Enhancement of Experienced Sexual Arousal in Response to Erotic Stimuli Through Misattribution of Unrelated Residual Excitation

Transcription

1 Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 1975, Vol. 32, No. 1, Enhancement of Experienced Sexual Arousal in Response to Erotic Stimuli Through Misattribution of Unrelated Residual Excitation Joanne R. Cantor, Dolf Zillmann, and Jennings Bryant Institute for Communication Research, Indiana University In a pretest, three phases of recovery from a standard physical exercise were determined. In Phase 1, subjects experienced high levels of physiological excitation and recognized that their arousal was due to exercise. In Phase 2, subjects maintained substantial excitatory residues from the exercise but felt that their arousal had returned to base level. In Phase 3, subjects' excitatory responses had decayed, and they knew they had recovered from the exercise. Subjects in the main experiment were exposed to an erotic film in the first, second, or third recovery phase after performing the exercise. Subjects viewing the film during the second recovery phase reported being more sexually aroused by the film and evaluated the film more positively than subjects in the other two conditions. Counter to the notion of arousal as a simple energizer of all behavior, these findings were interpreted as supporting excitation-transfer theory, which posits that residual excitation enhances emotional responses to unrelated, immediately present stimuli only when the prevailing arousal cannot be attributed to its actual source. Excitation-transfer theory (Zillmann, 1972) has been developed to account for an intensification of emotional states which are preceded by highly arousing, potentially unrelated experiences. The theory involves the assumptions that (a) critical components of an excitatory response decay relatively slowly and often remain operative after the individual has adjusted cognitively to novel stimulation and (b) the individual characteristically does not distinguish between the portions of his excitation that are due to prior arousal and those that are caused by present stimulation. Since, according to the two-factor theory of emotion (Schachter, 1964), the intensity with which an emotion is felt is a function of the prevailing level of excitation, excitation-transfer theory posits that undecayed excitation from prior stimulation, in general, should produce an over- This research was supported by National Science Foundation Grant GSOC to Dolf Zillmann. Joanne Cantor is now at the University of Wisconsin. Jennings Bryant is now at the University of Massachusetts. Requests for reprints should be sent to Dolf Zillmann, Institute for Communication Research, Radio-TV Center, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana intense response to present stimuli. Excitation transfer is not expected to occur in all situations in which undecayed excitation is present, however. In order for an enhancement of a subsequent emotion to be brought about, conditions must favor the misattribution of residual arousal to stimuli which are immediately present. If it is obvious to the individual that the source of his arousal is his prior and not his present activity, transfer should not occur. Studies investigating aggressive behavior following exercise (Zillmann, Johnson, & Day, 1974; Zillmann, Katcher, & Milavsky, 1972) are relevant to this point. In these studies, angered subjects experiencing residual excitation from exercise exhibited increased aggressiveness against their provoker when their opportunity to retaliate was provided with some delay after exercise, but failed to do so when retaliation occurred immediately after exercise. It was speculated that transfer was prevented immediately after exercise because the individual's arousal state involved clear and readily distinguishable cues of the source of the arousal, such as heavy breathing and heart pounding. It was thought that during the time when such cues were present, the individual did not interpret

