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The concomitance of emotional states and changes in the body structures which we now know to be controlled by way of the autonomic nervous system, had been observed and speculated upon long before the advent of the James-Lange Theory. Prior to 1884, the general conception existing in psychology had been to the effect that the conscious perception of a fact excited a mental affection which was called an emotion, which in turn set into activity the bodily expression of that emotion. James brought forth a very different viewpoint however, when he stated the theory that “the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of these changes as they occur is the emotion.” In the light of this theory an emotion constitutes then merely a conscious feeling or sensation in the production of which the different impulses coming from the structures under the control of the autonomic nervous system play the leading rôle.
Opponents of this theory have pointed out that the memory of an insult or sorrow is capable of initiating just as great a bodily change as did the original stimulus. This is said to be proof that the psychic state or emotion is capable of inaugurating the bodily changes, thereby invalidating the James-Lange Theory. The interpretation of the foregoing fact is wrong. A brief review of the physiology of the cerebral cortex teaches us that the cortex possesses the ability to receive and to store the mnemonic representations of our original environmental stimuli, and when occasion arises, by means of association, to reproduce a mirror image of the original stimulus which image stimulus is capable of originating a response similar in every way to that produced by the original. If processes in the cerebral cortex give rise to an emotion they do so in the manner outlined, in which case the visceral reaction instead of being produced by a stimulus from the environment, is produced by the mirror image of that stimulus, which arises wi