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ates, such as hunger and thirst, involve situations that lead to approach behavior
. Aversive states involve situations that lead the organism to withdraw or flee the situation. Pain is the
most well known aversive stimuli, and the most frequently studied.
Spence argued that the drive that activates aversive states was a result of the development of an internal,
emotional response in the organism, that the organism’s emotionality was aroused by an aversive stimulus
(pain, fear, and electric shock). Spence’s basic premise was that organisms learn from experience which
situations have aversive potential, and then strive to avoid those situations.
Cognitive Tradition
This approach stresses the importance of cognitive appraisal of a situation. Richard Lazarus felt that bodily
(affective) changes were not sufficient for the experience of a true emotional feeling, that we must assess a
situation as emotion producing before we can experience emotion. The first model to posit this idea was that
proposed by the Lazarus–Schachter theory of appraisal.
We now have a foundation for the study of emotion, so let us discuss theories that have been popular at
different times throughout the years.
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PSYCHOLOGY AND LIFE
The James–Lange Theory
James and Lange proposed that feelings of emotion did not occur immediately after the perception of an
event in the environment, but because of our bodily responses to the event or object. In a diagram form, the
chain of events looks like this:
PERCEPTION T BODILY CHANGES T EMOTION T BEHAVIOR
As an example of how this might look in real life, imagine meeting an angry bear in the woods:
SNARLING BEAR T INCREASED HEART RATE, T FEAR!