In 1962, Schachter and Singer conducted a study using misattribution of arousal. In this experiment, participants were told that the experimenters were researching the “effect of vitamin injections on visual skills” and gave participants an injection of either adrenaline or saline (saline being used on the control group). Participants who received the shot of adrenaline were either informed about the side effects of the injection, or not informed, and then all participants were exposed to either a happy or an angry confederate.
Schachter and Singer hypothesized that participants would express the same emotion as the confederates. As a result, they found that the participants who received the adrenaline shot but were not informed about getting it were more likely to express the same emotional state as the confederate they were exposed to. Their findings show that because the people were aroused by adrenaline, but had no explanation or label for it, they attributed their arousal to a feeling that they saw another person expressing. “The Three Factor Theory of Love” by Hatfield and Walster (1982)
This is based on work done by Schachter and Singer (1981) called the Attributional Model of Physiological Arousal. Schachter and Singer said that if we monitor our internal arousal state (e. g. heart rate, adrenalin levels, breathing rate), and take note of when it is at its highest. When it is at its highest, you would have to look around your life and see what is happening to you at the time when your internal arousal state is higher than normal, you would label this high arousal level as a specific mood depending on your external circumstances.
For example, if you have a high arousal state (heart rate and breathing rate and adrenaline level high, and an agitated psychological state), and you look around your life and you have exams coming up and lots of coursework deadlines. You would label this state as STRESSED. Another example, could be if you have a high arousal state, and you are about to leave to go to University or on holiday, you could label the arousal state as EXCITED. Hatfield and Walster apply this idea to LOVE.
They said that in order for this to work, you need three factors to be present: This theory is intuitively correct. We know that we get these feelings when someone we like is near or we are thinking about them. It is also a nice scientific explanation of the mechanisms behind the feelings involved in falling in love. It brings together physiological (nature) and cultural (nurture) factors in the explanation. It also explains cultural differences in the experience of love, as it takes into account the factor of cultural exposure.
Although, if you follow this model completely, all you need to do is to dress up & get your ‘beloved’ into a potentially exciting situation (e. g. on a roller coaster) and (as long as they are Western) they should immediately fall in love with you, which doesn’t generally happen. Therefore, when you think of that the theory doesn’t seem to work that well. There must be other factors involved, so this is not a complete explanation.
Another criticism of the theory comes from the idea of an ‘appropriate love object’. Culture tells us who is ‘appropriate’ i. e. similar age, opposite sex, similar ethnic and class groupings. So this model cannot explain why gay people find themselves attracted to members of the same sex, why people have ‘toy boys’ and ‘sugar-daddies’ or why some people might like ‘a bit of rough’ etc. “Love on a suspension bridge” by Dutton and Aron (1974) Attribution can play a powerful role in attraction. Specifically, misattribution of arousal can affect how attracted we feel toward another person. One very interesting field study of misattribution of arousal was conducted by Dutton and Aron (1974).
In this study, an attractive female or male experimenter approached men as they crossed either a high, rickety suspension bridge or a low safe bridge at a popular tourist site in North Vancouver, British Columbia. One of the bridges, the Capilano Canyon Suspension bridge is 5 feet wide, 450 feet long, and is constructed of wooden boards attached to wire cables that span a height of 250 feet. This bridge is not one for someone with a fear of heights. It wobbles as you walk on it and sways in the wind.
Nearby there is another bridge that does not stimulate as much arousal, it is solidly built out of heavy wood and stands only 10 feet about a small, peaceful stream. Whenever an unaccompanied male began to walk across either bridge, he was approached by a male or female assistant, who introduced themselves as a psychology researcher, and asked the men to write an imaginative story in response to a picture while standing on the bridge. The assistant also told the man that if he wanted to receive information about the study’s results, he could just call them Within this study there were 2 independent variables and 2 dependant variable…