Effect of irrational beliefs on emotional arousal.

Abstract

This article studied the relationship between the tendency to hold certain irrational beliefs and the likelihood of becoming emotionally aroused in various types of situations. The first experiment was correlational and found a positive relationship between irrational beliefs and paper-and-pencil measures of interpersonal, examination, and public speaking anxiety. The second experiment focused on one specific irrational belief—the overriding importance of social approval—and investigated the likelihood of emotional arousal occurring among individuals who ascribed to this belief. When asked to imagine themselves in social situations that might be interpreted as involving rejection by others, subjects holding this belief reported feeling significantly more anxious and angry than those who did not. Both the theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. Psychodynamic theorists have long recognized the importance of cognitive and symbolic activities as a determinant of emotional arousal. Although the general psychodynamic paradigm has come under heavy criticism by social learning theorists, such criticism is due less to the emphasis on cognitive factors than to the highly inferential and nonverifiable constructs employed in such attempts to understand human behavior. In fact, numerous social learning theorists (Bandura, 1969; Dollard & Miller, 19SO; Mowrer, 1960; Rotter, 1954; Staats & Staats, 1963) have placed great emphasis on the importance of cognitive processes as a significant determinant of emotional arousal. The acknowledgment by social learning theorists that cognition may mediate emotion does not necessarily negate the possibility that emotional arousal may occur without the existence of any mediating processes. Thus, Bandura (1969) has suggested that emotional behavior in humans may be divided into two types: The overall evidence would seem to indicate that emotional behavior may be controlled by two different stimulus sources. One is the emotional arousal self-generated by symbolic activities in the form of