James-Lange vs Cannon-Bard: what each theory claimed, and how the tests turned out

The James-Lange theory says that your body reacts first, and that your feeling of that bodily reaction is the emotion. The Cannon-Bard theory says that the brain starts the bodily reaction and the emotional experience at almost the same moment. Neither one causes the other. Take William James's own example of a bear. In the James-Lange theory, you tremble, and the feeling of the trembling is your fear. In the Cannon-Bard theory, you tremble and feel afraid at the same time.

Exams often add a third theory, the Schachter-Singer two-factor theory, and the three sequences are easy to mix up. Most summaries also leave out what the authors actually wrote. James named two tests that could disprove his theory, and researchers later ran versions of both. This article explains each theory from its original paper, Cannon's five objections, the results of those tests, and a method to sort exam questions.

• James published his theory in 1884: "we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble". Carl Lange published a similar theory in Danish in 1885.
• Walter Cannon attacked the theory in 1927 with five objections. One was that very different emotions come with the same bodily changes.
• In Cannon's alternative, processes in the thalamus give a sensation its emotional quality, and the bodily changes occur "almost simultaneously" with the feeling.
• Neither theory survives in its original form. People with spinal cord injuries still report intense emotions. But feedback from the body seems to have a small effect on how strong a feeling is.
• The MCAT outline lists exactly three theories of emotion: James-Lange, Cannon-Bard and Schachter-Singer.

The difference in one table

What James and Lange actually claimed

William James published "What is an Emotion?" in the journal Mind in 1884. He started from the common-sense order of events: "we meet a bear, are frightened and run". Then he reversed it.

His famous sentence comes next: "we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble". Without the bodily changes, James wrote, the perception "would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colourless, destitute of emotional warmth". You could see the bear and decide to run, but you "could not actually feel afraid".

James supported the idea with a thought experiment. Imagine a strong emotion, and then remove from it every feeling of its bodily symptoms. In James's words, "we find we have nothing left behind".

Two details often go missing from textbook summaries:

• The scope was limited. James applied the theory to what he called the "standard emotions", such as surprise, fear, anger and greed, which have strong bodily expression. In his 1890 textbook, the section heading says the emotion follows the bodily expression "in the coarser emotions at least".
• Lange's version was different. The Danish physiologist Carl Lange published his monograph in 1885. Cannon later summarised the difference. James gave "the chief part of the felt emotion" to sensations from the viscera, the internal organs. Lange gave it "wholly" to the circulatory system.

James also said how to test his theory. First, "any voluntary arousal of the so-called manifestations of a special emotion ought to give us the emotion itself". His example was "Whistling to keep up courage". Second, he imagined a person who had lost all bodily sensation, inside and out. If that person still had "strong emotional feeling", James wrote, it "would completely overthrow our case". Both tests come back later in this article.

Cannon's five objections

Walter Cannon was a Harvard physiologist who studied the bodily changes in fear and rage. In 1927 he published "The James-Lange theory of emotions: A critical examination and an alternative theory" in the American Journal of Psychology. Its core is five objections, and the quoted headings below are Cannon's own words.

1. 1."Total separation of the viscera from the central nervous system does not alter emotional behavior." Charles Sherrington cut the spinal cord and the vagus nerves of dogs. Cannon and his colleagues kept cats alive without their sympathetic nerve connections. The animals still behaved "as angrily, as joyfully, as fearfully as ever".
2. 2."The same visceral changes occur in very different emotional states and in non-emotional states." The sympathetic nervous system acts on the organs in a diffuse way and "goes into action as a unit", so fear and rage produce similar bodily changes.
3. 3."The viscera are relatively insensitive structures." Cannon noted that people are unaware of most processes in the stomach, intestines and liver. Surgeons could cut, crush or burn the gut of a patient without anaesthesia, and the patient felt no discomfort.
4. 4."Visceral changes are too slow to be a source of emotional feeling." Smooth muscle and glands start to react after delays of a fraction of a second to several seconds. But people showed emotional reactions to pictures "not uncommonly within 0.8 sec."
5. 5."Artificial induction of the visceral changes typical of strong emotions does not produce them." The Spanish physician Gregorio Marañón injected people with adrenaline, which copies the bodily changes of strong emotion. Most of them reported only the sensations, with remarks such as "I feel as if afraid" and "as if awaiting a great joy".

The first objection has a limit, and Cannon reported it himself. The animals showed emotional behaviour, but behaviour cannot show what an animal feels. Angell, the author of a paper that reconsidered James's theory, made this reply, and Cannon reported it in the same paper.

