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maximum very rapidly and then gradually sink to a quiet affective state. Secondly, we
have gradually arising emotions, such as anxiety, doubt, care, mournfulness, expectation,
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OUTLINES OF PSYCHOLOGY
106
and in many, cases joy, anger, worry. These rise to their maximum gradually and sink in
the same way. As a third form and at the same time a modification of the class just
mentioned we have intermittent emotions, in which several, periods of rise and fall
follow one another alternately. All emotions of long duration belong here. Thus,
especially joy, anger, mournfulness, and the most various forms of gradually arising
emotions, come in waves and often permit a distinction between periods of increasing
and those of decreasing emotional intensity. The sudden, irruptive emotions, on the
contrary, are seldom intermittent. This happens only in cases in which the emotion may
also belong to the second class. Such emotions of a very changeable form of occurence
[sic] are, for example, joy and anger. They may sometimes be sudden and irruptive. In
this case, to be sure, anger generally becomes rage. Or they may gradually rise and fall;
they are then generally of the intermittent type. In their psycho-physical concomitants,
the sudden irruptive emotions are all asthenic, those gradually arising may be either
sthenic or asthenic.
13a. The form of occurence [sic], then, however characteristic it may be in single cases,
is just as little a fixed criterion for the Psychological classification of emotions as is the
intensity of the feelings. Obviously such a classification can be based only on the quality
of the affective contents, while intensity and form of occurence may furnish the means of
subdivision. The way [p. 182] in which these conditions are connected with one another
and with the accompanying physical phenomena and through these with secondary sense-
feelings, shows the emotions to be most highly composite psychical processes which are
therefore in single cases exceedingly variable. A classification that is in any degree
exhaustive must, therefore, subdivide such varying emotions as joy, anger, fear, and
anxiety into their subforms, according to their modes of occurence, the intensity of their
component feelings, and finally according to their physical concomitants which are
dependent on both the psychical factors mentioned. Thus, for example, we may
distinguish a strong, a weak, and a variable form of anger, a sudden, a gradually arising,
and an intermittent form of its occurence, and finally a sthenic, asthenic, and a mixed
form of its expressive movements. For the psychological explanation, an account of the
causal interconnection, of the single forms in each particular case is much more important
than this mere classification. In giving such an accounts we have in the case of every
emotion to do with two factors, first, the quality and intensity of the component feelings,
and second, the rapidity of the succession of these feelings. The first factor determines
the general character of the emotion, the second its intensity in part and more especially
its form of occurence, while both together determine its physical accompaniments and the
psycho-physical changes resulting from the sense-feelings connected with these
accompanying phenomena (p. 177). It is for this very reason that the physical
concomitants are as a rule to be called psycho-physical. The expressions "psychological"
and "psycho-physical" should not, however, be regarded as absolute opposites in this
case, where we have to do merely with symptoms of emotion. We speak of psychological
emotional phenomena when we mean those that do not show any immediately perceptible
physical symptoms, even when such symptoms can be demonstrated with exact apparatus
(as, for example, changes in the pulse and in respiration). On the other hand we speak of
psycho-physical phenomena in the case of those which can be immediately recognized as
two-sided.
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OUTLINES OF PSYCHOLOGY
107
�14 VOLITIONAL PROCESSES.
1. Every emotion, made up, as it is, of a series of interrelated affective processes having a
unitary character, may terminate in one of two ways. It may give place to the ordinary
variable and relatively unemotional course of feelings. Such affective processes that fade
out without any special result, constitute the emotions in the strict sense as discussed in
the last paragraph. The process may, in a second class of cases, pass into a sudden change
in sensational and affective content, which brings the emotion to an instantaneous close;
such changes in the sensational and affective state which are prepared for by an emotion
and bring about its sudden end, are called volitional acts. The emotion itself together with
its result is a volitional process.
A volitional process is thus related to an emotion as a process of a higher stage, in the
same way that an emotion is related to a feeling. Volitional act is the name of only one
part of the process, that part which distinguishes a volition from an emotion. The way to [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]