Picture this, you're down the street at night, and all of a sudden a person wearing a clown costume pops out of nowhere and they start running towards you. Obviously you're going to have an emotional response, but what is it? Maybe you say, I feel afraid.
Maybe you say, I start running. Or maybe you say, I completely freeze up and start sweating. See, there's a lot that goes into our emotions.
We don't just feel them in our minds, we also experience those emotions in our bodies too. Emotions may drive voluntary or involuntary behaviors. And because of this, psychologists have been trying to wrap their heads around how our minds and our bodies experience different emotions for many years.
There's multiple theories that have tried to explain the role of arousal, cognition, and behavior, but until recently, they have all been kind of disproven and replaced with other, newer theories. The first theory of human emotion in modern psychology was a James-Lange theory, which centered around the body's physical arousal. It was then replaced by the Cannon-Bard theory, which argued that emotions started in the mind and not the body.
These theories didn't really satisfy many cognitive psychologists, including Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer. This led to the creation of the Shatter-Singer Theory of Emotion, also known as the Two-Factor Theory of Emotion. So let's break down what these two different factors are, how they work together, and how this theory fits into cognitive and social psychology. So first off, what is the Two-Factor Theory of Emotion? The Two-Factor Theory of Emotion recognizes that both cognition and arousal play a part in the identification and feelings of emotions.
Emotion is not only caused by a sensation in the body, or only caused by thoughts in the mind. Both of these processes influence the emotions that we feel and express those emotions to others. Things like context, past experiences, and a person's knowledge of their own body can also play a part in how they label or experience emotions.
So let's get into the two factors. Schachter and Singer believed that people felt emotions when they experienced arousal, and had context or stimuli to help them identify and label these feelings. This process started with arousal.
So the first one is physical. In the world of psychology, arousal is a state of wakefulness to the point of perception. And while it does have a role in sexual feelings, arousal is also important in fight or flight, consciousness, or just simply paying attention. Whenever a person encounters stimuli that evoke certain emotions, they first experience it as physiological arousal. This arousal takes place in the sympathetic nervous system.
Maybe your palms get sweaty or your chest hurts to tighten, or maybe your hands and feet become numb. The second factor is mental. Once a person notices this arousal, they must use environmental cues to interpret what is happening.
This leads them to identify their emotions. This cognitive process is called appraisal. When people are faced with a potentially threatening stimulus, they go through one or maybe even multiple rounds of appraisal. First, A person will experience primary appraisal. Their mind asks, Is this stimulus a threat?
In the example I used at the beginning of this video, you would probably come to the conclusion that a strange clown running at you is a threat. Next comes secondary appraisal. Then the body asks the mind, How do I handle this threat?
And often the answer is either fight, flight, or freeze. You may find yourself attacking the clown, running away from it, or some people even freeze in place of fear. But this isn't where cognition ends. You may go through a reappraisal if you gather new information that changes your perception of the situation. For example, maybe the clown yells out your name.
You can then realize that it's your best friend's voice. Now, this clown doesn't seem like such a threat. It's just your friend playing a prank on you.
Your palms might be sweaty and your heart may be still beating fast, but you now label your emotion as relief instead of fear. So Schachter and Singer tested out their theories about these processes by conducting an experiment. They injected participants with epinephrine. It's a hormone that causes an increased heart rate and a few other side effects.
But these participants knew that they were going to experience these side effects, but some of them didn't. Then the participants were placed in a room with a confederate, and the confederate either acted euphorically or angrily towards the participants. The participants that knew about the side effects did not report significant changes in their emotions, but the participants that didn't know there were going to be side effects, they were very much more likely to report changes in their mood.
So the participants in the room with the euphoric confederate were more likely to label their emotions as euphoria. And in the room where there was an angry confederate, they were more likely to label their emotions as anger. Now this showed us that both physical arousal and environmental cues influence how a person recognized and identified their emotions. So this theory assumes that people are in touch with their emotions and the physical responses happening within their body when they experience those emotions.
The first time you're experiencing a panic attack, for example, you may not be able to identify what is actually happening within your body. These new sensations, like your chest tightening or your hands tingling, may be confusing to you. Yet they are still occurring, whether or not you can identify them.
A study attempted to disprove the two-factor theory of emotion involved men on a bridge. The participants were asked to walk across two different bridges. One bridge was more narrow and scarier than the other, and at the end of each bridge, there was a woman that gave the men a questionnaire and told them to call her with questions or comments. Interestingly enough, the researchers found that the men who walked across the scary bridge were much more likely to call the woman, and, in their phone call, tell stories that contained sexual content.
So, you may be asking, why did they do this? Well, the researchers believe that the men experienced physiological arousal by walking across the scary bridge. Their body kind of reacted in a way.
And then the men used cognitive processes to determine that their arousal was due to the sexual attraction to the woman, not to the bridge. This is actually called the misattribution of arousal. So one could argue that the men labeled their emotions incorrectly, but only because their physiological arousal and their cognitive interpretations were done in two separate processes. This study seems to give evidence to the two-factor theory of emotion. Lastly, I want to give a little bit about criticism on the two-factor theory of emotion, because it's relatively new to the world of psychology.
It was first introduced in 1962, and not all replications of Schachter's and Singer's original studies have gotten the same results. While there may be more to explain when it comes to the mental and physical processes involved in identifying emotions, Schachter's and Singer's theory bring us closer than some of the simpler explanations that came before it. I really hope you enjoyed this video on the two-factor theory of emotion, and most of all, I hope that you learned something.
If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment below, and check out some of the other videos in my series. Thanks for watching!