Feelings argues for the counter-intuitive idea that feelings do not
cause behavior, but rather follow from behavior, and are, in fact,
the way that we know about our own bodily states and behaviors.
This point of view, often associated with William James, is called
self-perception theory. Self-perception theory can be empirically
tested by manipulating bodily states and behaviors in order to see
if the corresponding feelings are produced.
In this volume, James D. Laird presents hundreds of studies, all
demonstrating that feelings do indeed follow from behavior.
Behaviors that have been manipulated include facial expressions of
emotion, autonomic arousal, actions, gaze, and postures. The
feelings that have been induced include happiness, anger, fear,
romantic love, liking, disliking, hunger, and feelings of
familiarity. These feelings do not feel like knowledge because they
are knowledge-by-acquaintance, such as the knowledge we have of how
an apple tastes, rather than verbal, knowledge-by-description, such
as the knowledge that apples are red, round, and edible.
Many professional theories of human behavior, as well as common
sense, explain actions by an appeal to feelings as causes. Laird
argues to the contrary that if feelings are information about
behaviors that are already ongoing, feelings cannot be causes and
that the whole mechanistic model of human behavior as "caused" in
this sense seems mistaken. He proposes an alternative, cybernetic
model, involving hierarchically stacked control systems. In this
model, feelings provide feedback to the control systems, and in a
further elaboration, this model suggests that the stack of control
systems matches a similar stack of levelsof organization of the
world.
An original contribution to the study of the relationship between
feelings and behavior, the volume will be of interest to social,
emotional, and cognitive psychologists.
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