2 70 J. CANTOR, D. ZILLMANN, AND J. BRYANT his arousal as part of his anger toward his provoker, but that after some delay, when the salient cues of arousal had disappeared, portions of the residual arousal were still present to intensify felt anger. While this explanation accounts for the findings on aggression, the studies did not provide any data concerning subjects' actual perceptions of their arousal state or the length of time in which they felt their arousal was due to exercise. The present study was designed to confirm the assumptions made about the role of cues of the source of an arousal state in inhibiting transfer and to demonstrate that transfer effects occur only if residual arousal from a prior activity is present and the individual has lost track of these residues interoceptively. A pretest was conducted to determine (a) the time course of subjects' physiological recovery from a standard physical-exercise task and (b) the time course of subjects' perceptions of their own recovery. As expected, subjects reported feeling that they had returned to base level before they had actually recovered, and this inaccuracy of interoception permitted the delineation of the following three time phases after exercise: during Phase 1, measured excitation from the prior arousing experience was significantly above base level, and subjects were aware that they were still aroused from the prior stimulation; during Phase 2, measured excitation was still significantly elevated, but subjects reported feeling that they had recovered from their prior excitatory response; during Phase 3, measured excitation had returned to base level, and subjects perceived that they had recovered. In the main experiment, subjects were exposed to emotion-inducing stimuli portions of an erotic film during the first, second, or third recovery phase after exercise and reported on their responses to the stimuli. From the reasoning on the role of apparent cues of the source of arousal in excitation transfer, it was expected that responses to the erotic film would be no more intense during Phase 1 than during Phase 3, but that they would be significantly more pronounced during Phase 2 than during the other two phases. As a secondary expectation, it was speculated that subjects' perceptions that they were still aroused from exercise during Phase 1 might cause an impairment of responses to the erotic film (relative to Phase 3 as the control). The presence of cues linking experienced arousal to exertion could conceivably cause the individual to perceive the arousal produced by the erotic film as part of his residual arousal and thereby to underestimate his true response to the film (cf. Girodo, 1973). If such a process were to occur, it would cause reported responses to the erotic film during Phase 1 to be less intense than those occurring during Phase 3. These predictions contrast with the popular notion that arousal enhances any and every behavior engaged in, purely as a function of the magnitude of the prevailing arousal. According to this notion, reported responses to the erotic film should be highest during Phase 1, intermediate during Phase 2, and lowest during Phase 3. Pretest METHOD Subjects. Fifteen male undergraduates participated in the pretest to fulfill a requirement for an introductory communications course. Design. All subjects performed the same physicalexercise task. Their physiological responses were assessed before exercise and during the 10 minutes immediately following exercise. During the postexercise period, subjects reported their perceptions of their own level of arousal. These data were used to determine the time periods of the critical phases needed for the main experiment. Procedure. Each subject, tested individually, heard tape-recorded instructions describing the study as an investigation of the effects of physical distraction on perception. He was told that he would be exposed to slides for several minutes, and that during the first minute he would pedal an exercise bicycle. At regular intervals after exercising, he was informed, he would be asked to report on his perceptions of his recovery from the exercise. The manner of rating his physiological state was described to him, and it was explained that physiological measurements of his excitation would be taken also. The subject was told that the slide-viewing period would be of a predetermined length regardless of the time course of his physiological responses. Following these instructions, the experimenter took base-level measures of physiological excitation. 1 He then started the slide projector, which was set to change slides automatically at 8-second intervals, and l The third author served as the experimenter.

