Schachter S & Singer J. Cognitive, social and physiological determinants of emotional state. Psychol. Rev. 69:379-99, 1962

“When W. B. Cannon (1929) wrote his devastating and brilliant critique of the James-Lange theory of emotion,1 he would have been wise to follow the example of that great teacher of philosophy, Morris Raphael Cohen. At the end of a course in which he had demonstrated what was wrong with virtually every philosopher who had lived, Cohen was begged by his students to tell them what was right, what they should believe. ‘When Hercules cleaned out Augeias’ stables,’ Cohen responded, ‘they didn’t ask him to fill them up again.’ “Unlike Cohen, Cannon chose to offer his own theory —the so-called thalamic theory of emotion —a view which in the long run proved no more useful than had James’ theory. Where James had equated emotion with visceral, peripheral, physiological processes, Cannon equated emotion with processes and structures in the central nervous system. Though these theories These experiments independently manipulated physiological and situational determinants of emotional state. It was demonstrated that neither physiological nor psychological explanations alone could account for the experimental facts and an interactional view of emotion was proposed. [The Science Citation Index® (SCI®) and the Social Sciences Citation IndexTM (SSCITM) indicate that this paper was cited 432 times in the period 19621977.]