Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1975, Vol. 32, No. 1, 69-75
Enhancement of Experienced Sexual Arousal in Response to Erotic Stimuli Through Misattribution of Unrelated Residual Excitation Joanne R. Cantor, Dolf Zillmann, and Jennings Bryant Institute for Communication Research, Indiana University In a pretest, three phases of recovery from a standard physical exercise were determined. In Phase 1, subjects experienced high levels of physiological excitation and recognized that their arousal was due to exercise. In Phase 2, subjects maintained substantial excitatory residues from the exercise but felt that their arousal had returned to base level. In Phase 3, subjects' excitatory responses had decayed, and they knew they had recovered from the exercise. Subjects in the main experiment were exposed to an erotic film in the first, second, or third recovery phase after performing the exercise. Subjects viewing the film during the second recovery phase reported being more sexually aroused by the film and evaluated the film more positively than subjects in the other two conditions. Counter to the notion of arousal as a simple energizer of all behavior, these findings were interpreted as supporting excitation-transfer theory, which posits that residual excitation enhances emotional responses to unrelated, immediately present stimuli only when the prevailing arousal cannot be attributed to its actual source.
Excitation-transfer theory (Zillmann, 1972) has been developed to account for an intensification of emotional states which are preceded by highly arousing, potentially unrelated experiences. The theory involves the assumptions that (a) critical components of an excitatory response decay relatively slowly and often remain operative after the individual has adjusted cognitively to novel stimulation and (b) the individual characteristically does not distinguish between the portions of his excitation that are due to prior arousal and those that are caused by present stimulation. Since, according to the two-factor theory of emotion (Schachter, 1964), the intensity with which an emotion is felt is a function of the prevailing level of excitation, excitation-transfer theory posits that undecayed excitation from prior stimulation, in general, should produce an over-
intense response to present stimuli. Excitation transfer is not expected to occur in all situations in which undecayed excitation is present, however. In order for an enhancement of a subsequent emotion to be brought about, conditions must favor the misattribution of residual arousal to stimuli which are immediately present. If it is obvious to the individual that the source of his arousal is his prior and not his present activity, transfer should not occur. Studies investigating aggressive behavior following exercise (Zillmann, Johnson, & Day, 1974; Zillmann, Katcher, & Milavsky, 1972) are relevant to this point. In these studies, angered subjects experiencing residual excitation from exercise exhibited increased aggressiveness against their provoker when their opportunity to retaliate was provided with some delay after exercise, but failed to do so when retaliation occurred immediately after exercise. It was speculated that transfer was prevented immediately after exercise because the individual's arousal state involved clear and readily distinguishable cues of the source of the arousal, such as heavy breathing and heart pounding. It was thought that during the time when such cues were present, the individual did not interpret
This research was supported by National Science Foundation Grant GSOC-7205471 to Dolf Zillmann. Joanne Cantor is now at the University of Wisconsin. Jennings Bryant is now at the University of Massachusetts. Requests for reprints should be sent to Dolf Zillmann, Institute for Communication Research, Radio-TV Center, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47401.
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J. CANTOR, D. ZILLMANN, AND J. BRYANT
his arousal as part of his anger toward his provoker, but that after some delay, when the salient cues of arousal had disappeared, portions of the residual arousal were still present to intensify felt anger. While this explanation accounts for the findings on aggression, the studies did not provide any data concerning subjects' actual perceptions of their arousal state or the length of time in which they felt their arousal was due to exercise. The present study was designed to confirm the assumptions made about the role of cues of the source of an arousal state in inhibiting transfer and to demonstrate that transfer effects occur only if residual arousal from a prior activity is present and the individual has lost track of these residues interoceptively. A pretest was conducted to determine (a) the time course of subjects' physiological recovery from a standard physical-exercise task and (b) the time course of subjects' perceptions of their own recovery. As expected, subjects reported feeling that they had returned to base level before they had actually recovered, and this inaccuracy of interoception permitted the delineation of the following three time phases after exercise: during Phase 1, measured excitation from the prior arousing experience was significantly above base level, and subjects were aware that they were still aroused from the prior stimulation; during Phase 2, measured excitation was still significantly elevated, but subjects reported feeling that they had recovered from their prior excitatory response; during Phase 3, measured excitation had returned to base level, and subjects perceived that they had recovered. In the main experiment, subjects were exposed to emotion-inducing stimuli—portions of an erotic film—during the first, second, or third recovery phase after exercise and reported on their responses to the stimuli. From the reasoning on the role of apparent cues of the source of arousal in excitation transfer, it was expected that responses to the erotic film would be no more intense during Phase 1 than during Phase 3, but that they would be significantly more pronounced during Phase 2 than during the other two phases. As a secondary expectation, it was
