When we find ourselves in a difficult situation, we experience stress. This law was described by Hans Selye, there is no psychology here, it is a purely biological adaptive reaction of any organism. And us, including. As for our emotions and feelings, we construct them ourselves, understanding what kind of situation it is. If there is a suspicious criminal person nearby, then we will consider the resulting excitement as fear, if a lovely woman — a romantic feeling, if we came to the exam — of course, we have exam jitters. Well, we have outlined the essence of Stanley Schechter’s two-factor theory of emotions (Two—factortheoryofemotion).
This theory says that “we infer our emotions in the same way we infer what kind of people we are” – we observe our behavior and then explain why we behave the way we do. In this case, we observe not only our external, social behavior, but also our internal behavior, namely, how strong arousal we feel. If we feel aroused, we try to find out what is causing our arousal.
For example, your heart is beating fast and your body is tense. And what: are you experiencing terrible fear or is your stomach cramping from love? From is determined by your inner experience, but by the situation in which you are. Nothing is written on the experience — well, or we can read little on it. And the situation is clearer, so we focus on it.
In total, two factors are important for us to understand our emotional state: whether there is physiological arousal and what circumstances, the occurrence of which situation, we can explain it. That is why Schechter’s theory is called two-factor.
Stanley Schechter and Jerome Singer conducted an experiment to test this audacious theory; imagine yourself a part of it. When you arrive, the experimenter reports that a study is underway on how the vitamin suproxin affects human vision. After the doctor gives you an injection of a small dose of suproxin, the experimenter asks you to wait until the medicine begins to work. He introduces you to another participant in the experiment. The second participant says that he was also injected with a dose of suproxin. The experimenter gives each of you a questionnaire and says that he will come soon and give you a test to check your eyesight. You look at the questionnaire and notice that it contains some very personal and offensive questions. For example, “How many men (other than your father) did your mother have extramarital affairs with?” The second participant angrily reacts to these questions, he becomes more and more furious, then tears up the questionnaire, throws it on the floor and slams the door out of the room. What do you think you will feel? Are you angry too?
As you may have guessed, the real purpose of the experiment was not to test eyesight. The researchers created a situation in which the two main variables, arousal and the emotional explanation for that arousal, were present or absent, and then tested what emotions people experienced. The participants in the experiment did not actually receive any injection of the vitamin. Instead, the arousal variable was manipulated in the following way: Some participants in the experiment received a dose of epinephrine, a drug. Which causes arousal (increased body temperature and increased breathing), and some participants were injected with a placebo, which had no physiological effects.
Imagine now how you would feel when you received a dose of epinephrine: when you started reading the questionnaire, you felt aroused (note that the experimenter did not tell you that it was epinephrine, so you do not understand that it is the drug that makes you so aroused) . The second participant in the experiment—actually the experimenter’s assistant—reacts furiously to the questionnaire. You are more likely to conclude that you are agitated because you are angry too. You were placed in the conditions that Schechter considered necessary for the experience of emotions — you are aroused, you have searched for and found a reasonable explanation for your arousal in this situation. And thus you also become enraged. This is exactly what happened in reality — the participants who were given epinephrine reacted with more anger than the subjects who received the placebo dose.
The most interesting takeaway from Schechter’s theory is that people’s emotions are somewhat arbitrary, depending on the most likely explanation for arousal. Schechter and Singer tested this idea from two angles. First, they showed that they could prevent people from flaring up by rationally explaining the reason for their arousal. Some participants in the experiment who received a dose of epinephrine were told by the researchers that the drug would increase their heart rate, their face would be warm and red, and their hands would begin to shake slightly. When people actually began to feel this way, they did not conclude that they were angry, but attributed their feelings to the effect of the medicine. As a result, these participants in the experiment did not respond to the questionnaire with anger.
Even more eloquently, Schechter and Singer demonstrated that they could make subjects experience completely different emotions if they changed the most likely explanation for their arousal. In other conditions, the participants in the experiment did not receive a questionnaire with offensive questions and did not see the experimenter’s assistant angry. Instead, the experimenter’s assistant pretended to be overwhelmed with unreasonable joy and acted carefree, he played basketball with paper pellets, made paper airplanes and launched them into the air, twisted the hula hoop he found in the corner. How did the real participants in the experiment react? If they received a dose of epinephrine, but knew nothing about its effects, they concluded that they felt happy and carefree, and in some cases even joined in an impromptu game.