Summary
When an individual has no immediate explanation for the state of physiological arousal they are feeling, they will label the feelings based on cues that are available to them. That is why subjects have feelings of either euphoria or anger when they had unexplained SNS arousal. The subjects that were in the misinformed or ignorant condition behaved similarly to the stooge, while those who were correctly informed of the expected SNS responses, had little to no mirroring of the actor's cues. They concluded that when the subjects were informed of the reason for the SNS arousal, they had a perfectly appropriate explanation for this and did not have a need to find an external basis for these feelings.
The results support the proposition that following the injection of epinephrine, some subjects had no explanation for the bodily state they felt. They did give behavioral and self-report indications that they had been manipulated into the feeling states of euphoria and anger. Subjects' emotional states were inferred from both observations of the subjects and the subjects responses on a self-rating of emotion scale. Those subjects who had received the adrenaline injection were more emotional by both measures, showing that the first factor in emotion, intensity, resulted from visceral arousal.
Participants who were in the misinformed or ignorant condition behaved similarly to the actor, while those who were informed of the expected effects of the adrenaline showed no emotional pattern. This suggests that participants who were informed cognitively attributed their feelings to the physiological effects of the adrenaline, while the uninformed or misinformed groups could perform no such attribution and so interpreted the feelings as emotion. Schachter's cognitive labeling theory thus identifies "cognitive attribution," the mind's attempt to pair the feeling of arousal with its (inferred) causal pattern in the environment as the second factor in the Two-factor Theory of Emotion.
Read more about this topic: Two-factor Theory Of Emotion
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