"I discovered," he said in a late-period interview, "that those who seldom dwell on their emotions know better than anyone else just what an emotion is".
He believes his and other researchers' efforts will provide a much better understanding of what an emotion is in the brain.
Part of the problem seems to be the rather simple account of what an emotion is that Brown and Hamlyn use as their starting point: if love is an emotion, then the understanding of what an emotion is must be enriched considerably to accommodate love.
You see what an emotion does to somebody, but you can't see it really.
Although everyone apparently knew what an "emotion" was, theorists agreed with Brown that this could not be embodied in any verbal definition (Dixon, 2003, pp. 129 130).
In that year William James wrote an influential article in Mind entitled "What Is an Emotion?" A century and a quarter later, however, there seems to be little scientific consensus on the answer to his question, and some are beginning to wonder whether it is the very category of "emotion" that is the problem.
Now, in "Looking for Spinoza," he sets out to explain what precisely an emotion is, and what parts of the brain give rise to emotions of different kinds.
In an essay titled "What Is an Emotion?," James offered the following thought experiment: imagine a strong emotional response to some event in your life, and then try to erase from it "its characteristic bodily symptoms" — for instance, fear without a rush of adrenaline and the physical impulse to run, or sadness without flushness and tears.
In 1884 James had written an essay called "What is an Emotion?", which influenced Stanislavsky's later practice.
So, when W. James famously asked in 1884, "What is an emotion?" he was not engaging with an age-old conundrum, but was seeking to define a psychological category that had been in existence only a couple of generations.
Examples now include: What is an emotion?
