Reaction (psychology)

“ But the experience leaves its 'unimaginable touch' on the matter of the convolutions, and the next impression which a sense-organ transmits produces a cerebral reaction in which the awakened vestige of the last impression plays its part. Another sort of feeling and a higher grade of cognition are the consequence. 'Ideas' about the object mingle with the awareness of its mere sensible presence, we name it, class it, compare it, utter propositions concerning it, and the complication of the possible consciousness which an incoming current may arouse, goes on increasing to the end of life. ”

“ The relation and reaction above mentioned are interesting not only from the viewpoint of theory but also because of their practicable application in emotional development and training. It is an established truth of psychology that each physical expression of an emotional state serves to intensify the latter; it is pouring oil on the fire. Likewise, it is equally true that the repression of the physical expression of an emotion tends to restrain and inhibit the emotion itself. ”

“ But other factors in reality are present; for we find the reaction-time more prolonged by the concomitant stimulation when the stimulus is weak than when it is strong I made experiments in which the principal impression, or signal for reaction, was a bell-stroke whose strength could be graduated by a spring against the hammer with a movable counterpoise. ”

“ Without taking sides in the above controversy, many psychologists proceed upon the hypothesis that there is a mutual action and reaction between emotional mental states and the appropriate physical expression thereof, each in a measure being the cause of the other, and each likewise being the effect of the other. ”

“ But the versatility of consciousness in substituting and providing merely mental reaction for other hostile tendencies that the subject really wished fulfilled is quite striking. Visual and motor imagery may take the place of tendencies which are inhibited and allow a successful expression. ”

“ All this will be explained at some length in Chapter XXIV. Meanwhile we can say that the multiplicity of emotional and instinctive reactions in man, together with his extensive associative power, permit of extensive recouplings of the original sensory and motor partners. The consequences of one instinctive reaction often prove to be the inciters of an opposite reaction, and being suggested on later occasions by the original object, may then suppress the first reaction altogether, just as in the case of the child and the flame. ”

“ If belief consists in an emotional reaction of the entire man on an object, how can we believe at will? We cannot control our emotions. ”

“ After all, it is the consequences of a theory which count, and this will be seen to be true particularly as respects memory. The pragmatic point of view of counting the consequences, of determining the difference 11that the theory makes in the understanding of the mental processes of normal and abnormal life, reveals the importance to us of validating the theory. The consequences of the psycho-physiological theory are so far-reaching, in view of its bearing upon a large number of problems in normal and abnormal psychology, that it is worthy of sustained and exhaustive examination. ”

“ For we can only conclude what is in the mind of another by interpreting his expression of his thinking and feeling. We cannot see within his mind. But experience with ourselves and others has taught us that certain attitudes of body, certain shades of countenance, certain gestures, tones of voice, spontaneous or willed actions, represent anger or joy, impatience or irritability, stern control or poise of mind. We realize that the average man has learned to conceal his mental reactions from the casual observer at will. ”

“ The third aspect from which it is possible, on the lines of human psychology, to view the gregarious instinct is the cognitive, including within the connotation of this word the cognitive aspect of sensation. ”

“ As thought is based on perception, so will is based on impulse; and since thought and will appear as the two highest opposites of feeling, and this, according to our definition, springs from sensation by way of perception, the will, including action and abstinence from action, arises out of the general sensitivity. The progress of science authorizes the expectation that the close relation of sensitivity to simple reaction will one day be discovered. ”

“ They carry their own inner measure of worth with them; and it is just as logical to use the present theory of the emotions for proving that sensational processes need not be vile and material, as to use their vileness and materiality as a proof that such a theory cannot be true.
If such a theory is true, then each emotion is the resultant of a sum of elements, and each element is caused by a physiological process of a sort already well known. The elements are all organic changes, and each of them is the reflex effect of the exciting object. ”

“ The same explanation may be applied to all emotions of inclination or repulsion. Everywhere we find the emotion as physiological stimulus in indivisible union with a number of partly known, partly unknown functions of the understanding. The unknown play an important rôle. ”

“ They are sensational processes, processes due to inward currents set up by physical happenings. Such processes have, it is true, always been regarded by the platonizers in psychology as having something peculiarly base about them. But our emotions must always be inwardly what they are, whatever be the physiological ground of their apparition. If they are deep, pure, worthy, spiritual facts on any conceivable theory of their physiological source, they remain no less deep, pure, spiritual, and worthy of regard on this present sensational theory. ”

“ Mental synthesis of psychic content in the unity of a moment-consciousness is a fundamental principle of psychology. ”

“ We thus find that we reach the heart of our inquiry into volition when we ask by what process it is that the thought of any given object comes to prevail stably in the mind. Where thoughts prevail without effort, we have sufficiently studied in the several chapters on sensation, association, and attention, the laws of their advent before consciousness and of their stay. ”

“ The main point of this discussion is that all mental {47} phenomena, whether movements, sensations, emotions, impulses or thoughts, are a person's acts, but that every act is a response to some present stimulus. ”

“ THE STREAM OF THOUGHT.
We now begin our study of the mind from within. Most books start with sensations, as the simplest mental facts, and proceed synthetically, constructing each higher stage from those below it. But this is abandoning the empirical method of investigation. No one ever had a simple sensation by itself. Consciousness, from our natal day, is of a teeming multiplicity of objects and relations, and what we call simple sensations are results of discriminative attention, pushed often to a very high degree. ”

