1 General Introduction 11 1.1 Emotion as the ‘Alpha’ and ‘Omega’ of psychology Emotions shape and colour our world [1, 2]. They are ubiquitous in all areas of human life: in social relationships, music, arts, sports, religion and spirituality, work, cooking, birth and demise, videogames, social media, movies… One could argue that for us humans, recognising and understanding – and thus dealing with - emotion is apparently something so obvious, it is almost impossible not to do. Of course, we have our rationality to work with, but we basically ‘breathe’ emotion as we live our lives [3]. And so, both on a personal level and for psychological science, the importance of emotion in the human psyche is hard to be overstated. In fact, one could argue that part of the roots of the field of academic psychology lie in the study of emotion. Just five years after Wundt started the world’s first psychology lab in 1879 at the University of Leipzig – generally considered the official start of psychology as a separate and distinct scientific discipline - American soiled William James (1884) published his landmark article ‘What is an emotion?’ [4]. With it, he not only presented a first thorough, compelling work on the perceived origins and workings of emotion in the human species, but simultaneously brought into existence one of the most influential academic traditions in psychology in which this dissertation is also rooted. For James, emotion is an embodied experience of an active self [5] in which ‘’… the whole organism may be called a sounding-board" [6]. Although his theory on emotion and emotional consciousness was unfortunately ‘grossly’ misunderstood by many researchers after him [5, 7], the unmistakable central tenet of James’ theory was the specific role the body and bodily experience had in emotion: “My theory... is that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur IS the emotion. Commonsense says we lose our fortune, are sorry and weep; we meet a bear, are frightened and run; we are insulted by a rival, are angry and strike. The hypothesis here to be defended says that this order of sequence is incorrect, that the one mental state is not immediately induced by the other, that the bodily manifestations must first be interposed between, and that the more rational statement is that we feel sorry because we cry, angry because we strike, afraid because we tremble, and not that we cry, strike, or tremble, because we are sorry, angry, or fearful, as the case may be. Without the bodily states following on the perception, the latter would be purely cognitive in form, pale, colourless, destitute of emotional warmth. We might then see the bear, and judge it best to run, receive the insult and deem it right to strike, but we could not actually feel afraid or angry. (pp. 189-190)” [4] James’ theory holds that the sensation of bodily changes is a necessary condition of emotion, not that ‘the subjective experience of emotion is neither more nor less than the awareness of our own bodily changes in the presence of certain arousing stimuli’ [7]. In addition, James regarded emotions as adaptive behavioural and physiological
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