Stick with It by Sean D. Young

Author:Sean D. Young
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2017-05-09T16:00:00+00:00

PHYSIOLOGY AND EMOTIONS

You’ve probably heard of people taking dates to horror movies in the hope that the date will get scared and hug them. This tactic might sound ridiculous, but there’s actually some science to back it up.

If people become physiologically aroused, for instance, by watching a scary movie, they sometimes mistake their arousal by the movie as being caused by something else, like being nervous about whether their date is going well. It turns out that downloading and watching Saw III instead of Star Wars: Episode III can make the difference in whether people keep dating.

Some of the strongest research on this topic was done years ago using methods that might not pass the research ethical boards, but bear with me because they did teach us some interesting things about people. For example, one study asked men to look at pictures of “seminude” women while being hooked up to physiological equipment and listening to prerecorded sounds so that the men (incorrectly) thought they were hearing their heartbeats. One group of men heard the heartbeats increasing or decreasing in speed as they viewed the pictures, while another group heard a steady heartbeat speed throughout their viewing of the pictures. The men were then asked to rate the attractiveness of the women in the pictures.

Stop for a second and see if you can get where I’m going with this. . . . Similar to the conventional wisdom that self-esteem shouldn’t be affected by seemingly tiny things like whether a person writes with her left or right hand, there is a belief that attraction is completely subjective and shouldn’t be affected by little, seemingly unrelated things like how fast a sound is pulsing. But that’s not what the study found. The researchers found that men rated the women in the pictures as more attractive if the men had seen them while hearing the (fake) heartbeat increasing or decreasing in speed. This effect didn’t go away after the study ended; it had a lasting effect: researchers interviewed the participants four to five weeks later (disguised as visiting the men for a different reason) and learned that the men still preferred the women they had picked.10 11 This study took place back in the 1960s, and a number of people did not believe the results. More recent studies in the past ten years attempted to retest this phenomenon and found similar results.12 There is even neuroscience research showing that the brain acts differently when people are asked to do something while listening to their own heart rate (even if it’s actually a fake recording).13

In fact, there has been a lot of research showing that people look to their physiological and emotional signs to learn who they are, what to think, and how to act. For example, people look back on their emotional expressions to learn whether they were happy or sad during an event. The idea behind this work is that emotional expressions, like smiling or frowning, can get people to feel emotions even if they aren’t aware they are making those faces.

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