Okay. So we are going to begin with one of the oldest theories of emotion. This is the James-Lange theory. And the James here is actually William James, one of, like, the founders of psychology in America. Now the idea behind this theory is that emotion arises from physiological arousal.

So physiology is kind of the driving force behind emotion. They believed that each emotion has a specific pattern of physiological arousal. So for example, let's say we have our stimulus, a bear pops up, that is going to cause physiological arousal, things like an increased heart rate, and based on that specific, you know, profile of physiological arousal, I can label the emotion that I'm feeling as fear. Now, this is a very simple explanation of emotion, but there are a lot of critiques of this because it is so simple. So the first, which you may have already thought of, is that it's very unlikely that every single emotion and feeling that humans are capable of has completely unique physiology.

And in fact, with modern technology, we know for a fact that that just isn't true. It's not like you have a unique heart rate for every single emotion or a completely unique biosignature. It just wouldn't really make sense. So that kind of puts a hole in this theory. Another issue is that emotions can also happen before the effects of physiology are felt, and embarrassment is a great example of this.

It can take about 15 to 30 seconds for that kind of classic blushing feeling to actually reach your cheeks, but you can be aware that you are embarrassed well before, like, 30 seconds go by. Right? So, this is just not always the order that things take place, and as you may have noticed we are missing an entire piece. We are completely missing cognition here. Again, this is a very old theory.

They weren't really considering that aspect of emotion at the time, but nowadays we know for a fact that this is missing a very important piece. So this was a very simple explanation but it was lacking in many ways. Alright, so that is our James-Lange theory and I'll see you guys in the next one. Bye bye.