CONSTRUCT ACCESSIBILITY AND THE MISATTRIBUTION OF AROUSAL - SCHACHTERAND SINGER REVISITED

Schachter and Singer (1962) showed that people search the immediate en vironment for emotionally relevant cues to label and interpret unexpla ined physiological arousal. We investigated how unobtrusively activate d cognitions and physiological arousal interact to produce emotional e xperience when the immediate environment is devoid of relevant cues. S ubjects were primed with positive, negative, or neutral concepts. They then either exercised or sat still and, either immediately or after a delay, rated their emotional stare. Consistent with what Schachter an d Singer found, subjects in the exercise, delayed-rating condition, wh o lacked an obvious explanation for their arousal, made the mast extre me affective self-ratings, which were consistent with the valence of t he primed concepts. These subjects apparently interpreted their residu al arousal in terms of the primed concepts. Subjects in the exercise, immediate-rating condition, who had an explanation for their arousal ( i.e., the exercise), were not influenced by the primes. Subjects in th e no-exercise condition showed typical priming effects, with prime-con sistent self-ratings that decayed over time. Implications for emotion formation, misattribution of arousal, and cognition are discussed.