Arousal Can Shape Emotions and Decisions

Psychological arousal can shape how people interpret their feelings, emotions, and choices. When arousal feels vague and has no clear cause, people may explain it using the situation around them. Research by Stanley Schachter and Jerome Singer helped show that this kind of misreading can change behavior.

We may think that we know how and why we feel a certain way at any given moment. However, mental states are a product of both internal dispositions and external situations that we are not directly aware, which? under certain circumstances?creates inconsistencies between perceptual expectations and reality.

For example, while hiking an indi...