Chapter 1 12 response tendencies that are called forth directly by evolutionarily significant situations [8]. Nowadays, backed by convincing evidence from affective neuroscience - although perhaps not all agreeing with all of James’ ideas, few researchers and clinicians doubt the significance of the body in emotion. Today’s discourse on emotion is dominated by the compelling works of authors, such as Barrett [9], LeDoux [10], Damasio [11], Van der Kolk [12], Lane [13], and Ogden [14], who all place great emphasis on the role of the body. However, some 137 years later, we still fall short of an answer to this question that propelled much of the field of academic psychology into existence. We are again aware of the facts that James was over a century ago: bodily sensations are not the ‘whole experience’; yet they are part of what makes the whole experience emotional [11-13, 15-17]. The bodily sensations, "perceived, like the original object, in many portions of the cortex, combine with it in consciousness and transform it from an object-simply apprehended into an object-emotionally-felt" [4]. The bodily processes combine with the perception of the object to produce the emotion. In this respect, James's theory resembles Schachter and Singer's (1962) idea that emotion is a combination of cognitive and physiological responses [7]. Still, even though emotion and its bodily basis have had a real resuscitation in both research and the clinical field in past decades – there still is no generally accepted definition of ‘what is an emotion’. What is agreed upon is that ‘emotion’ refers to a collection of psychological states that include subjective experience, expressive behaviour (e.g., facial, bodily, verbal), and peripheral physiological responses (e.g., heart rate, respiration). It is also widely agreed that emotions are a central feature in any psychological model of the human mind. Beyond these two points of agreement, however, almost everything else seems to be subject to debate [18]. The struggle to really understand this omnipresent, yet hard to capture phenomenon that is emotion is not merely an academic one. In contrast, as stated above, psychological first-person experience is constructed from emotions on a day-to-day basis. Many psychiatric disorders are said to be characterized by problems with emotion and emotion regulation; estimates range from 40% to more than 75% [19]. As emotions are hard to be directly controlled by mere reason and will, and yet have such an impact on our doings, it is understandable that many efforts have beenmade by physicians, psychotherapists, psychiatrists, coaches, and other health professionals to help us ‘manage’, or ‘regulate’ this powerful, potentially disrupting internal source.
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