Misattribution of arousal

One of the initial studies looking into this phenomenon conducted by Schachter and Singer (1962)[1] was based on the idea that the experience of arousal could be ambiguous and therefore misattributed to an incorrect stimulus.

An example of the possible effects of misattribution of arousal is perceiving a potential partner as more attractive because of a heightened state of physiological stress.

As the men finished the survey, the female confederate, who was not aware of the experimental hypothesis, explained she would be available to answer any questions regarding her project, giving her phone number and name to the male subjects.

Conditions such as experiencing winds during their walk and the nervous feeling may have contributed to their fast-paced heartbeats and rapid breathing.

There were no significant differences on either bridge when the researchers used a male confederate to give the Thematic Apperception Test and his phone number for any further questions about the experiment.

Epinephrine activated the sympathetic nervous system and produced symptoms such as an elevated heart rate and blood pressure.

The researchers also found that emotions (in this study, euphoria and anger) could be manipulated by providing a participant with a shot of epinephrine.

One study conducted by Savitsky, Medvec, Charlton, and Gilovich[4] focused on how confidence can be affected by misattribution of arousal.

In the first experiment, 54 male participants were placed under varying degrees of physical exertion, in order to create a state of arousal.

To test this hypothesis the researchers created three separate videos to prime the subjects with a positive, negative, or neutral arousal.

[2] A study done by Loftis and Ross in 1974 looked at the effects of misattribution of arousal upon acquisition and extinction of a conditional emotional response.

They conducted two experiments with 89 female undergraduates to show that misattribution procedures can alter physiological response to a conditioned source of a fear or arousal.

Allen et al. propose a different model called Response-Facilitation, in which they suggest that the subject that is aroused will be more attracted to the target person (compared to people who are unaroused), regardless of if they know the true source of the stimulation.