Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [327]
The cognitive theory of emotional arousal was a smashing success. It not only illustrated the importance of cognition, the new passion of psychologists, but made sense of a mass of previously bewildering findings. Over the next two decades a huge amount of related research was conducted by psychologists, some of which qualified or contradicted the Schachter-Singer theory but most of which confirmed and added to it. A few highlights of the findings:
—Schachter and his colleague Larry Gross enlisted volunteers, some obese and some normal, in what they were told was a study of how somatic reactions are related to psychological traits. The experimenters conned each volunteer into handing over his watch when electrode paste was applied to his wrists; the electrodes being attached to him served only to disguise the removal of the watch. The researchers also left a box of crackers in the room and told the volunteer—who was alone during the experiment—to help himself. In the room was a doctored clock, running either at half speed or at double speed. After a while some volunteers thought it was their dinnertime although it was still early, others that it was not yet their dinnertime although it was late. The obese volunteers ate more crackers when they thought it was beyond their regular dinner hour than when they thought it was not yet their dinner hour; normal volunteers ate the same number no matter what time they thought it was. The conclusion: Not the stomach but the mind of the obese volunteers determined their feelings of hunger.57
—Another research team had an attractive female confederate approach men students as they were crossing either a swaying suspension bridge over a deep canyon or a low, solid bridge. In each situation the confederate’s cover story was that for a research project she wanted them to fill out a questionnaire and make up a brief story about a picture. She gave each man her name and telephone number so that he could call her if he wanted to know more about the project. The men she approached on the frightening suspension bridge wrote stories with more sexual imagery and were more likely to call her and ask for a date than the men she approached on the low, firm bridge. The experimenters concluded that the men approached on the frightening bridge interpreted their anxiety as the first stage of sexual attraction. As per Schachter-Singer theory, the men had taken an external clue—the presence of the attractive woman—as the explanation of their physical feelings.58
—In the late 1970s Paul Rozin and Deborah Schiller of the University of Pennsylvania undertook an inquiry into how and why human beings develop a liking for a painful stimulus, in this case chili pepper in food. Rozin and Schiller interviewed college students in Philadelphia and Mexicans in a highlands village near Oaxaca, and discovered that initially the response to chili pepper by children is almost always strongly negative; this ruled out the possibility that chili lovers are relatively insensitive to the irritant. They found that the initial dislike of the painful sensation changed because of the mother’s training and the social situation (especially in Mexico). The recognition that the burning sensation is considered desirable led the children to develop a liking for it—again, evidence that the mind decides how a sensation is to be interpreted.59
—Sexual arousal and mating behavior are automatically triggered in insects by pheromones (attractant secretions); even in mammals, odors produced by a female in heat switch on sexual desire and activity in the male, as every dog owner knows. Moreover,