Abstract

At the empirical center of James’s theory of emotion is the prediction that people induced to act emotionally will report feeling the corresponding emotion. While the research more or less inspired by James is complex, it is also large. Reisenzein and Stephan identify a number of problems in this literature, but we think, on balance, the research supports James’s hypothesis. At a minimum, there are literally hundreds of studies showing that people induced to act as if they felt an emotion, an attitude, or a judgment report those feelings. Critics of James’s theory are left with the task of accounting for these findings.