Strategies Behind the Mundane

Today has been a day of discovery for me. Two things that I have thought about in the past suddenly gained meaning as I was exposed either to a definition for said thoughts or to another person who thinks in the same way. They are pretty run-of-the-mill things, but I find them infinitely interesting.

The first concept is one that we covered in one of my psychology courses, referred to as Misattribution of Arousal. This is a result of the Two-Factor Theory of Emotion, which says that we look at our current state of mind and then draw how we're feeling based on that and our current surroundings. How that leads to this misattribution is when one source causes the physiological arousal and we end up attributing it to something else. The example from class was as follows: If you're feeling hot, have an increased heart rate and shaky hands, you need to know what situation you're in to say for sure how you're feeling. Maybe you just saw an extremely attractive member of the opposite sex and are flustered, or maybe you just got done exercising, or any number of other things. The point here is that such feelings can be attributed to a very wide range of things. This is where it gets tricky.

The reason why this is a problem is that we don't always remember why we got into that state or even when we entered it. So it becomes a spur-of-the-moment thing, searching for a reason why we suddenly became aroused. A study that supports this theory is that of the Scenic Attraction Study (Dutton and Aron, 1974). In this study, participants walked across a very high up, unstable suspension bridge in a park. Having done so, they went to the purposefully-very-attractive tester and rated how nice the park was. However, in the process of finishing up the paperwork, the test administrator secretly slipped the participants her phone number. Then, the idea was to wait to see how many participants called her. However, there was one more variable. Half of the participants got to sit on a bench after crossing the scary suspension bridge, while half went straight to the attractive woman. The results of the test showed that many more participants that went straight from the bridge to the rating process called her, implying that they attributed their arousal to her attractiveness rather than their frightening experience crossing the bridge. This supports the theory that people will misconstrue the cause of their feelings if they happen to misread a situation. This is also a good reason to take your date to a theme park and a scary movie, as they might commit the same error and end up seeing you in a much more positive light. Why I found this so interesting, however, is because it explains the typical media example of the superhero saving the damsel in distress from certain death and her falling hopelessly in love with him as a result. It isn't necessarily the superhero's innate good looks, it may just be the shock of the said damsel's situation being mislabeled as being smitten with her savior.

The second point of the day is an observation. When getting ready for tests, I often listen to music from a game called Fight Night Round 4 (a boxing title by EA Sports). One of my favorite motivational songs is called "Ready For The Fight," and features such phrases as "going for the knockout," "I'm gonna stand my ground and be the best pound-for-pound" and other such phrases conveying one's total control over a situation. I thought I might be the only one who viewed tests in this way, but just today a classmate and friend of mine said that they were going to approach today's statistics test "like Rocky," implying that he was going to shoot for total victory. I find it interesting that people view tests in this manner, almost as if it were a boxing match and the test happened to be another person. In this way, it is interesting how people personify their problems in order to more easily motivate themselves to overcome them.