The fifth objection also contains a detail that matters later. A smaller number of Marañón's patients did feel a real emotion, usually sorrow. In some cases, this happened only when the injection came after a talk about their sick children or their dead parents. In Cannon's summary, adrenaline helped to produce an emotion "only when an emotional mood already exists".

Cannon's alternative: the thalamic theory

Cannon proposed that the important events happen inside the brain. A situation excites the sense organs, and the signal activates processes in the thalamus, a structure deep in the brain. These processes send signals out to the muscles and organs and up to the cortex at the same time. In Cannon's words, "the peculiar quality of the emotion is added to simple sensation when the thalamic processes are roused".

He also wrote that "the bodily changes occur almost simultaneously with the emotional experience". That timing explains the error that Cannon saw in James's theory. Because the body and the feeling change together, it is natural to think that one causes the other. In Cannon's view, a third thing, the thalamic discharge, causes both.

The theory now has a second name in it. Philip Bard was Cannon's doctoral student at Harvard. Cannon had found that cats without a cerebral cortex became angry at slight provocation, and he called this behaviour "sham rage". He gave Bard a thesis topic: look for a brain centre that sham rage needs. The diencephalon is the part of the brain that contains the thalamus and the hypothalamus. Bard's thesis on it appeared in 1927, and a journal paper followed in 1928.

Modern textbooks describe the theory by its timing, not its anatomy. The open textbook Psychology 2e from OpenStax says that in the Cannon-Bard theory, arousal and emotional experience "occur simultaneously, yet independently".

Schachter-Singer: the third theory on the exam

In 1962, Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer proposed that an emotion has two factors: bodily arousal and a cognitive label that explains it. In their view, the same state of arousal "could be labeled 'joy' or 'fury' or 'jealousy'". The label comes from the situation.

Their starting point was Marañón's "as if" reports. Schachter and Singer argued that his patients knew about the injection. So the patients had "a completely appropriate cognition or explanation" for their bodily state. In their view, this explained why so few of the patients felt a real emotion. So the two researchers designed an experiment in which people felt arousal but did not know its cause.

The experiment used a cover story. The participants were male introductory psychology students at the University of Minnesota. They heard that the study tested how a vitamin compound called "Suproxin" affects vision, and all but 1 of 185 agreed to the injection. In fact, the injection contained epinephrine (adrenaline) or a placebo:

• Some epinephrine participants heard the true side effects.
• Some heard nothing about side effects.
• Some heard false side effects.

Each participant then waited with a stooge, an actor who pretended to be another participant. In one version, the stooge acted euphoric, with paper planes, paper basketball and a hula hoop. In the other, he became angry about a long and personal questionnaire.

The participants with no correct explanation for their arousal were "readily manipulable" into euphoria or anger. The participants who knew the true side effects "proved relatively immune". This result is the core of the two-factor theory.

The paper also contains a problem that summaries rarely mention. The placebo participants, who received no drug, scored between the uninformed epinephrine group and the informed one. Schachter and Singer called this "a particularly troubling pattern", because it "raises serious questions about our entire theoretical structure". They argued that the injection itself gave some participants an explanation for how they felt.

Later reviews were cautious. In 1983, the psychologist Rainer Reisenzein reviewed two decades of research on the theory. He found "no convincing evidence" that arousal is necessary for an emotion, or that emotions come from a label for unexplained arousal. One claim did have support: arousal from an unrelated source can make an emotional reaction stronger.

The best-known example of that claim is a 1974 study by Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron. An attractive female interviewer approached men on a fear-arousing suspension bridge or on a bridge that did not cause fear. The men on the frightening bridge wrote more sexual content in a picture-story test. More of them also tried to contact the interviewer after the study.

How James's own tests turned out

Spinal cord injury: the test James asked for

A spinal cord injury cuts much of the feedback from the body to the brain. That makes it the nearest real case to the person James imagined, who had lost bodily sensation.

In 1966, George Hohmann interviewed 26 men with spinal cord injuries about their feelings before and after the injury. Hohmann was himself paraplegic, and he knew all of the men well. They reported significant decreases in anger, sexual excitement and fear, and an increase in sentimentality. Hohmann also saw a trend: the more extensive the damage, the larger the decrease in some feelings. These results seemed to support James.

In 1988, Kathleen Chwalisz and her colleagues asked the same question with three groups. The groups were people with spinal cord injuries, people with other disabilities and people without disabilities. The groups differed on only one measure of emotional intensity. On that measure, the people with spinal cord injuries more often reported stronger fear than before the injury. The authors wrote that the injured participants "often described intense emotional experiences".

