Emergency Responses

In all the classes of motivation so far considered, we have found the inner tension system prepared, so to speak, to cooperate with outer stimulating conditions; there is a state of readiness. But if we are thrown into a dither by stumbling over a rope or discovering an old letter from an erstwhile loved one, or receiving an unexpected telegram, no "state of readiness" exists. Yet we certainly display "motivation" as we respond. We know no better term to describe this externally aroused state of upheaval than the term "emergency response"; although any term presents difficulties, we shall hope to justify its usage as we develop the story.

From a rough descriptive standpoint motivation may be very crudely divided into two classes of activities, one of which, the "vegetative", serves to maintain the processes of growth, repair, and reproduction, and the other of which (Cannon's "emergency" system) has to do with the mobilization of available resources in a time of direct threat to life itself. Cannon structured the problem very graphically when he assigned the former functions to the parasympathetic (the craniosacral) system, the latter to the sympathetic.

Cannon's original theory of emotions as emergency upheavals certainly needs to be shaken down a bit, but even so it is surprisingly useful; it is worth the work of refining it. The first major point of criticism is that the vegetative responses themselves show all degrees of stressfulness and, when necessary, involve plenty of sympathetic activity. The hungry man's heart may accelerate when dinner nears; the returning lover scarcely shows the retardation of pulse which parasympathetic activity would involve; wild pounding of the heart may appear indiscriminately in a wide variety of conditions, from threat to joyous excitement.

Despite these and more objections, there is still value in the vegetative-emergency antithesis. Though it draws too sharp a line, some sort of line is necessary if any grouping of phenomena is to be achieved. From the present standpoint the term motive may be used very broadly to include all maintenance and extension of life processes, the homeostatic and the continuous motor adjustments to shifting external situations as well as the emergency upheaval states. The term emotion, already used in over fifty senses, may if desired be employed to designate only the emergency responses, notably those of fear and rage. Struggle under pain, suffocation, etc., may be grouped under the fear category if one wishes, and any form of vigorous attack on interfering obstacles may be called rage. Disgust and shame are upheavals due to a threat, too, if the term is stretched. Grief may be regarded as response to an emergency about which nothing can be done. Surprise might be considered a very mild form of startle, and hence of fear. The only purpose of a classification here is to indicate that there is a variety of more or less similar, more or less distinguishable response patterns which overlap physiologically and behaviorally but which, in spite of all difficulties, do constitute a group that no one would confuse with the group of vegetative activities. In general, the distinction lies in the fact that the vegetative activities go on all the time in constant or in cyclical fashion, whereas the emergency group of reactions may appear twenty times a day, or once, or not at all, depending on what happens outside; there may be constant threats or none at all. The patterns are imposed; they are not necessary spontaneous expressions of life. This, like all the distinctions in this field, is too sharp; a man climbing Mt. Everest struggles to breathe just as he struggles to climb. When the inner equilibrium of the neurochemical system becomes slowly more and more unstable as a result of the life processes themselves, and inner behavior leads directly to outer behavior, one may speak of visceral drives; when the inner equilibrium is suddenly or forcibly disturbed by external circumstances, such as threats, one may speak of emergency responses. Mixtures and transitions are obvious. The same is true of summer weather and winter weather, but they have to be distinguished.

In all this we are speaking of the source, the locus and character of the inner imbalance, not the external manifestations. A man may struggle to breathe, or, with bitterness hardened into hate, lie quiet to kill. Consequently the individual differences in all the types of motivation conceived here are individual differences in the inner patterns. These can be studied in three ways: (1) directly through pulse, blood pressure, fluoroscopic examination of the stomach, galvanic skin reflex, measures of finger temperature, etc.; (2) indirectly through inference from external behavior patterns, including the verbal and gestural; (3) still more indirectly through the testimony and inferences of observers regarding their own past and present conduct. The writer's bias in favor of the first of these should be clear by now, and perhaps also his conviction that no physiological indicator means a great deal by itself and that converging lines of indirect evidence, correlated if possible with direct evidence, are a great deal better than any single indicator.

