Your heart starts to race, your hands start shaking, you are jittery and your body temperature just spiked.
In what situation would you put yourself? What is the emotion you are undergoing? Think about it for a minute.
Are you anxious? Is there fear bouncing around inside you? Are you experiencing nothing at all? Or maybe you are looking at someone attractive?
It could be any of those, couldn’t it?
Going in for a job interview could make you anxious. Partying the night before a big exam instead of studying might make you terrified you would fail a class. You could be at the gym working out. Then again, you could be staring at your significant other and becoming aroused.
The four indicators at the beginning of this are quite ambiguous. That is the point here though — ambiguity of these feelings.
All emotions are like this instance. They are extremely subjective to a certain situation and their signs are applicable to other situations.
Through the two-factor theory of emotion, founded by Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer in a 1962 experiment, the world learned emotions are assessed in two steps. The first of these is to experience some form of arousal.
Secondly, the person will attribute these arousal symptoms to a particular situation to explain why they are feeling how they are feeling.
Unfortunately, humans are often wrong. It is easier for humans, by nature, to find the quickest and easiest explanations for something so that way they can find confidence in having the ability to control tiny aspects of their lives.
Plausibility is comfort to a human. Yet plausibility may not be the right reason for emotions.
Here is another example to try to help understanding on this subject. You start to feel a tightness in your chest, your stomach is upset and you are extremely restless. You have a humongous exam tomorrow, but your boyfriend/girlfriend just broke up with you and you are devastated.
So, where is the emotion stemming from? One of these or both? Is there really a right answer?
The process of misattribution of emotion is a normality. People like to be able to explain their lives and to have control over how they feel. This is something everyone should be aware of and is generally not a major concern unless the misattributions are self-directed and destroy a person’s self-worth. This creates other issues that will not be discussed currently.
There is no outright solution to be found for this method.
Philosophers would say to sit and linger over the conundrum for hours and figure out the best possible answer for the emotion experienced— no one has time for this, though, especially taking into consideration the amount of emotional arousals felt in any given day.
Misattributing an emotion is not the end of the world. This column is merely proving the point that humans do not have as complete of control of their lives as they think we do.
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