(Crossposted from Instagram)

Step aside, Freud, if you have daddy issues with psychology you ought to take them up with William James, who is often regarded as the "father of (American) psychology". James was known as a "cognitivist" and focused on was actually going on inside the mind. He is often contrasted with Wundt, a behaviorist, who focused only on behavior. Both are often credited with opening the first psychology lab, moving the discipline towards science (and away from Freud and ripping lines of coke before giving lectures).

As an early psychologist, James straddled the line between philosopher and psychologist in many ways. He intuitively came up with many ideas regarding human motivation and experience that were impossible to test at the time, and would only later be validated. Of particular importance, and relevance to the quote, was his ideas on the relationship between emotion and judgement. Before James, it was thought that we had an experience, made a judgement on that experience, and that that judgement was what gave us emotion.

James believed that this relationship, at the very least, flowed both ways. Sometimes, we experience an emotional response to an event, and only after we experience our emotion do we formulate a judgement (really a post hoc explanation) of it. Studies confirm this - for example, when given a stimulant, people are very suggestible as to whether they're angry or euphoric (though they'll claim it was based on their judgement). Another study has shown that people who simply hold a confident posture will behave more confidently and assertively.

Put in more modern terms, the notion of "fake it 'till you make it" in the realm of emotion has some empirical grounding, because our emotions do not merely inform our behavior; our behavior informs our emotions. Simply smiling more will make you happier (a study confirmed this, tricking participants into activating their smiling muscles by holding a pencil between their teeth longways). Simply moving around more (eg, walking) will make you feel more motivated.

Now, putting a pencil between our teeth to feel happy might seem ridiculous, but it's these sorts of interventions that are especially low hanging fruit when it comes to feeling better, because our mind will follow our body. I think why yoga makes people feel so good might very well have less to do with the stretch, and more to do with just having good posture for an hour. An interesting contrast to James views is the stoics, who believed that by controlling their judgements they could reign in full control of their emotions.

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(Explanatory notes)

I read a lecture note series of James (Pragmatism, I think?) where he used the terminology of "thick" to describe good ideas, which I must admit I found a lot funnier than I should have. Needless to say, he expressed a preference for "thick" ideas.

Wundt and James didn't found the first psych lab together - instead they're both credited as there is some debate as to whether or not James' laboratory (which came first) qualified as a "lab" because he used it more for teaching than experiments.

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