In 1962, Stanley Schachter and Jerome E. Singer performed a study that tested how people use clues in their environment to explain physiological changes.
Second, that if a person experiences a state of arousal for which they have an appropriate explanation, then they will be unlikely to label their feelings in terms of the alternative cognitions available.
The results show that those participants who had no explanation of why their body felt as it did were more susceptible to the confederate, supporting the three hypotheses.
Psychologists Donald G. Dutton and Arthur P. Aron wanted to use a natural setting that would induce physiological arousal.
She gave the participants a questionnaire which included an ambiguous picture to describe and her number to call if they had any further questions.
The idea of this study was to find which group of males were more likely to call the female experimenter and to measure the sexual content of the stories the men wrote after crossing one of the bridges.
They found that the men who walked across the scary bridge were more likely to call the woman to follow up on the study, and that their stories had more sexual content.
[2] The two-factor theory would say that this is because they had transferred (misattributed) their arousal from fear or anxiety on the suspension bridge to higher levels of sexual feeling towards the female experimenter.
Maslach concluded that when there is a lack of explanation for an arousal it will cause a negative emotion, which will evoke either anger or fear.
This is important considering the heavy implication of certain brain centers in mitigating emotional experience (e.g., fear and the amygdala).
[7] It can also be noted that Gregorio Marañon also had early studies in the development of cognitive theories of emotion and should be recognized for making contributions to this concept.