CAS PS 101 Lecture Notes - Lecture 19: Decision-Making, Black Panther, Thought Suppression

• School: Boston University
• Department: Psychological & Brain Sciences
• Course: CAS PS 101
• Professor: Natalie Emmons

Document Summary

We can misattribute the sources of our emotional states. One interesting implication of the two-factor theory is that physical states caused by a situation can be attributed to the wrong emotion. When people misidentify the source of their arousal, it is called misattribution of arousal. Ex: a female experimenter greets male participants halfway across a bridge. Some of the males were on a stable bridge; some of the males were on a more dangerous bridge. The female would give the males her phone number in case they had any other questions. They found that the males who were on the risky bridge were more likely to call the female experimenter and ask her to a date because they misattributed their arousal to the female rather than to the bridge. Excitation transfer is a similar form of misattribution; residual physiological arousal caused by one event is transferred to a new stimulus.