“ Psychoanalytic experience teaches that where the reaction manifests itself all too strongly this happens because it is not merely a reaction to a present, but above all to a long past experience, which stands behind the other and offers first the original actual tonal background. ”

“ Both instincts and emotions are reactions upon special sorts of objects of perception; they depend on the hemispheres; and they are in the first instance reflex, that is, they take place the first time the exciting object is met, are accompanied by no forethought or deliberation, and are irresistible. But they are modifiable to a certain extent by experience, and on later occasions of meeting the exciting object, the instincts especially have less of the blind impulsive character which they had at first. ”

“ The deciphering of the purposive tremors demand an extreme sensitiveness and delicacy of feeling, both psychological and physiological, to combine the individual perceptions into a complete unity of thought, if it is at all permissible to make an analogy between the processes of cognition in the realm of the unconscious and the conscious. ”

“ General psychopathology.—In the light of all these well-known physiological effects of emotion it is apparent that when an idea possessing a strong emotional tone, such as fear or its variants, enters consciousness, it is accompanied by a complex of physiological reactions. In other words, fear, as a biological reaction of the organism to a stimulus, does not consist of the psychical element alone, but includes a large syndrome of physiological processes. 441We can, indeed, theoretically construct a schema which would represent the emotional reaction. ”

“ This is what we have seen in instinct, in emotion, in common ideo-motor action, in hypnotic suggestion, in morbid impulsion, and in voluntas invita,—the impelling idea is simply the one which possesses the attention. It is the same where pleasure and pain are the motor spurs—they drive other thoughts from consciousness at the same time that they instigate their own characteristic 'volitional' effects. ”

“ The excitation of certain circumscribed regions of the body immediately causes to arise in the mind either ideas or feelings which are imperiously imposed on the consciousness and last as long as the excitement which provoked them. ”

“ One might ask in the same way if a sensation of sound is simple or compound, and here also, according to the point of view, the answer would vary. For consciousness the event is one, simple and irreducible; for objective analysis the event is compound, reducible to a definite number of vibrations. In the various regions of psychology we might find many problems of the same kind. The important point is to 12understand that the instinct of preservation is not an entity, but an abbreviated expression indicating a group of tendencies. ”

“ The concept revelation in the sense that quite suddenly, with ineffable certainty and delicacy, something is seen, something is heard, something convulsing and breaking into one’s inmost self, does but describe the fact. ”

“ If the external cause or object be absent, the consequent feeling, direct or indirect, which we term perception, will not be induced, precisely as any other feeling will not arise without its peculiar antecedent. The relation of cause and effect, in short, is exactly the same in perception as in all the other mental phenomena—a relation of invariable sequence of one change after another change. ”

“ But the supposition that a sensation primitively feels either itself or its object to be in the same place with the brain is absolutely groundless, and neither a priori probability nor facts from experience can be adduced to show that such a deliverance forms any part of the original cognitive function of our sensibility. ”

“ For every stimulus which produces in consciousness a definite content of sensation is also a definite degree of disturbance, and therefore makes a call upon the forces of the nerves; and the sum of these little changes, which in their character as disturbances are not so diverse as the contents of consciousness they give rise to, produce the general feeling which, added to the inability to distinguish, deludes us into the belief in an actual absence of diversity in our sensations. ”

“ Our emotional and instinctive tendencies, our irresistible impulses to couple certain movements with the perception or thought of certain things, are also features of our connate mental structure, and like the necessary judgments, are interpreted by the apriorists and the empiricists in the same warring ways. ”

“ So in word-association reactions, when a word is accompanied by an affect-reaction the word itself may be sufficient to excite the reaction without assuming that an “unconscious complex has been struck.” The total mechanism of the process we are investigating must be determined in each case for itself.
In the study and formulation of psychological phenomena there is one common tendency and danger, and that is of making the phenomena too schematic and sharply defined, as if we were dealing 419with material objects. ”

“ By acting out the external manifestations, we gradually infect the nerves leading to them, and finally waken up the diffusive current by a sort of action ab extra.... Thus it is that we are sometimes able to assume a cheerful tone of mind by forcing a hilarious expression. ”

“ Now the moment an emotion is causally accounted for, as the arousal by an object of a lot of reflex acts which are forthwith felt, we immediately{382} see why there is no limit to the number of possible different emotions which may exist, and why the emotions of different individuals may vary indefinitely, both as to their constitution and as to the objects which call them forth. For there is nothing sacramental or eternally fixed in reflex action. Any sort of reflex effect is possible, and reflexes actually vary indefinitely, as we know. ”

“ There is an original tendency or susceptibility of the mind, by which, on perceiving together different objects, we are instantly, without the intervention of any other mental process, sensible of their relation in certain respects, as truly as there is an original tendency or susceptibility by which, when external objects are present and have produced a certain affection of our sensorial organ, we are instantly affected with the primary elementary feelings of perception ”

“ These characters would naturally keep us from introspectively paying much attention to them in detail, whilst they would at the same time make us aware of them as a coherent group of processes, strongly contrasted with all the other things consciousness contained,—even with the other constituents of the 'Self,' material, social, or spiritual, as the case might be. They are reactions, and they are primary reactions. Everything arouses them; for objects which have no other effects will for a moment contract the brow and make the glottis close. ”