ABSTRACT
This chapter presents a preliminary attempt to integrate social psychologists' basic interest in cognitive and behavioral control processes with our interest in hypnosis as a method and as an independent area of inquiry. It describes briefly their common features of subject selection and formal hypnotic training. All subjects were undergraduates at Stanford University, recruited through the introductory psychology course. Social psychologists' attempted to rule out other alternative explanations of changes in skin temperature by keeping environmental conditions constant and by minimizing overt skeletal responses on the part of the subjects. The experimental investigation of emotion was given considerable impetus by the research of Schachter and Singer who specified the two interacting components of emotional states as physiological arousal and an appropriate cognitive explanation of this arousal. The comparison between unexplained arousal groups and placebo controls reaches statistical significance only in the anger condition, not in the euphoria one.
