In this video I explain the idea of misattribution of arousal; when people misinterpret their physiological arousal, which may cause them to mislabel their emotional experience. I explain how this was demonstrated in Schachter & Singer’s study (discussed in the previous video) as well as in Stuart Valins’s study of false heart-beat feedback. The most famous example of misattribution of arousal comes from Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron‘s study of male responses to a female interviewer differing whether they met her on the Capilano suspension bridge or on solid ground.

Stuart Valins (1966) Cognitive Effects of False Heart-Rate Feedback: https://www.researchgate.net/publicat…

Radiolab Live – Tell-Tale Hearts – http://www.radiolab.org/story/radiola…

Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron (1974) Some evidence for heightened sexual attraction under conditions of high anxiety: http://gaius.fpce.uc.pt/niips/novopla…

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Video Transcript

Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re going to look at the idea of misattribution of arousal. So in the previous video I talked about theories of emotion and I ended by talking about the Schachter-Singer theory of emotion which is also known as Two-Factor theory and the basic idea of Two-Factor theory is that our emotional experience is the result of a combination of our physiological activity and our interpretation of that activity and the situation that we’re in.

What this means is that it’s possible for us to misinterpret things, to misinterpret the cause of that physiological activity and as a result we might mislabel our emotional experience. Now this was demonstrated in the experiment I described by Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer in that some of the participants were misinformed about the effects of an injection that they received. So the participants had received an injection of epinephrine or adrenaline, and some of them were told the truth about what this injection was going to do to them and others were misinformed. And then later what we saw was that the participants labeled their emotional state differently depending on whether they were well-informed or misinformed about the source of their physiological activity.

Now this misattribution of arousal was also demonstrated in a study by Stuart Valins, and Valins was actually a student of Stanley Schachter’s, and one study that Valins did had males listen to a heartbeat and they believed that they were listening to their own heartbeat. And while they were listening to their heartbeat they were asked to rate their attraction to images of semi-nude women. What Valins found was that if the researchers manipulated the speed of the heartbeat that the males were listening to, so if they’re looking at these pictures and they hear the heartbeats speeding up, they actually misinterpreted this as thinking their own heart was speeding up. And as a result they rated those images as being more attractive. They felt more attraction to those women because they thought “my heart’s beating faster, that must clearly be a sign that I really like what I’m seeing”.

Now this was also demonstrated inadvertently in 2015 during a recording of the podcast Radiolab by WNYC. So they were doing a live podcast recording with a live audience and this podcast featured a loud heartbeat sound throughout the podcast which was playing in the background of a story that was being told. And what they found was that some of the listeners actually started feeling dizzy from hearing this heart rate that was accelerating and some people actually fainted from hearing this. And this shows this possibility to misinterpret the source of physiological activity. Now of course in this case the participants even knew that the heart that they were hearing was not their own and yet it still had this powerful effect.

Now probably the most famous example of misattribution of arousal is a study conducted by Donald Dutton and Arthur Aaron in 1974. In this study Dutton and Aaron had males interviewed by a female in Capilano Park in Vancouver and in some cases the female interviewed the male subjects while they were standing on the Capilano Suspension Bridge and in other cases the men were interviewed by the same female interviewer but they were standing on stable ground. At the end of the interview, she sort of gives them her phone number and says you know “you can give me a call if you have any questions”.

And what Dutton and Aaron found was that the men who met her while they were standing on the suspension bridge were more likely to call than the men who met her while they were standing on solid ground. Now to give you an idea of why this bridge would have this potential effect on men calling this woman back, we’ll take a look at the Capilano Suspension Bridge. So here’s a picture of it here and you can see that it’s probably a bit of a physiologically arousing experience to be standing on this bridge. To give you a sense of scale there you can see that those are two people standing on the bridge, so it’s quite high up and it’s still shaking.

The idea is that the men were misinterpreting their physiological arousal. The bridge was the cause of their elevated heart rate and their sweaty palms but they’re talking to this woman and they’re thinking you know “my heart’s pounding and I’m sweating, like, man, I must really be attracted to her” right? So they misinterpreted this and therefore they were more likely to try to get in touch with her after the interview was over. Ok, so hopefully that helps you to understand this idea of misattribution of arousal. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!