Is That Really How You Feel?

•      Consider a situation in which you are just exiting the gym and are fairly worked up, when an attractive person passes and greets you. This situation may cause you to feel extremely attracted to this other person. It is important, however, to consider why you may feel this way. According to a psychological concept called The Two Factor Theory of Emotion, this feeling may derive from much more complex means. As proposed by this theory, emotions are influenced by multiple factors, which may be too ambiguous to differentiate, so therefore, based on the way a person feels about a certain situation they may attribute their emotions to one factor over the other despite the actual influence each factor holds. Not only does this concept apply to attraction, but it also applies to any other emotion with multiple factors involved, such as anger, happiness or nervousness.
  
  Minutes before an essential speech I was required to give in my sophomore History class, I remember feeling an intense wave of nervousness as I realized that I forgot my speech in my locker. With the time rapidly passing, I decided to ask the teacher if I could go to the bathroom, intending to sneak out to retrieve my speech, which was two floors below the classroom. After the teacher agreed to let me go, I ran downstairs so that he would not detect that I was going to my locker (since it was mandatory to have the speech at the start of class). After successfully recovering the paper, I stealthily walked into the classroom ready to present. What I had not prepared for, however, was the accelerated heart rate that running two flights of steps would give me. Now standing in front of the class, slightly sweaty and somewhat out of breath, I began to feel a sense of nervousness which I had never before experienced, causing me to struggle with my speech.
  Although I did not know it at the time, I was experiencing the Two Factor Theory of Emotion. Because of the events that preceded my speech, my sympathetic nervous system reacted in a way that is similar to nervousness, causing me to attribute the sensation to my apprehensions about giving the speech, and not to the fact that I had just run two flights of stairs. As dictated by this phenomenon, emotions and reactions are far more complex than perceived, and with some certain nuanced factors, it may be nearly impossible to correctly link the origin of an emotion to the emotion itself. 
  Similarly, in an experiment created by Donald Dutton and Arthur Aron, men who had previously crossed a wooden suspension bridge (the Capilano Foot Bridge) were to be interviewed by an attractive woman about their experience either immediately after they crossed the bridge, or after a period of time in which they could rest. After the men were interviewed by the woman they were given her phone number and told to call her later. As the experiment concluded, men were much more likely to call the woman back if they were interviewed directly after they crossed the bridge, than if they rested before the interview, as they were consequently more likely to perceive their emotions as the result of the presence of an attractive woman, rather than attributing their previous adrenal responses to the footbridge itself.
  Although this phenomenon can be detrimental to our perceptions of our emotions, it is essential to remain critically conscious of what we feel, and more importantly why we are feeling it. By remaining critically conscious, we are then able to combat the misattributions that the Two Factor Theory of Emotion may cause, therefore enabling us to more accurately label the causes of our emotions. Whether it is nervousness, anger, sadness, or love, always consider the events preceding the sensation, as well as its other possible factors before improperly attributing the factors to a specific emotion.
  
  
  Mark Donovan
  
  
  Dutton, D. G. and Aron, A. P. (1974). Some evidence for heightened sexual attraction under conditions of high anxiety. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 30, pp. 510–517.