Theories of Emotion

Emotion is made up of three components; physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience. One of the oldest theoretical controversies regarding emotion focuses on the timing of our feelings in relation to the physiological responses that accompany emotion. William James and Carl Lange proposed that we feel emotion after we notice our physiological responses. Walter Cannon and Philip Bard believed that we feel emotion at the same time that our bodies respond. A third, more recent, theory, the Schachter-Singer two-factor theory, focuses on the interplay of the emotions rather than the timing of the emotions. It states that there are only two components of emotion, physical arousal and a cognitive label.