This being another spin-off from reading the book by Anil Seth at reference 1, which I am now getting through. More than half way round on the first lap.
The spin-off being an experiment, described at reference 2 and conducted near fifty years ago, was designed to test whether people were more likely to become sexually aroused when they were emotionally aroused, in this case frightened, for some other reason. A positive result would suggest that there is more to sexual arousal than basic instinct. The technical term for this seems to be ‘misattribution of arousal’, as explained at reference 4.
The paper describes three related experiments rather than just one. These are summarised in the figure below. For all the experiments, the subjects, the people being aroused, were young men. The interviewers were a mix of men and (attractive) women. The collaborators were a mix of men and women. All the experiments appeared to depend, at least to some extent, on the subjects not knowing what the experiments were really about. There was a degree of dishonesty involved – which may not be permitted these days, even if it is still thought to work.
The first experiment involved two bridges over the Capilano Gorge near Vancouver, for which see reference 3. One, snapped above, was long, high, unsteady and scary, the other (the control) was a much more sober and solid timber affair. As far as I can make out, the interviews were carried out on the bridges – which in the case of the scary bridge seems a bit much. Maybe I have read it wrong. Half the interviewers were women, half were men. Arousal was tested in two ways: first by means of a single picture version of the Thematic Apperception Test (see below) and second by inviting subjects to phone the interviewer afterwards if they had any queries. With phoning being taken as a proxy for arousal in the case of the female interviewers.
The two bridges may well have attracted rather different kinds of visitors, different in ways that were relevant, and the second experiment, intended to correct for this, used just the scary bridge and just female interviewers. One set of subjects was interviewed on the bridge, the other after they had got off the bridge and cooled off. Otherwise as experiment 1.
The problem here was to be sure that the interviewers behaved in exactly the same way to the two groups of subjects and that the subjects responded in the same way. Was there, for example, a positive response to a ‘lady in distress’?
So the third experiment was carried out in more controlled conditions of the laboratory and tested the anxiety response of subjects to the prospect of an electric shock. A collaborator, most of these being attractive women, was to be shocked at the same time.
The wording used suggests that the experiment was all about anticipation and that no shocks were actually administered – which would make secrecy important – and possibly a bit implausible.
Thematic Apperception Test
I had some trouble with this test. Wikipedia is on the case at reference 5 and there is plenty of material out on the Internet, but the test itself remains expensive and does not appear to have leaked out in its near century of existence.
I can buy the book – reference 6 – from Abebooks or eBay for £50 or more. I can subscribe to Scribd and get an electronic copy that way. Scribd being a respectable looking archive from California offering a thirty-day free trial, after which it is $10 a month or so. Various other sites offer pdfs, but they all have rather odd-looking addresses and I don’t care to use them. Plenty of papers about the test available for free, but not the test itself. Which, in any event, if still used has probably moved on a bit in the course of the intervening years.
What is clear enough, is that the test is based on offering the subject a sequence of picture cards and asking them to write a short story about each. The pictures are deliberately ambiguous, leaving subjects plenty of room to interpret them in their own fashion, after their own tastes and predilections. Different sets of pictures – perhaps ten pictures each - were used for children and for adults, for men and women.
The experimenter then derives scores from the stories. I suppose it might be thought of as a more elaborate version of the Rorschach ink blot test. In the present case, just one card is used, probably quite enough if you are perched rather high up, on a bridge which is moving about with the wind.
Bing turns up a selection of the pictures used for the test on the key ‘TAT Item 3GF’, with a likely one included above. I can’t get proper corroboration, but it fits the description offered in the paper and any sexual content is fairly muted.
And a bit after that, I turned up what appears to be a complete set of pictures, albeit unlabelled, via Pinterest, at reference 8. A couple of these are included below.
Don’t know what I would have found to say about this one. Can’t make it out at all.
The results
Statistical arguments aside, the first experiment was clear enough. The subjects were more sexually aroused on the scary bridge with female interviewers than otherwise.
The second experiment confirmed the results of the first, thus dealing with the different subject populations objection.
The third experiment confirmed the results of the first when using the anxiety about a shock to come rather than fear arising from actually being on a scary bridge.