speculated that subjects' perceptions that they were still aroused from exercise during Phase 1 might cause an impairment of responses to the erotic film (relative to Phase 3 as the control). The presence of cues linking experienced arousal to exertion could conceivably cause the individual to perceive the arousal produced by the erotic film as part of his residual arousal and thereby to underestimate his true response to the film (cf. Girodo, 1973). If such a process were to occur, it would cause reported responses to the erotic film during Phase 1 to be less intense than those occurring during Phase 3. These predictions contrast with the popular notion that arousal enhances any and every behavior engaged in, purely as a function of the magnitude of the prevailing arousal. According to this notion, reported responses to the erotic film should be highest during Phase 1, intermediate during Phase 2, and lowest during Phase 3. METHOD Pretest Subjects. Fifteen male undergraduates participated in the pretest to fulfill a requirement for an introductory communications course. Design. All subjects performed the same physicalexercise task. Their physiological responses were assessed before exercise and during the 10 minutes immediately following exercise. During the postexercise period, subjects reported their perceptions of their own level of arousal. These data were used to determine the time periods of the critical phases needed for the main experiment. Procedure. Each subject, tested individually, heard tape-recorded instructions describing the study as an investigation of the effects of physical distraction on perception. He was told that he would be exposed to slides for several minutes, and that during the first minute he would pedal an exercise bicycle. At regular intervals after exercising, he was informed, he would be asked to report on his perceptions of his recovery from the exercise. The manner of rating his physiological state was described to him, and it was explained that physiological measurements of his excitation would be taken also. The subject was told that the slide-viewing period would be of a predetermined length regardless of the time course of his physiological responses. Following these instructions, the experimenter took base-level measures of physiological excitation.1 He then started the slide projector, which was set to change slides automatically at 8-second intervals, and l
The third author served as the experimenter.
71
ENHANCEMENT OF EXPERIENCED SEXUAL AROUSAL told the subject to start pedaling the bicycle. At the end of 1 minute, he told the subject to stop pedaling. During the next 10 minutes physiological measures were taken, and the subject was asked, at 1-minute intervals, to report on his arousal state. The series of slides the subject was exposed to throughout the exercise and decay periods consisted of magazine advertisements and pictures of scenery and wildlife. After the 10-minute assessment period, the subject was dismissed. Apparatus. A Schwinn bicycle ergometer was employed for the exercise task. It was set for a work load of 1SOO kilopond meters per minute, or 245.3 watts. Blood pressure was recorded on a Sears sphygmomanometergraph. Heart rate was assessed continuously on a Hewlett-Packard 77S4A recorder. The subject was prevented from receiving feedback of his actual responses from the measuring equipment. Measures of actual excitation. Systolic blood pressure and heart rate were used as measures of sympathetic arousal. Blood pressure was measured before exercise and 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9 minutes after exercise. The continuous readings of heart rate automatically computed an average over IS beats. To achieve a correspondence of heart rate with the intermittent blood pressure readings, the mean recorded heart rate during the 20 seconds prior to each blood pressure assessment was used. Measure of perceived arousal. The subject was told to conceive of his arousal state in numerical terms, that is, to think of his physiological state before exercise as 0% and his highest level of excitation, that experienced immediately after exercise, as 100% of his excitatory response to exertion. He was instructed to report on his arousal level by stating the percentage of the arousal originally produced by the exercise that was still present. He was permitted to respond in negative percentages if he felt his arousal level to be lower than it was prior to exercise. Determination of time phases for the main experiment. The measures of actual physiological excitation, systolic blood pressure and heart rate, were coded along with the measures of perceived arousal taken 1, 3, S, 7, and 9 minutes after exercise. To determine whether the perceived time of decay differed significantly from the actual decay time for either physiological measure, the time of return to base level for each subject on each measure was recorded. For each physiological response, this was determined as the first minute during which the particular response was at or below the level recorded prior to exercise. For the perceived arousal measure, it was recorded as the first minute during which the subject reported himself to be experiencing 0% arousal. A Hotelling's T2 analysis executed on these data yielded a highly significant overall difference between the three measures, T2 = 82.09, cv = 3.5, F ( 3 , 1 2 ) , p
Enhancement of Experienced Sexual Arousal in Response to Erotic Stimuli Through Misattribution of Unrelated Residual Excitation Joanne R. Cantor, Dolf Zillmann, and Jennings Bryant Institute for Communication Research, Indiana University In a pretest, three phases of recovery from a standard physical exercise were determined. In Phase 1, subjects experienced high levels of physiological excitation and recognized that their arousal was due to exercise. In Phase 2, subjects maintained substantial excitatory residues from the exercise but felt that their arousal had returned to base level. In Phase 3, subjects' excitatory responses had decayed, and they knew they had recovered from the exercise. Subjects in the main experiment were exposed to an erotic film in the first, second, or third recovery phase after performing the exercise. Subjects viewing the film during the second recovery phase reported being more sexually aroused by the film and evaluated the film more positively than subjects in the other two conditions. Counter to the notion of arousal as a simple energizer of all behavior, these findings were interpreted as supporting excitation-transfer theory, which posits that residual excitation enhances emotional responses to unrelated, immediately present stimuli only when the prevailing arousal cannot be attributed to its actual source.