3 ENHANCEMENT OF EXPERIENCED SEXUAL AROUSAL 71 told the subject to start pedaling the bicycle. At the end of 1 minute, he told the subject to stop pedaling. During the next 10 minutes physiological measures were taken, and the subject was asked, at 1-minute intervals, to report on his arousal state. The series of slides the subject was exposed to throughout the exercise and decay periods consisted of magazine advertisements and pictures of scenery and wildlife. After the 10-minute assessment period, the subject was dismissed. Apparatus. A Schwinn bicycle ergometer was employed for the exercise task. It was set for a work load of 1SOO kilopond meters per minute, or watts. Blood pressure was recorded on a Sears sphygmomanometergraph. Heart rate was assessed continuously on a Hewlett-Packard 77S4A recorder. The subject was prevented from receiving feedback of his actual responses from the measuring equipment. Measures of actual excitation. Systolic blood pressure and heart rate were used as measures of sympathetic arousal. Blood pressure was measured before exercise and 1, 3, 5, 7, and 9 minutes after exercise. The continuous readings of heart rate automatically computed an average over IS beats. To achieve a correspondence of heart rate with the intermittent blood pressure readings, the mean recorded heart rate during the 20 seconds prior to each blood pressure assessment was used. Measure of perceived arousal. The subject was told to conceive of his arousal state in numerical terms, that is, to think of his physiological state before exercise as 0% and his highest level of excitation, that experienced immediately after exercise, as 100% of his excitatory response to exertion. He was instructed to report on his arousal level by stating the percentage of the arousal originally produced by the exercise that was still present. He was permitted to respond in negative percentages if he felt his arousal level to be lower than it was prior to exercise. Determination of time phases for the main experiment. The measures of actual physiological excitation, systolic blood pressure and heart rate, were coded along with the measures of perceived arousal taken 1, 3, S, 7, and 9 minutes after exercise. To determine whether the perceived time of decay differed significantly from the actual decay time for either physiological measure, the time of return to base level for each subject on each measure was recorded. For each physiological response, this was determined as the first minute during which the particular response was at or below the level recorded prior to exercise. For the perceived arousal measure, it was recorded as the first minute during which the subject reported himself to be experiencing 0% arousal. A Hotelling's T 2 analysis executed on these data yielded a highly significant overall difference between the three measures, T 2 = 82.09, cv = 3.5, F(3,12), p<.00l. A Newman-Keuls test on the means of the three conditions revealed that the mean time of return to base level for perceived arousal (4.47 minutes) was significantly (p <".001) less than TABLE 1 MEANS or MEASURES or PERCEIVED AND ACTUAL RESIDUAL EXCITATION Measure Perceived residual excitation Actual residual excitation Systolic blood pressure Heart rate Before exercise 108" 81" Time of measurement Minutes after exercise 1 S 9 63" " 121" 92» -1» 108" 84» b Note. For the ratings of perceived residual excitation, 0 corresponded to excitation experienced before exercise and 100 corresponded to excitation experienced immediately after exercise. Systolic blood pressure was measured in millimeters of mercury, heart rate in beats per minute. For each measure, means having no letter in their superscripts in common differ significantly at p <.05 by Newman- Keuls test. the mean times of return to base level for systolic blood pressure (8.47) and heart rate (8.33). These results show that the physiological excitation produced by exercise lingered on for a substantial period of time after the subjects felt that they had returned to base level. Because arousal was perceived to be elevated, on the average, for somewhat less than 5 minutes, but actually remained elevated for over 8 minutes, Newman-Keuls analyses were performed on the measures taken 1, 5, and 9 minutes after exercise. As can be seen from Table 1, subjects were significantly more aware of residual arousal 1 minute after exercise than 5 and 9 minutes after exercise. At these latter two times, mean assessments of arousal hovered around zero and did not differ appreciably from each other. Table 1 also shows that heart rate and blood pressure exhibited the required differentiations at these three times. One and S minutes after exercise, excitation was significantly elevated, and 9 minutes after, it was no longer significantly above base level. Although it was not possible to run analyses on physiological states immediately after exercise (the cardiotachometer required at least a half-minute to readjust), it was assumed that the differentiation would be even stronger if the condition of perceived residual arousal were shifted from 1 minute after to immediately after exercise. Main Experiment Subjects. Forty-five male undergraduates participated in the experiment. They were recruited from the same class as the subjects in the pretest and fulfilled the same course requirement by participating. Subjects were randomly assigned to conditions. Design. Subjects were exposed to the same four segments of an erotic film (a) immediately after exercise (residual excitation perceived), (b) 5 minutes after exercise (residual excitation not perceived), or (c) 9 minutes after exercise (no residual excitation) and gave ratings of their own emotional responses to

