WeRead Powered by ReaderPub
Bodily changes in pain, hunger, fear, and rage cover

Bodily changes in pain, hunger, fear, and rage

Chapter 70: REFERENCES
By Walter B. Cannon
Open in WeRead

Explore more books like this:

Health & MedicinePsychiatry/PsychologyScience - Biology

About This Book

A systematic account of experiments examining physiological changes that accompany pain, hunger, fear, and rage. It explains autonomic nervous system organization and shows how emotional excitation alters digestion, circulation, respiration, coagulation, and glandular secretion. Experimental evidence links splanchnic nerve activity and adrenal secretion to rapid increases in blood pressure, mobilization of energy, inhibition of intestinal motility, and accelerated clotting; hunger sensations and gastric contractions are described alongside methods used to record them. The work argues that these coordinated visceral reactions are adaptive responses to threat or need and provides detailed experimental procedures and results supporting a functional interpretation of emotional bodily changes.

Figure 35.—Rapid clotting after emotional excitement, with slowing of the process when the splanchnic nerves were cut in the thorax (the left at 3:26, the right at 3:35).

The data presented in this chapter show that such stimulation as in the unanesthetized animal would cause pain, and also such emotions as fear and rage, are capable of greatly shortening the coagulation time of blood. These results are quite in harmony with the evidence previously offered that injected adrenin and secretion from the adrenal glands induced by splanchnic stimulation hasten clotting, for painful stimulation and emotional excitement also evoke activity of the adrenals. Here, then, is another fundamental change in the body, a change tending to the conservation of its most important fluid, wrought through the adrenal glands in times of great perturbation. This bodily change and the others which occur under the same circumstances are next to be examined with reference to their significance.

REFERENCES

1 Cannon and Mendenhall: American Journal of Physiology, 1914, xxxiv, p. 251.

2 Macleod: Diabetes: its Pathological Physiology, London, 1913, pp. 68–72.

3 Gautrelet and Thomas: Comptes Rendus, Société de Biologie, 1909, lxvii, p. 233.

4 Bang: Der Blutzucker, Wiesbaden, 1913, p. 87.

5 Elliott: Journal of Physiology, 1912, xliv, p. 379.

6 Elliott: Loc. cit., pp. 406, 407.

7 Elliott: Loc. cit., p. 388.