I’m always intrigued at the research and theoretical underpinnings when I’m presented with management training on how to improve things. A useful, but rarely explained concept that periodically comes up is the idea that you can rebadge emotions to make them motivating rather than paralysing. “I’m not scared, I’m excited!”. I’ve seen this approach work with coaching clients, but it got me wondering about the experiments that were conducted to underpin the theory. Doing so turned out to open a weird can of worms from back in the day that I’m not sure would fly socially or ethically today.

An early stab at explaining it, from the 1880s, was the James-Lange theory of emotion. This suggested that it was the physiological changes that you experience which drive your emotion, not the original stimulus. In a The Winter’s Tale flashback, should you spot a bear, the theory runs that your heart races and you tremble and you prepare to run. Your brain notices that your body is doing all this and interprets it as fear (rather than the other way around, you see a bear, get afraid and then that causes your heart to race).

How wide is my pupil?

Early memorable attempts to test this out were reported on in the New York Times under the title “Students measure fear by Pupilometer, kick subjects shins to experiment on anger: https://www.nytimes.com/1925/11/24/archives/students-measure-fear-by-a-pupilometer-kick-subjects-shins-to.html   

Apparently they also borrowed a boa constrictor from the zoology department to test out how people reacted when afraid, waved bacon sandwiches at people who’d been told to fast to test hunger’s effect and got the subjects’ to bring along their girlfriends to give them a friendly fondle to test out their reaction to pleasure (presumably while still strapped into the kit to measure the reaction of their eyes). Unfortunately, the emotions prompted for weren’t always the reactions they got (indignant at being kicked, angry at being taunted with food and embarrassment).

Allport and Tomkins went a bit more conservatively with their own experiment in the sixties and tested out whether instructing someone to smile would prompt them to feel more joy (alongside looking at other emotions) and found there to be a link between facial expression and emotions. A more recent study by Hennenlotter in 2007 looked at how injecting botox into someone’s face impacted their response to emotions and whether by tamping down someone’s reactions this might lead to treatments along those lines for depression (the botoxed people felt emotions less intensely).

A rival theory from Cannon-Bard in the 1920s suggested that the physiological reaction and emotion occur simultaneously. Both theories have been iterated still further by Schachter-Singer who suggested that there was a two-factor prompt for emotions, whereby physiological arousal was then parsed through cognitive labelling.

Their experiments involved injecting people with epinephrine (to increase their heart rate, blood pressure and breathing) or a placebo and telling them that it was a new drug which would test their eyesight and then having them interact with another person who they were told was part of the trial, but who was actually pretending to be excited or angry and then watching their reactions through a one-way mirror. The participants who had no explanation for their changed physiological state were more likely to be prompted to emotion by the fake participant.

I think that the two factor theory makes the best sense, and I do wonder to what degree the question of whether the increased heart rate prompted the feelings or the feelings prompted the increased heart rate is somewhat moot in terms of how quickly one would trigger the other. The cognitive labelling point feels like the most relevant part for coaching, as it seems whichever way round things go there’s a likely feedback loop which will embed or heighten that state.

From a personal perspective I’ve always been something of a fainter, having had issues with low blood pressure as a kid. Throughout my adolescence, if I caught my elbow on the funnybone or stood up too quickly or had an injection of any kind, I’d feel my vision tunnel and I’d feel light-headed and hot until I laid down or passed out. That nervousness is now forever associated with hypodermic needles in my mind and so I was fretting a bit when it came to vaccination time during the pandemic. Fortunately the NHS issued some great guidance for people like myself who suffer from vasovagal syncope (which turns out to be the fancy name for my faintyness). There were the top tips I was already aware of (making sure I’d eaten something beforehand and had plenty of cool water and stayed hydrated), but also some tips around pumping your muscles to ensure that the blood is recirculated from your extremities. Specifically, they advised someone who was worried about fainting to repeatedly clench their buttocks.

The vaccination centre I attended was in a sports hall that I’d often played badminton at, so it was nice to be familiar with the terrain. I was led through to the waiting area (lines of spaced out chairs in the centre of the hall, surrounded by curtained booths on three sides of the periphery). I scoffed some refresher sweets, had a sip of water from my flask and got to clenching my buttocks, as I’d been instructed. A minute or so into this routine a curtain was drawn and I locked eyes with a man who had just been jabbed. I was mid-clench, and it all felt quite awkward. Slightly less so when I realised that it was the husband of a close friend (we had a laugh about it all afterwards). 

Apologies for the digression, but seeing how smoothly the jabs (and boosters) went for me, I think there’s definitely some mileage in pondering the links between your physiological responses, your cognitive labels (from past experience) and the emotions that you feel and sussing out some plans to break you out of the loop if you feel things start to spiral.

Though, to be honest, the main lesson that I’ve drawn from looking into this all is that you probably don’t want to volunteer to participate in the kinds of studies that explore the link between emotions and physiology, unless you like getting kicked in the shins.