A critique of Sarnoff and Zimbardo's psychoanalytic alternative to a social comparison theory of emotions.

Abstract

Summary Sarnoff and Zimbardo's (8) contention that a psychoanalytically derived conception of emotion has greater utility in predicting affiliative response to emotional arousal than does social comparison theory was disputed. It was argued that the experiment that Sarnoff and Zimbardo conducted to test their theory was inconclusive, since (a) success of experimental manipulations of independent variables, fear and anxiety, was not satisfactorily demonstrated; (b) data relevant to the major dependent variable, affiliative preference, were presented in a form that precludes unambiguous interpretation; (c) social comparison theory as extended to emotions is adequate to account for those experimental findings that are not methodologically or interpretively suspect.