Excitation-transfer theory (Zillmann, 1972) has been developed to account for an intensification of emotional states which are preceded by highly arousing, potentially unrelated experiences. The theory involves the assumptions that (a) critical components of an excitatory response decay relatively slowly and often remain operative after the individual has adjusted cognitively to novel stimulation and (b) the individual characteristically does not distinguish between the portions of his excitation that are due to prior arousal and those that are caused by present stimulation. Since, according to the two-factor theory of emotion (Schachter, 1964), the intensity with which an emotion is felt is a function of the prevailing level of excitation, excitation-transfer theory posits that undecayed excitation from prior stimulation, in general, should produce an over-
intense response to present stimuli. Excitation transfer is not expected to occur in all situations in which undecayed excitation is present, however. In order for an enhancement of a subsequent emotion to be brought about, conditions must favor the misattribution of residual arousal to stimuli which are immediately present. If it is obvious to the individual that the source of his arousal is his prior and not his present activity, transfer should not occur. Studies investigating aggressive behavior following exercise (Zillmann, Johnson, & Day, 1974; Zillmann, Katcher, & Milavsky, 1972) are relevant to this point. In these studies, angered subjects experiencing residual excitation from exercise exhibited increased aggressiveness against their provoker when their opportunity to retaliate was provided with some delay after exercise, but failed to do so when retaliation occurred immediately after exercise. It was speculated that transfer was prevented immediately after exercise because the individual's arousal state involved clear and readily distinguishable cues of the source of the arousal, such as heavy breathing and heart pounding. It was thought that during the time when such cues were present, the individual did not interpret
This research was supported by National Science Foundation Grant GSOC-7205471 to Dolf Zillmann. Joanne Cantor is now at the University of Wisconsin. Jennings Bryant is now at the University of Massachusetts. Requests for reprints should be sent to Dolf Zillmann, Institute for Communication Research, Radio-TV Center, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana 47401.
69
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J. CANTOR, D. ZILLMANN, AND J. BRYANT
his arousal as part of his anger toward his provoker, but that after some delay, when the salient cues of arousal had disappeared, portions of the residual arousal were still present to intensify felt anger. While this explanation accounts for the findings on aggression, the studies did not provide any data concerning subjects' actual perceptions of their arousal state or the length of time in which they felt their arousal was due to exercise. The present study was designed to confirm the assumptions made about the role of cues of the source of an arousal state in inhibiting transfer and to demonstrate that transfer effects occur only if residual arousal from a prior activity is present and the individual has lost track of these residues interoceptively. A pretest was conducted to determine (a) the time course of subjects' physiological recovery from a standard physical-exercise task and (b) the time course of subjects' perceptions of their own recovery. As expected, subjects reported feeling that they had returned to base level before they had actually recovered, and this inaccuracy of interoception permitted the delineation of the following three time phases after exercise: during Phase 1, measured excitation from the prior arousing experience was significantly above base level, and subjects were aware that they were still aroused from the prior stimulation; during Phase 2, measured excitation was still significantly elevated, but subjects reported feeling that they had recovered from their prior excitatory response; during Phase 3, measured excitation had returned to base level, and subjects perceived that they had recovered. In the main experiment, subjects were exposed to emotion-inducing stimuli—portions of an erotic film—during the first, second, or third recovery phase after exercise and reported on their responses to the stimuli. From the reasoning on the role of apparent cues of the source of arousal in excitation transfer, it was expected that responses to the erotic film would be no more intense during Phase 1 than during Phase 3, but that they would be significantly more pronounced during Phase 2 than during the other two phases. As a secondary expectation, it was
