Good afternoon my loyal readers, and welcome back to another edition of The Psych Era. Today I will be speaking on something I recently did a study on- misattribution of arousal. Many individuals get the wrong idea without context, but I am not referencing what you may be thinking. I mean emotions, rather. Before diving into this, I first want to explain how men and women differ in emotional development. From a young age, females tend to focus on cooperation with others and forming intimate relationships. Why is this? The best thing about psychology is that you can form many different theories about why people do things. However, in my eyes, I simply believe that women are wired to be more caring creatures. Growing up with a single mom and primarily around women, I have seen firsthand how amazing they can be. Is my answer biased? Somewhat, yeah, but studies do show that women reach their affiliation needs(my loyal readers know this one) through the phenomenon of tending and befriending. It is amazing how similar we all are without even realizing it.

Now, for men, emotional development is quite different. In most cases, men focus more on group involvement, such as a sports team or club. Many developmental psychologists argue that because we used to be in a hunter-gatherer society, we are wired to do so per the idea of the collective consciousness. Do I believe that? Kind of. I mean, men do work very well in teams and do some phenomenal things. Having “the boys” around you is an amazing feeling that allows most men to achieve their affiliation needs. One thing it is important to remember, however, is that emotional development is different for everyone. Girls are more emotionally intelligent than boys, but that is not always the case. Not every boy or girl does what I do, which is why I love social psychology. It considers everything, including the situations. For example, I achieved my affiliation need through the tend and befriend method because that was what I was exposed to. As previously mentioned, I was around more women, so I adopted that process. Children are observational learners. What they see you do, they do.

Anyways, let us get back to the task at hand, misattribution of arousal. A very intelligent theory on this is known as the Schachter-Singer Two Factor theory. To simplify this, it is essentially the idea that a stimulus causes us to feel physiological arousal(increased heart rate), leading to labeling emotions. Allow me to explain why sometimes this leads to people misinterpreting their emotions. Sometimes, we tend to misattribute our emotions. Let us say that you are watching a scary movie with a person you are attracted to. You are extremely scared. Your heart rate is elevating, your breathing changes, and you look at this person, and suddenly, they look even better than before. One may assume that is attraction; however, in reality, you are just scared of the movie. That is a misattribution of arousal. Next time you want your crush to like you, do something scary together, so they think they’re in love rather than scared when they look at you. If you want to read more on this, go here. See you next time!