed "emotion" precedes its "physiological expressions" so-called, a view for which Sherrington declares his preference. It is consonant with such a view, but also with James's view. Moreover, so far as the animals may be supposed to have been conscious of the reaction of the facial and forelimb muscles, they had a good bit of the basis of the psychic stuff which James is always presenting, in season and out, as among the most essential features in our awareness of the self. In other words, no evidence which left facial and cranial muscles unimpaired would ever have seemed to him very convincing as ground for conclusions unfavorable to his theory. And as to the classification of emotion he was a latitudinarian, holding that many groupings were possible and significant. To group on the basis of visceral reactions alone would presumably have seemed to him theoretically possible, but quite unimportant for any penetrating apprehension of the total situation, because disregarding a full half, and perhaps more, of the important organic reactions, to wit, the general peripheral and skeletal conditions.

13. Lloyd Morgan's Theory of Instincts and Emotions [Quoted in SEASHORE, C. E., Introduction to Psychology, pp. 326-327 Copyright, 1923, by the Macmillan Co.]

I may be allowed here to recapitulate my own view of the matter. When a specific situation affords an appropriate constellation of stimuli, there issue reflexly from the subcortical centers two sets of efferent impulses, (1) those which evoke a specific mode of instinctive behavior, including those motor responses which constitute much of the so-called emotional expression; (2) those which evoke visceral disturbance-changes of heart-beat, and of the respiratory rhythm, modifications of the digestive and glandular functions, alterations in the peripheral vascular flow, a diffused influence on the general coenæsthesis and so forth. From all this complex of bodily changes, afferent impulses come into the central nervous system, and when they reach the cortex, qualify the experience of the presented situation and thus complete the instinctive experience with its accompanying emotional tone.