speculated that subjects' perceptions that they were still aroused from exercise during Phase 1 might cause an impairment of responses to the erotic film (relative to Phase 3 as the control). The presence of cues linking experienced arousal to exertion could conceivably cause the individual to perceive the arousal produced by the erotic film as part of his residual arousal and thereby to underestimate his true response to the film (cf. Girodo, 1973). If such a process were to occur, it would cause reported responses to the erotic film during Phase 1 to be less intense than those occurring during Phase 3. These predictions contrast with the popular notion that arousal enhances any and every behavior engaged in, purely as a function of the magnitude of the prevailing arousal. According to this notion, reported responses to the erotic film should be highest during Phase 1, intermediate during Phase 2, and lowest during Phase 3. METHOD Pretest Subjects. Fifteen male undergraduates participated in the pretest to fulfill a requirement for an introductory communications course. Design. All subjects performed the same physicalexercise task. Their physiological responses were assessed before exercise and during the 10 minutes immediately following exercise. During the postexercise period, subjects reported their perceptions of their own level of arousal. These data were used to determine the time periods of the critical phases needed for the main experiment. Procedure. Each subject, tested individually, heard tape-recorded instructions describing the study as an investigation of the effects of physical distraction on perception. He was told that he would be exposed to slides for several minutes, and that during the first minute he would pedal an exercise bicycle. At regular intervals after exercising, he was informed, he would be asked to report on his perceptions of his recovery from the exercise. The manner of rating his physiological state was described to him, and it was explained that physiological measurements of his excitation would be taken also. The subject was told that the slide-viewing period would be of a predetermined length regardless of the time course of his physiological responses. Following these instructions, the experimenter took base-level measures of physiological excitation.1 He then started the slide projector, which was set to change slides automatically at 8-second intervals, and l
The third author served as the experimenter.
71
ENHANCEMENT OF EXPERIENCED SEXUAL AROUSAL told the subject to start pedaling the bicycle. At the end of 1 minute, he told the subject to stop pedaling. During the next 10 minutes physiological measures were taken, and the subject was asked, at 1-minute intervals, to report on his arousal state. The series of slides the subject was exposed to throughout the exercise and decay periods consisted of magazine advertisements and pictures of scenery and wildlife. After the 10-minute assessment period, the subject was dismissed. Apparatus. A Schwinn bicycle ergometer was employed for the exercise task. It was set for a work load of 1SOO kilopond meters per minute, or 245.3 watts. Blood pressure was recorded on a Sears sphygmomanometergraph. Heart rate was assessed continuously on a Hewlett-Packard 77S4A recorder. The subject was prevented from receiving feedback of his actual responses from the measuring equipment. Measures of actual excitation. Systolic blood pressure and heart rate were used as measures of sympathetic arousal. Blood pressure was measured before exercise and 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9 minutes after exercise. The continuous readings of heart rate automatically computed an average over IS beats. To achieve a correspondence of heart rate with the intermittent blood pressure readings, the mean recorded heart rate during the 20 seconds prior to each blood pressure assessment was used. Measure of perceived arousal. The subject was told to conceive of his arousal state in numerical terms, that is, to think of his physiological state before exercise as 0% and his highest level of excitation, that experienced immediately after exercise, as 100% of his excitatory response to exertion. He was instructed to report on his arousal level by stating the percentage of the arousal originally produced by the exercise that was still present. He was permitted to respond in negative percentages if he felt his arousal level to be lower than it was prior to exercise. Determination of time phases for the main experiment. The measures of actual physiological excitation, systolic blood pressure and heart rate, were coded along with the measures of perceived arousal taken 1, 3, S, 7, and 9 minutes after exercise. To determine whether the perceived time of decay differed significantly from the actual decay time for either physiological measure, the time of return to base level for each subject on each measure was recorded. For each physiological response, this was determined as the first minute during which the particular response was at or below the level recorded prior to exercise. For the perceived arousal measure, it was recorded as the first minute during which the subject reported himself to be experiencing 0% arousal. A Hotelling's T2 analysis executed on these data yielded a highly significant overall difference between the three measures, T2 = 82.09, cv = 3.5, F ( 3 , 1 2 ) , p
