The Legacy of Cognition-Arousal Theory: Introduction to a Special Section of Emotion Review

Abstract

According to a ranking published in 2002, Stanley Schachter belongs to the 100 most eminent psychologists of the 20th century (Haggbloom et al., 2002). Schachter's fame rests in significant part on his two-factor, cognition-arousal theory of emotion, which is the focus of this special section of Emotion Review. The theory, first published by Schachter and Singer (1962), was presented to the scientific community as a neo-Jamesian formulation that preserved the valid assumptions of James's (1890/1950) theory of emotion while accommodating valid objections raised against it. To recall, the core assumption of James's theory is that emotions (emotional experiences) are feelings of the bodily changes caused by emotion-eliciting stimuli (for more detail, see Reisenzein & Stephan, 2014). This theory of the nature of emotions implies that bodily sensations are both necessary and sufficient for emotions (at least for a core set) and that different emotions (joy, anger, fear, etc.) are marked by distinct patterns of bodily feelings. A main objection of James's critics, whose most influential representative was Cannon (1927), was that these implications of the theory are empirically false (for more on this and other objections to James, see Deonna & Teroni, 2017; Reisenzein & Stephan, 2014). While many felt that Cannon's critique had put James's theory to rest, Schachter, like several others (e.g., Duffy, 1941; Marañon, 1924) believed that the criticisms were only partly justified. In particular, Schachter (1964) was unconvinced by Cannon's (1927) objections against the necessity of bodily feelings for emotions; rather, he remained convinced by James's (1890/1950) argument that bodily feelings are required to explain the "affective warmth" of emotional experiences, and their intensity. However, Schachter accepted Cannon's arguments that bodily feelings are not sufficient for emotions and are too unspecific to account for the qualitative distinctions between them. To remedy these perceived deficits of James's theory, Schachter (1964; Schachter & Singer, 1962) proposed that an emotion is the product of two factors, an emotion-unspecific feeling of arousal, and an emotion-specific cognition. More precisely, according to the standard, attributional interpretation of Schachter's theory (see Reisenzein, 2017), an emotion (e.g., joy) occurs if the person feels aroused, appraises an event as concern-relevant in a particular way, that is specific for this emotion (e.g., as a wish fulfillment in the case of joy), and believes that her arousal was caused by her appraisal of the event. Furthermore, although Schachter himself did not emphasize this point, the attribution of the arousal to the appraisal presumably provides the emotion with an object (see Shaked & Clore, 2017).

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“…L. Martin & Clore, 2001). From a psychological perspective, affective experience is defined as the feelings elicited from the interaction between a person and the environment (Dror, 2017;Friedman, 2010;Reisenzein, 2017). In other words, interaction generates a physiological response, which is interpreted as either an emotion (i.e., specific, short-lived, reactive response) or a mood (i.e., general, short-term, reactive response) that will be evaluated and labelled as a feeling (Holbrook & O'Shaughnessy, 1984).…”