How does love feel? Most people describe physiological sensations: “I felt so excited I couldn’t breathe”; “My throat choked up”; “I felt tingling all over.” If you look at those descriptions, couldn’t they also be descriptions of fear, anger, or excitement? Is there a difference between being in love and being on a roller coaster?
Perhaps not. In a famous experiment, Schachter & Singer (1962) gave students a shot of epinephrine (adrenaline) that causes general arousal, including sweaty palms, increased heart rate, increased breathing, and so on. They split the students into four groups: one was told exactly what was happening and what to expect, another was told the wrong set of symptoms to expect (itching, numbness, a slight headache), a third group was told nothing, and a fourth group got an injection of saline solution (saltwater) rather than epinephrine.
Each group was put into a waiting room with a student who was actually part of the study. In half the cases, the confederate acted happy, and in half, angry. The interesting result was that the students in the informed group, when they felt aroused, assumed they were feeling the effects of the epinephrine. However, the uninformed groups tended to believe they were experiencing the same emotion as the other person in the room. They thought they were happy, or they thought they were angry. Schachter & Singer concluded that an emotion happens when there is general physiological arousal for whatever reason and a label is attached to it—and that label might be any emotion. In other words, people should be vulnerable to experiencing love (or another emotion) when they are physiologically aroused for whatever reason (Schachter & Singer, 2001).
Another experiment by Dutton & Aron (1974) found similar results. Male participants were asked to walk across one of two bridges. The first was a very high bridge that hung over a gorge, had low handrails, and swayed in the wind. The second bridge was close to the ground and didn’t sway. As the men crossed the bridge, they were met by an attractive male or female research assistant who asked them to answer a few questions and tell a story based on a picture. The assistant also mentioned that the men could call him or her at home for more information. The result was that those men who met the female on the high bridge, where they were more physiologically aroused by the sense of danger, told stories with more erotic content and were most likely to call the female assistant at home. The men had a physiological response to the danger and interpreted this response as arousal to the attractive research assistant. (Male participants in this study were assumed to be heterosexual. How do you think this assumption could affect the results of the study?)
So, is love just a label we give to sweaty palms? The idea may explain why we tend to associate love and sex so closely; sexual excitement is a state of intense physiological arousal. Certainly arousal of some sort is a necessary component of love. Would you want to be in love with someone who wasn’t the least bit excited when you entered the room? Love, however, is almost certainly more than arousal alone. Perhaps arousal has a stronger connection to initial attraction than to love. Maybe that is why lust is so often confused with love.
However, this being said, it’s also important to point out that the original Schachter & Singer (1962) study has often been challenged and is difficult to replicate. There is very little support for the claim that arousal is a necessary condition for an emotional state, and the role of arousal has been overstated (Reisenzein, 1994).