Stanley Shachter Influence On Social Psychology

Stanley Schachter was an American psychologist who came from Queens, New York. He was born in the year of 1922 and died June 7, 1997 at age 75. Stanley shared his home with his former wife named Sophia Duckworth and their only son named Elijah. During the years before his family, Stanley went to college for his bachelors and masters at Yale University in the years of 1942-1944. Then transferred to the University of Michigan in the year of 1949 for his PhD, all for social psychology. With all of his many discoveries, Stanley was considered by some to be the father of health psychology. The reasons for such consideration is with his research in social influences and peer pressure, how birth order of siblings affects their intelligence and emotional …show more content…
Before we get into that though, lets first go over what social influence and peer pressure actually means. Social influence is a change in overt behavior caused by real or imagined pressure from others. Then there is peer pressure, which is the influence from members of one’s peer group. With those two being explained it gives a better explanation on what Schachter meant when he said the main factors of these two subjects were the main factors. With obedience people would have the will power to say no but do not, with conformity it shows that people strive to be like one another even when unknowingly doing so, and compliance has that people will only yield to others because they are too weak to think or act on their own. After his theories on social influences and peer pressure he started working on the theories of birth order of siblings affecting their emotional stability and …show more content…
The cognitive appraisal theory says that for us to actually experience an emotion, we must not only feel physiological arousal, but also must mentally interpret that psychological arousal as a specific emotion. For example, the same physiological arousal that you feel can be labeled either in fear in the presence of a snarling bear or lust in the presence of an attractive partner. As an experiment, Stanley and Singer injected college men with a hormone that triggers feelings of arousal, known as epinephrine. The actual volunteers felt little to no emotion at all because they attributed their arousal to the drug, but the clueless participants “caught” the apparent emotion of the other person they encountered in the waiting room that they were told to wait in during their experiment. They became happy if the accomplice was acting euphoric and testy if the accomplice was acting irritated. After their discovery together that a stirred-up state can be experienced as one emotion or another, depending on how we interpret it, has been copied plenty of times all with the same result and all formulating from their original discovery in the first place. The main point they wanted to make was that arousal fuels emotion and then cognition channels