Understanding Psychology (10th Ed)

Singer theory of emotion, 
this might very well happen. This approach to explain-
ing emotions emphasizes that we identify the emotion we are experiencing by 
observing our environment and comparing ourselves with others (Schachter & 
Singer, 1962).
Schachter and Singer’s classic experiment found evidence for this hypothesis. 
In the study, participants were told that they would receive an injection of a vita-
min. In reality, they were given epinephrine, a drug that causes responses that 
typically occur during strong emotional reactions, such as an increase in physio-
logical arousal, including higher heart and respiration rates and a reddening of the 
face. The members of both groups were then placed individually in a situation 
where a confederate of the experimenter acted in one of two ways. In one condition 
he acted angry and hostile; in the other condition he behaved as if he were exu-
berantly happy. 
The purpose of the experiment was to determine how the participants would 
react emotionally to the confederate’s behavior. When they were asked to describe 
their own emotional state at the end of the experiment, the participants exposed to 
the angry confederate reported that they felt angry, while those exposed to the happy 
confederate reported feeling happy. In sum, the results suggest that participants 
turned to the environment and the behavior of others for an explanation of the 
physiological arousal they were experiencing. 
The results of the Schachter-Singer experiment, then, supported a cognitive view 
of emotions in which emotions are determined jointly by a relatively nonspecifi c kind 
of physiological arousal and the labeling of that arousal on the basis of cues from the 
environment (refer to the third part of Figure 2). Although later research has found 
that arousal is more specifi c than Schachter and Singer believed, they were right in 
assuming that when the source of physiological arousal is unclear, we may look to 
our surroundings to determine what we are experiencing.