4 72 J. CANTOR, D. ZILLMANN, AND J. BRYANT the film as well as their evaluations of the film. Ratings of a violent film seen prior to exercise served as a check on possible sampling bias. Procedure. Each subject was tested individually and received instructions on tape. The subject was told that two different experiments were being run in the same session for reasons of convenience. One experiment was said to deal with the subject's reactions to portions of feature films, and the other was said to deal with the effect of physical distraction on perception. The subject was told that in the film experiment, he would see several segments of two commercially distributed films, one violent and one erotic, and that after each segment, he would make two ratings, one dealing with the film segment per se and one reporting on his own response to the segment. The specific rating scales to be used and the manner of marking them were then explained. In addition, the subject was told that he would give summary evaluations of each film after all segments of that film had been seen. At this point, he was told that the erotic film had an "R" rating, and he was given the opportunity to withdraw from the experiment if he did not wish to see such a film. (No subject withdrew.) Next, the subject was told that in the distraction experiment, he would be exposed to slides while seated on an exercise bicycle and that during 1 minute of the slide-viewing period, he would be asked to pedal the bicycle. Finally', it was explained that the distraction experiment would be run in the middle of the session to give the subject a break between the two films. The subject was seated in front of the television monitor and next to 'the bike exerciser and was given a booklet containing the evaluation forms. The experimenter then started the videotape of the four segments of the violent film. As each segment ended, the subject gave it two ratings. The rating scales for the individual segments appeared on the first page of the booklet. After all four segments had been screened and rated, the experimenter told the subject to turn to the next page and fill out the summary evaluations of the film. Ratings of this film served mainly to familiarize subjects with the rating procedures, but additionally, the data from these ratings served as a check for sampling bias and as covariates for the ratings of the erotic film. Next, the subject was told to be seated on the bike exerciser, and the experimenter started the slide projector, which was loaded with 'the slides used in the pretest and set to change slides at the same intervals. All subjects spent 10 minutes sitting on the bike and viewing slides. The experimental manipulations were introduced by varying -the time at which the subject performed the 1-minute exercise. Subjects in the condition of perceived residual excitation performed the exercise during the last minute of slide-viewing, those in the condition of unperceived residual excitation performed it during the fourth minute, and those in the condition of no residual excitation exercised during the first minute. At the end of the 10 minutes, the slide projector was turned off, the subject returned to his seat, and the four segments of the erotic film were shown. The subject rated the film segments following the same procedure he had used to rate the violent film. He was then dismissed. The entire class was debriefed after all the data had been collected. Materials. The segments of the violent film were from The Wild Bunch. The erotic sequences were taken from Naked -under Leather. Each segment lasted 1 minute, and a 15-second pause was recorded between segments. Dependent measures. All film ratings were made on scales ranging from 0 to 100. The scales were numbered at intervals of 10, but subjects were free to intersect the scale at any point. Ratings were recorded to the nearest integer. For each segment of both the violent film and the erotic film, subjects answered the question, "How exciting is this segment of the film?" by marking a scale ranging from "not at all exciting" to "extremely exciting." For each segment of the violent film, the second question read "How physically aroused were you by this segment of the film?" and was answered by marking a scale ranging from "not aroused at all" to "extremely aroused." For each segment of the erotic film, the second question read "How sexually aroused were you by this segment of the film?" and was answered by marking a scale ranging from "not sexually aroused at all" to "extremely sexually aroused." The summary evaluations of both films involved an assessment of the aesthetic quality of each film, on a scale