Stanley Schachter

Stanley Schachter (1922-1997) was an American Social Psychologist who, along with Jerome E. Singer, is best known for the development of the two-factor theory of emotion in 1962.

This theory states that emotions are composed of two ingredients: physiological arousal and a cognitive label. This pairing causes an individual's experience of emotion to stem from a mental awareness of the body's physical arousal. So when seeing a poisonous snake, the Schachter-Singer model proposes that to have an emotion requires both physiological arousal (breathing fast, sinking stomach, sweaty palms) and a cognitive explanation for the arousal ("Yikes, that's a poisonous snake!"). During his career he also studied and published many papers about obesity, group dynamics, birth order, and smoking. As of 2002 Schachter was considered the seventh most cited 20th century psychologists.