Abstract
Subjects were given written accounts of Schachter and Singer's (1962) experiment. Each subject read one such description, which depicted one of four treatments (informed/anger, informed/euphoria, uninformed/anger, uninformed/euphoria), and were then asked to take the role of a subject in the original study and to rate (a) their own feelings, (b) the importance of various factors as determinants of these feelings, and (c) their perceptions of the confederate's feelings. The experimental manipulations produced few significant effects on the first of these sets of ratings, while the angereuphoria manipulation had a strong impact on the third set of ratings. These findings support Schachter and Singer's implicit assumptions (a) that the anger and euphoria conditions are not inherently emotional and (b) that the confederate's mood is perceived by subjects in the intended manner. However, subjects' ratings of the importance of various possible causes of their feelings yielded findings that seriously question other assumptions implicit in Schachter and Singer's procedure. It is concluded that further tests of the two-factor theory of emotion should adopt a substantially revised procedure.
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The author wishes to thank Gün R. Semin, Hugh Wagner, Caroline McCulloch, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. A modified version of this paper was presented at the Annual Conference of the British Psychological Society's Social Psychology Section, Guildford, 1979.
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Manstead, A.S.R. A role-playing replication of Schachter and Singer's (1962) study of the cognitive and physiological determinants of emotional state. Motiv Emot 3, 251–264 (1979). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01904229
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01904229