Other work on feelings and emotions
A subject which has occupied many people over many years, with its modern treatment perhaps being kicked off by Darwin’s 1872 book on the expression of emotion in man and animals. A subject which takes in rather physical feelings like pain, through the more or less universal disgust – thought by many to have originated with learning to avoid eating bad things - through to the rather social emotions like shame.
As explained below, to be revisited.
Conclusions
I am no expert on this sort of thing, but this experiment, interesting though the results are, strikes me as being rather weak by the standards of today. However, for the present purposes, let us suppose that emotions aroused for some other reason can be transformed into sexual arousal, sexual attraction. So what?
One story, which sounds rather hydraulic and Freudian, would be that a store of negative arousal energy is only too happy to be diverted to positive sexual arousal.
But then I remember seeing a film, many years ago now, in which it was claimed that all the arousal consequent on going on a busy political demonstration could easily be diverted in the same way. In which case, the stored-up arousal does not need to be negative.
I also remember going for a ride on a tethered balloon which was set up in what gmaps calls Vauxhall Pleasure Gardens, not far from the railway station. Being a sufferer from vertigo I got a bit uncomfortable, discomfort which transformed into a fit of talking as we started going down. Something of the same sort happened when I had to chicken out of walk which traversed a long steep slope above a burn, quite possibly on the path which leads south and east from the Glen Nevis Inn, a little to the south east of Fort William and to the north west of Ben Nevis. The start of which path is snapped above. In both cases, I was perfectly safe – but in both cases I also felt very unsafe and uncomfortable. Perhaps if I been single and travelling with an unattached and attractive young lady things might have turned out differently.
From where I associated to an anecdote from a politician, a good public speaker, who explained that a bit of stage fright was good, it got the adrenalin going, made for a better performance. He might have been the same chap who made a habit of eating a green apple, while he waited in the wings, to get his mouth and jaws warmed up for action. And then to one about ladies’ college basketball in the US, where the ladies go in for various forms of group shouts and hugs to get themselves hyped up for the next round. Which rather takes me back to the hydraulics I started with.
That sort of thing aside, the Seth take was that: ‘This study, conducted more than forty years ago, shows inevitable methodological weaknesses when compared to today’s more rigorous though still imperfect standards. Not to mention the dubious ethics. But it still vividly illustrates the view that emotional experiences depend on how physiological changes are evaluated by higher level cognitive processes’. Very much of a piece with his line that (the contents of) subjective experience is a marriage of stuff – in the case of emotions and feelings, mostly interoceptive stuff – coming in at the bottom married to predictions coming down from the top. That emotions are not that different, as far as that is concerned, as seeing a red bench seat in a restaurant. Both are confections of the brains’ generative processes, and neither just pops off an assembly line of feed forward processes. A line which he contrasts with the appraisal theory introduced at reference 9.
I am rather taken with the Seth line, but I don’t yet quite see my way to blending it in with the hydraulics, or with the widely used two-dimensional view of emotions, with valence running from minus one to plus one and arousal running from zero to one. Nor do I see why his line is so very different from appraisal, at least as described at reference 9.
Perhaps time to take another look at reference 10, for another view. A view which supposes feelings and emotions to be old, not to say ancient, in evolutionary terms, largely sub-cortical and shared to some considerable extent with other mammals.
With the snap above having been put together about the time of the first look, back in the summer of this year.
Work in progress.
PS: I thought at the time that it was a pity to have missed the view I thought there might have been from the top. A view of the lochan which might well have been quite something, to judge from the snap above. The pin marks the chicken.
References
Reference 1: Being You: A New Science of Consciousness – Anil Seth – 2021.
Reference 2: Some evidence for heightened sexual attraction under conditions of high anxiety – Dutton, D.G.; Aaron, A. P. – 1974.
Reference 3: https://www.capbridge.com/. One of the bridges in question, also snapped at the head of the post. Looks like the handrails are now rather higher than Dutton & Aaron suggested back in 1974.
Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Misattribution_of_arousal. The story according to Wikipedia.
Reference 5: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thematic_apperception_test.
Reference 6: Thematic apperception test – Murray, H. A. – 1943.
Reference 7: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribd.
Reference 9: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appraisal_theory.
Reference 10: Affective neuroscience: The foundations of human and animal emotions – Panksepp, J – 1998.
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