ABSTRACT
Schachter's hypothesis was that arousal and cognitions are both necessary components of an emotion. The arousal, as it were, gives guts to the emotion. The cognition tells us what exactly the guts are being given to. The common research technique has been to show subjects from different cultures series of emotion-expressing facial photographs, and record the amount of cross-cultural agreement. Using this technique agreement is high even when the people in the photographs are from a different cultural and racial group. Cognitive theory is recognizably in a state of infancy, and needs much development in spelling out its predictions and much more precision in specifying its variables. It is not for something called cognitive psychology to embrace motivational and emotional phenomena; rather the area of motivation and emotion has embraced and will continue to embrace cognitive concepts, as and when required, as long as they give rise to testable hypotheses.
