ABSTRACT

Can we experience an emotion without the feeling of accelerated heartbeats, perspiration, or other changes in the body? In his paper “What is an emotion”, William James famously claimed that “if we fancy some strong emotion and then try to abstract from our consciousness of it all the feelings of its bodily symptoms, we find we have nothing left behind”. Thus, bodily changes are essential to emotion. This is known as the Subtraction Argument, and proponents of Embodied theories of emotion still use it to defend their claims. Proponents of Disembodied theories, however, have different intuitions regarding the role of bodily changes in the experience of emotion. In order to advance this debate, I conducted a series of studies testing people’s intuitions regarding the Subtraction Argument. Results show that, against James’ claims, most people consider that their hypothetical (Study 1) and actual (Study 2) emotions persist in the absence of bodily feelings. Furthermore, Study 1 found that participants’ responses were not related to individual differences in cognitive reflection or interoceptive awareness. These results pose a problem for Embodied theories of emotion and challenge extant explanations for the persistence of emotional experience in cases of impaired interoception.

摘要

我们能在没有心跳加速、出汗或身体其他变化的情况下体验情绪吗？在他的论文“什么是情绪”中，威廉詹姆斯著名地声称“如果我们幻想某种强烈的情绪，然后试图从我们的意识中抽象出它的身体症状的所有感觉，我们会发现我们什么都没有留下”。因此，身体的变化对情绪至关重要。这被称为减法论证，情感体现理论的支持者仍然使用它来捍卫他们的主张。然而，无实体理论的支持者对于身体变化在情感体验中的作用有不同的直觉。为了推进这场辩论，我进行了一系列研究，测试人们对减法论证的直觉。结果表明，与詹姆斯的主张相反，大多数人认为他们的假设（研究 1）和实际（研究 2）情绪在没有身体感觉的情况下持续存在。此外，研究 1 发现参与者的反应与认知反射或内感受意识的个体差异无关。这些结果对情感的具体化理论提出了一个问题，并挑战了现有的对内感受受损情况下情感体验持续存在的解释。