The authors concluded that the perception of bodily arousal "may not be necessary for emotional experience". They also saw weak trends that this perception may make emotions more intense. So the evidence goes against the strong version of James's theory, because strong emotion continues when much of the bodily feedback is lost. The test is not complete, because people with spinal cord injuries keep the sensation above the injury. A weaker version of the theory, in which the body adds intensity, is still possible.

Facial feedback: James's second test

James's other test was that making the bodily expression of an emotion should produce the emotion. Its modern form is the facial feedback hypothesis. In 1988, Fritz Strack, Leonard Martin and Sabine Stepper asked people to hold a pen in their mouth. One way of holding it helped the smiling muscles, and the other way blocked them. People in the smiling position reported more intense humour responses to cartoons.

In 2016, 17 independent laboratories repeated this study with one agreed protocol. The original study had found a difference of 0.82 points on a 10-point scale. The combined result of the new studies was 0.03 points, with a confidence interval that included zero.

The research did not stop there. A 2019 meta-analysis by Nicholas Coles and colleagues combined 286 effect sizes from 138 studies. It found that facial feedback has a real but small effect, and that the effect varies between studies. In 2022, the Many Smiles Collaboration tested 3,878 participants in 19 countries. Copying smiling faces and posing a smile on request "could both amplify and initiate feelings of happiness". The pen method gave less conclusive results.

James's prediction therefore holds only in a weak form. Posing an expression can change a feeling by a small amount, but it does not give "the emotion itself".

Do emotions have bodily fingerprints?

Cannon's second objection said that very different emotions share the same bodily changes. A 2018 meta-analysis by Erika Siegel and colleagues tested this question with 202 laboratory studies of the autonomic nervous system in adults from non-clinical samples. Emotions changed many of the bodily measures. But the pattern of changes "did not clearly distinguish" one emotion category from another, and the same emotion varied a lot between studies.

This result agrees better with Cannon's objection than with James's view. It is one large analysis in a debate that continues, so it does not close the question.

So which theory is right?

Neither theory survives as its authors first stated it. The evidence in this article points to three conclusions:

• Bodily arousal is not necessary for an emotion. People with spinal cord injuries still report intense emotions, and Reisenzein found no convincing evidence for the claim that arousal is necessary.
• Feedback from the body has a small effect. It can make a feeling a little stronger, and a posed or copied smile can make people a little happier.
• The body does not clearly tell emotions apart. Similar arousal can come with different emotions, which was Cannon's point and the starting point of Schachter and Singer.

Later theories moved the debate in other directions. In appraisal theories, such as that of Richard Lazarus, your evaluation of a situation comes first and determines the emotion. Siegel and her colleagues tested the theory of constructed emotion. This theory treats each emotion as a varied group of instances, not as one fixed bodily pattern.

Exams still test the three classic theories, because they set out the three basic positions clearly. In the first, the body comes first. In the second, the body and the feeling come together. In the third, the body needs a label.

Classifying exam scenarios

The AAMC's outline of the MCAT lists exactly three entries under "Theories of emotion": James-Lange, Cannon-Bard and Schachter-Singer. To sort a scenario, ask one question: what does the scenario say causes the feeling?

1. 1.If the feeling comes from your perception of your own bodily reaction, the answer is James-Lange.
2. 2.If the bodily reaction and the feeling start at the same time and independently, the answer is Cannon-Bard.
3. 3.If the person feels arousal and then uses the situation to decide which emotion it is, the answer is Schachter-Singer.

A memory aid helps with the order. James-Lange: the body leads, and the feeling follows. Cannon-Bard: a cannon fires two shots at once, one to the body and one to the feeling. Schachter-Singer is the two-factor theory: arousal plus a label.

What this means when you learn psychology terms

The three theories are easiest to learn as one set. Each theory names an order of events, and an exam question usually asks which order a scenario describes. So learn the three together, with one example each, and then test yourself on new scenarios instead of rereading the definitions. Spacing your reviews out explains how to plan the sessions. Our guide to memorising psychology terminology shows how to prepare a set of terms for an exam.

Psychology World is built for this kind of repeated contact. You look up a term and save it to one of your own lists. Then you drill the list as flashcards, as multiple-choice questions once the list has four or more terms, or by typing the answer. A daily word also brings a term back without a search. The four steps of the learning loop and what each study mode does are on the home page.