Instead, they argued that emotions are perceptions of changes in bodily state. We don’t cry because we are sad, we are sad because we perceive our bodily state in the condition of crying. The emotion of fear, in this view, is constituted by (interoceptive) perception of a whole gamut of bodily responses set off by the organism recognizing danger in its environment. For James, the perception of bodily changes as they occur is the emotion:
