Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [326]
—In 1960, Eckhard Hess (whom we saw, a while back, imprinting mallard ducklings on a mechanical mother) photographed the eyes of volunteers while they looked at different pictures. The pupils of the men widened when they saw pictures of women, especially pin-ups; the pupils of the women did so when they saw pictures of babies, particularly of one with his mother. The mind, recognizing and evaluating the content of the pictures, sent signals to the limbic system, which then generated both peripheral and central responses, namely, the pupillary widening and a sense of sexual interest.55
By far the most impressive experiment on cognitive influences on the emotions was conducted in 1962 by Stanley Schachter (1922– 1997) and Jerome Singer; it yielded a theory that dominated emotion research for twenty years. Schachter, whom we last saw enacting with gusto the role of a true believer in a cult expecting a worldwide flood, was a bluff, craggy-faced man with a zany sense of humor and, in the 1960s, a taste for daring and deceptive experimentation. Only such a person could have conceived of and coolly carried out the historic work in question.
Schachter, after reviewing the evidence for and against the James-Lange and Cannon-Bard theories, had concluded that “the variety of emotion, mood, and feeling states are by no means matched by an equal variety of visceral patterns,” and, like a number of other psychologists, came to believe that cognitive factors might be the major determinants of emotional states. He and Singer hypothesized that human beings cannot identify an emotion from the physical symptoms they are experiencing but must rely on external clues. The mind, using those clues, labels what the body is feeling as anger, joy, fear, and so on.
To test their hypothesis, Schachter and Singer asked volunteers for permission to inject them with Suproxin, supposedly a vitamin preparation, to investigate its effects on vision. In reality, the material injected was adrenaline, which causes the heart to race, the face to flush, and the hands to tremble—as do certain strong emotions. Some subjects were told in advance that Suproxin had these side effects, others were not.
Just before each subject began to feel the effects of the adrenaline, he was ushered into a room where he and another student (a confederate), who supposedly had also just had the vitamin injection, had to fill out a five-page questionnaire. The confederate enacted one of two scripts that he had rehearsed. In the presence of some subjects he would act giddy, silly, and happy. He would doodle, pitch crumpled paper into a distant wastebasket in a “basketball game,” make a paper airplane and sail it around the room, play with a hula hoop, and so on, meanwhile saying things like “This is one of my good days. I feel like a kid again.” With other subjects he would grumble about the length of the questionnaire and become annoyed by the questions (which grew ever more personal and insulting, one of the last being, “With how many men has your mother had extramarital relations?”—to which the lowest multiple-choice answer was “4 and under”). Finally he would rip up the questionnaire, throw the pieces on the floor, and storm out of the room.
Through a one-way screen, the researchers observed and rated each volunteer’s behavior and afterward had him fill out a mood scale indicating how irritated, angry, or annoyed, or conversely how good or happy, he felt. The results were arresting. Of the volunteers who had not been told about the injection’s effects, those who had seen the confederate being euphoric had also behaved, and said they felt, euphoric, and those who had seen him being irritated and angry had also behaved, and said they felt, irritated and angry. But volunteers who had been told in advance about Suproxin’s physiological side effects gave no such responses; they already had an adequate cognitive explanation for their feelings. Schachter and Singer’s historic conclusion:
Given a state of physiological arousal for which an