ranging from "very poor" to "excellent," an assessment of how entertaining each film was, on a scale ranging from "not at all enjoyable" to "extremely enjoyable," and an assessment of how emotionally involving each film was, on a scale ranging from "not at all emotionally involving" to "extremely emotionally involving." RESULTS Reported Sexual Arousal in Response to Erotic Film An analysis of variance was executed on the self-ratings of sexual arousal in response to the four segments of the erotic film, with the three conditions of residual excitation as an independent measure factor and the four film segments as a repeated measure factor. The analysis yielded a highly significant main effect of residual excitation, F(2,42) =9.47, p <.001. As can be seen from the "Segments combined" column of Table 2, this effect was due to the fact that subjects in the condition of unperceived residual excitation gave significantly higher ratings of their own sexual arousal than subjects in the other two conditions. Thus, as expected, excitation transfer occurred only in Phase 2. The analysis of variance also yielded a significant main effect

5 ENHANCEMENT OF EXPERIENCED SEXUAL AROUSAL 73 TABLE 2 REPORTED EMOTIONAL RESPONSE TO EROTIC FILM AND EVALUATIONS OP FILM Pretested perception of excitation from exercise Reported sexual arousal in response to film segment First Second Third Fourth Evaluations of film Segments combined FxriHne exciting Aes " Enter- thctic taining Involving Residual excitation perceived Residual excitation not perceived No residual excitation 15" Sl^ 26" 32 s 60 b 40" 37* 52 b 32" 27" 43 b 27» 28 A 52 B 31 A 29 A 53D 38 A 28 A S9 B 35 A 23 A S6 B 3S A 31 A 61B 29 A Note. Comparisons are within columns only. Means having different lowercase superscripts differ significantly at p <.05 by two tailed t test (Cochran's method). Means having different uppercase superscripts differ significantly at t <.05 by Newman-Keuls test. of film segments, jp(l,42) = 12.23, conservatively corrected by the Geisser-Greenhouse method, p <.01, which reflects only the fact that the different segments proved differentially arousing. The interaction between residual excitation and film segments was nonsignificant, ^(2,42) = 2.85, conservatively corrected, p <.10. The first four columns of Table 2 show the means of the self-ratings of sexual response for each of the four segments. As can be seen, the significant betweenconditions differentiation reported for the main effect was observed for every segment of the film. Evaluations of the Erotic Film A mixed-design analysis of variance was also performed on the ratings of excitingness of the four segments of the erotic film. Again, there was a significant main effect of residual excitation, F(2,42) = 8.28, p <.01, reflecting the pattern of means reported for experienced sexual arousal. The "Exciting" column of Table 2 shows the combined means over the four film segments. In addition, the four units of the film were perceived as differentially exciting, F(l,42) = 10.68, conservatively corrected, p <.01, but the interaction between excitation conditions and film units was nonsignificant, F(2,42) = 1.35, conservatively corrected, p >.25. Subsequent comparisons by Cochran's method revealed that for the first segment, the mean of the condition of perceived residual excitation (20) was significantly lower than those of the other two conditions (unperceived residual excitation: 50: no residual excitation: 37), and the latter two means differed significantly from each other. In contrast, the differentiation of excitation conditions for the second, third, and fourth segments paralleled the pattern reflected in the main effect. The summary evaluations of the erotic film yielded the same significant effect of residual excitation and the same pattern of means. The ratings of the aesthetic quality of the film were associated with F(2,42) = 7.39 (p <.01), those of the film's entertainment value with 7?(2,42) = 9.58 (p <.001), and those of the film's emotional involvement potential with F(2, 42) = (p <.001). Table 2 shows the means on these measures. It should be noted that in the first two ratings of experienced sexual arousal and in the evaluations of the film as exciting, aesthetic, and entertaining, the condition of perceived residual excitation (Phase 1) was associated with substantially lower scores than the condition of no residual excitation (Phase 3). Although this difference was significant only with regard to the excitingness of the first film segment, the ratings reflect a tendency in the direction of the secondary effect predicted in the introduction the expectation that the presence of cues linking arousal to exercise might cause subjects to overattribute their arousal to the exercise and underattribute it to the sexual stimuli. Ruling Out Sampling Bias All ratings of the violent film seen prior to the manipulations were subjected to analyses of variance. None of these analyses yielded significant effects of treatment condi-

