Neural organization for emotional expression / Walter B. Cannon.

  • Walter Bradford Cannon
Date:
1928
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Neural organization for emotional expression / Walter B. Cannon. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    CHAPTER 22 NEURAL ORGANIZATION FOR EMOTIONAL EXPRESSION Water B. CANNON Harvard University Medical School In this paper I shall restrict myself primarily to a consideration of a typical reaction system of the more highly developed organ- isms, that which is commonly called an expression or outburst of anger or rage. Later I shall consider some bearings which the facts may have on the nature of emotional excitation. The complex of bodily alterations that appears in rage has many features resembling the simple reflexes, such as sneezing, coughing, and sucking. First, its occurrence in the early months of even so highly developed an organism as the human infant indi- cates that its neural pattern, like that of the reflexes mentioned above, is congenitally inwrought in the central! nervous apparatus. Second, as in the reflexes, it is a prompt.response to the appropriate stimulus, Again, it is a constant and uniform response—so much is this so, indeed, that there is no mistaking its character, whether it be manifested by the diverse races of man or by the lower animals. It is like the reflexes, also, in being a permanent mode of reaction; throughout life the characteristic display of the rage- response may be suddenly evoked in all its elaborateness. Further, it is a response to a fairly definite stimulus—an inner stimulus which arises when there is a hampering or checking of motion or an opposition to one or another primary impulse. Finally, the rage-response is like the simple reflexes in being useful. Else- where (1) I have called attention to the wide range of bodily ad- justments which occur in an enraged animal—the more rapid heart-beat, the redistribution of the blood, the increase of red cor- puscles in the circulation, the deeper ventilation of the lungs, the dilatation of the bronchioles, the liberation of sugar from the liver, the secretion of adrenin with its favorable action on fatigued mus- cles—all of which may properly be regarded as rendering the organism more efficient in struggle, in such struggle as may be necessary to overwhelm the opposition and to allow the natural impulse to prevail. Thus, as should be clear, all the main features of the simple reflexes—the inborn prompt, constant, uniform, ' Qs Be Sr ;
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