One may wish to retain the term emotion in spite of the lack of agreement in its use, for we can hardly dispense with it when we wish to describe the upheaval of the individual when overpowered by some vigorous external stimulus. Certainly the cerebral cortex is involved, and certainly the lower centers, especially in the thalamic region, are profoundly concerned. Certainly also there is abundant discharge both to striped and to unstriped muscles and to duct and to ductless glands. It would be perfectly proper to regard rage or fear as a visceral drive in the sense defined above, if we wished to stress the internal factors which tend to produce generalized bodily tension, many of which make a person vaguely apprehensive or irritable. When we use the word emotion, however, we usually mean to stress something more explosive, a process by which the individual is catapulted into a new and unplanned relation to his environment, not solely as the result of a tension system which existed before he made contact with the new outer stimulus. Considered in such terms as these, involving both cerebral, visceral, and skeletal adjustment, emotions can be equated with emergency reactions. They exhibit the all-or-none principle more clearly than do the other drives, and as a rule have

rather clearly definable thresholds which differ sharply from one person to another and from one occasion to another for the same person. Constitutional factors again may be inferred from the data suggested above, at least in reference to fear and rage.

Since, however, we are dealing with elementary reactions abstracted from the total, it is proper to emphasize that there is no sharp distinction between the different emotions; they overlap too much. Nor is there a sharp distinction between emotions and other motives, because there is always some "new outer stimulus" and some "readjustment" to be made. By and large, disgust and shame have more in common with fear and rage than they have with the other groups of responses, if we happen to see fit to stress the suddenness of upheaval and the complexity of response. In all four classes of drives (visceral, activity, sensory, and emotions)there is a synergy of the central nervous system, the autonomic nervous system, and all the various effector systems. Some of the most joyful experiences, like exhilaration and laughter, draw from such wide bodily resources as to involve, more or less, all of the four classes of motives.

In connection with emotion it needs also to be stressed that one learns how to cope with one's motives, and that one of the most fundamental and central skills of personality is its means of keeping itself out of certain emotion-rousing situations, notably fear and shame. The degree of success is perhaps the chief factor in the security level of the person. Here, and in so many other aspects of psychology, the laboratory has studied the fully aroused response, while the clinic has studied the means used by the individual to avoid making the response. Organically, of course, the two are aspects of one system.

In view of the difficulty of differentiating between the emergency patterns at birth (none has been sharply defined experimentally except the "startle pattern"), two lines of evidence must be offered to justify the conception of fear, rage, surprise, and mirth, and perhaps some other patterns, as recognizably distinct from one another at an advanced maturation level, and from the "visceral drives." Though emotional patterns are not very easily distinguished at birth, they can be differentiated without difficulty at ten months of age; the maturation process involves not an isolated detail, but a complex expressive pattern. The other, likewise a study by Goodenough, indicates, in the case of a girl blind and deaf from birth, that patterns of surprise, anger, joy, and laughter could easily be observed and photographed at ten years of age. It is likely that the mechanism of skeletal-muscle patterning is responsible for this.

Individual differences in such emotional responses among the newborn have been something of a scandal to a psychology chiefly interested in uniformity of response. The startle pattern shows good uniformity of outline from child to child, but varies largely in intensity; and the attempt to study the familiar patterns of "rage," "fear," "love," etc., has in general revealed the fact that stimuli intense enough to pass the threshold of the phlegmatic are positively traumatizing to other people. Some infants begin to smile and laugh much earlier than others; others remain reserved or plaintive month after month. Wherever we look in the world of motivation, we find big differences; the attempt to iron out individuality by going back to the moment of birth is signally unsuccessful.

But however much we emphasize the functional distinctness of the various individual drives and of the various classes of drives, we must keep constantly in mind that the tension system is a system, that tensions spread through the body, that no one region is ever active without arousing others, and that no drive can ever exist in an otherwise undriven body. There are nodal tension centers, interacting systems at all times. The simplest conceivable formulation would be a figure-ground relationship, in which relative activity in one region is the figure, relative inactivity elsewhere the ground. Far more frequently we find ourselves confronted by a system of nodes of varying levels of intensity and with networks or communication systems conveying energy to and from these tension centers, the general activity level of the organism (depending upon age, health, etc.) serving as matrix, and the specific responses to specific outer and inner stimuli serving as crystallization points.