Misattribution of Arousal

Emotion Misconstrued

One result of misidentifying the source of arousal may be the mislabeling of emotional arousal. In a classic study, Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer suggested that emotion is experienced when both physiological arousal and a cognitive label for the experience co-occur. It matters not whether the arousal precedes or follows the emotional label for the experience of an emotion, just that they are jointly experienced at some point. For example, imagine that a person enters a situation expecting joy and is subsequently aroused. According to this model, this person will experience joy because that label was most available when the arousal was experienced. Although in this instance the emotion (joy) occurs with the onset of arousal, one might also imagine a situation in which arousal precedes the cognitive labeling process. For example, a person might experience an elevated heart rate while sitting in a coffee shop and not attach an emotional label to the arousal until another person sits nearby at another table. In this case, the caffeine-induced arousal might be misat-tributed to the more salient environmental cue of [Page 1109]the other person, resulting in the attachment of an emotional label (e.g., attraction, love, lust) to the experienced arousal. In this instance, the arousal precedes the emotional label and the true source of the arousal may not be prominent in the person's mind as the situation unfolds.

The impact of the salience of possible sources of arousal and the subsequent mislabeling of emotions has been examined extensively over the years. In Schachter and Singer's experiment, participants were placed in a situation where the source of their arousal could be attributed to multiple sources. Schachter and Singer reported that subjects who did not have an accurate explanation for the cause of their arousal were more likely than others were to mimic the behavior of another person (e.g., euphoric) who was present. This imitation has been interpreted as the result of the misattribution process that resulted in participants' mislabeling of emotion. That is, participants in this situation employed the most salient cue available to interpret their experience—the confederate's behavior—and thereby produced an emotional label that was consistent with the confederate's behavior. Although Schachter and Singer's model is no longer viewed as a viable explanation of emotion, their initial inquiry spawned numerous studies demonstrating that people actively interpret their social situations, consider plausible explanations to label their experiences, and at times settle on the most cognitively available explanation.

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