6 74 J. CANTOR, D. ZILLMANN, AND J. BRYANT tions. The highest F ratio associated with the treatment conditions was 1.72 (df=2,42, p >.10) for ratings of the film's excitingness. All other F ratios were less than unity. Therefore, the differences observed in responses to the erotic film cannot have been due to a failure of random assignment. As a further check on the possibility of missampling, analyses of covariance were performed on the combined ratings of the film segments and the summary evaluations, using the analogous ratings of the violent film as covariates. All statistical decisions were identical to those yielded by the analyses of variance, with all significant F ratios becoming slightly more pronounced. DISCUSSION The findings of the present study bring strong and consistent support for the notion that residual excitation from prior activities enhances subsequent emotional experiences only when this excitation is not clearly linked to its actual source. The high levels of excitation experienced immediately after exercise did not cause an enhancement of responses to the erotic film on any measure. In contrast, the substantially lower excitatory residues existing 5 minutes after exercise markedly enhanced responses to the erotic film on every measure. Subjects experiencing unrecognized residual excitation not only reported their own sexual arousal to be more intense, but also judged the film to be of A higher quality. Although the secondary expectation that the presence of properly attributed residual arousal would impair responses to the erotic film was not confirmed, there was some evidence of a tendency in this direction. Regarding the assessment of awareness of physiological arousal in the pretest, it might be argued that subjects reported perceiving that they had returned to base level sooner than they actually felt they had recovered because they experienced "evaluation apprehension" and wanted to appear to be in good physical condition. This argument does not seem very convincing, however, in light of the fact that subjects knew that their actual physiological responses were being monitored. If anything, evaluation apprehension probably caused subjects to try to be as accurate as possible and made them much more sensitive to their arousal state than they would have been under ordinary conditions. Thus, because artificially high levels of attention to interoceptive cues were fostered by the procedure, the observed duration of the period of awareness of residual arousal seems conservative. Under more natural conditions, in which the individual would not be motivated to attend to interoceptive cues and, additionally, would be distracted by environmental stimuli, subjects would undoubtedly have felt that they had recovered sooner. Be this as it may, the problem of enhancing awareness cannot be solved, since there seems to be no way of probing awareness without enhancing it to some degree. The implications of the unavoidable enhancement of awareness, in the framework of the present investigation, seem to be simply that the period during which apparent cues of arousal will prevent transfer is probably of shorter duration than the time reported in the pretest would suggest. This, of course, would mean that the phase in which transfer effects could occur is potentially longer. It might also be argued that the failure of excitation transfer immediately after exercise was due not to a failure of misattribution but rather to a distracting effect caused by the presence of strong interoceptive cues of arousal. Thus distracted, subjects may have paid little attention to the erotic film. However, whereas heavy breathing and heart pounding might have momentarily preoccupied the subject, it seems that the extremely high attention-getting capacity of the type of stimuli used would quickly override any such distraction effects. The reported findings are clearly contrary to the expectation that residual arousal enhances all ongoing behavior simply as a function of the magnitude of prevailing arousal. They show that residual arousal which is properly recognized as such not only does not intensify ongoing responses, but may actually impair them. The findings demonstrate the crucial role of the misattribution of arousal in the enhancement of emotional responses by residual excitation.

7 ENHANCEMENT OF EXPERIENCED SEXUAL AROUSAL 75 REFERENCES Girodo, M. Film-induced arousal, information search, and the attribution process. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1973, 25, Schachter, S. The interaction of cognitive and physiological determinants of emotional state. In P. H. Leiderman & D. Shapiro (Eds.), Psychobiological approaches to social behavior. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, Zillmann, D. The role of excitation in aggressive behavior. Proceedings of the Seventeenth International Congress of Applied Psychology, Brussels: Editest, Zillmann, D., Johnson, R. C., & Day, K. D. Attribution of apparent arousal and proficiency of recovery from sympathetic activation affecting excitation transfer to aggressive behavior. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1974, 10, Zillmann, D., Katcher, A. H., & Milavsky, B. Excitation transfer from physical exercise to subsequent aggressive behavior. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 1972, 8, (Received March 4, 1974)