Anxiety And Misperception

Words: 2005
Pages: 9

Anxiety, the Master of Misperception: The Effects of Social Anxiety on Perceived Attraction
As a result of evolution, humans have developed the ability to decipher and label their physiological arousal (emotions, behaviors, thoughts, etc.) in accordance with the situation that they are in. However, many researchers have demonstrated that humans are not always perfect at correctly labeling their physiological state with the appropriate source. In 1962, Schachter and Singer proposed the two-factor theory of emotion as a way to explain the phenomenon of mislabeling physiological arousal. When a person is placed in a physiologically arousing situation, they will use their knowledge and experience of the context in order label their behavior. If
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Duncan (2015) conducted research to find an effect of fear on attraction and concluded that there was a relationship between both. This suggested that fear was misattributed to attraction, the same results that Dutton and Aron found in 1974. As a continuation of Duncan (2015) and Dutton and Aron (1974), the current study plans to look at the effect of social anxiety on attraction to determine if this type of arousal can be as easily misattributed to attraction as fear. This will be done by having participants answer a series of either difficult or easy math problems with an attractive male present in the room. The explanation of the experiment given will function as a social anxiety producing condition. When students are told to answer math problems on a board in front of their class, they are likely to feel some social anxiety. This experiment hopes to replicate this situation. The function of the male confederate is to introduce an attractive person into the situation. The male will act as a participant to avoid any confounding variables. It is assumed that there will be an interaction between the explanation given and math difficulty on the attractiveness of the male …show more content…
The main effect of explanation given was not statistically significant, F(1, 39) = 0.206, p = 0.652. The explanation given did not influence how the participants rated the confederate’s physical attractiveness. The main effect of math difficulty approached conventional levels of statistical significance, F(1, 39) = 2.092, p = 0.156. The participants rated the confederate’s physical attractiveness higher depending on the difficulty of the problems. The interaction between explanation given and math difficulty on physical attractiveness was statistically significant, F(1, 39) = 4.151, p = 0.048. Participants in explanation one with easy math problems rated the confederate’s physical attractiveness higher (M = 23.4, SD = 2.99) than did participants who were presented with difficult math problems (M = 19.92, SD = 2.78). Participants in explanation two did not demonstrate a noticeable difference on attraction rating between easy or hard math problems (M = 20.91 and 21.5, SD = 3.78 and