Stanley Schachter

Stanley Schachter (April 15, 1922 – June 7, 1997) was an American social psychologist, who is perhaps best known for his development of the two factor theory of emotion in 1962 along with Jerome E. Singer. In his theory he states that emotions have two ingredients: physiological arousal and a cognitive label. A person's experience of an emotion stems from the mental awareness of the body's physical arousal and the explanation one attaches to this arousal. Schachter also studied and published many works on the subjects of obesity, group dynamics, birth order and smoking. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Schachter as the seventh most cited psychologist of the 20th century. Biographical background Early life and education Schachter was born in Flushing, New York, the son of Anna (Fruchter) and Nathan Schachter. His parents were both Romanian Jews, his father from Vasilău, a small village in Bukovina, and his mother from Rădăuți. As a young man, Schachter initially studied Art history at Yale University. He obtained his bachelor's degree in 1942, and went on to pursue his Master's in Psychology, also at Yale, where he was influenced by Clark Hull. After earning his Master's in 1944, Schachter joined the United States Armed Forces, where he served until 1946. During his two years in the Armed Forces, Schachter obtained the rank of sergeant. He worked at the Biophysics Division of the Aero-Medical Laboratory of Wright Field in Riverside, Ohio, studying the visual problems experienced by pilots in flight. In 1946, after his term in the armed forces, Schachter went to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to work with the German social psychologist Kurt Lewin, in his Research Center for Group Dynamics, studying social issues. Unfortunately, Lewin died in 1947, very shortly after Schachter's arrival in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A senior doctoral student, Leon Festinger, took over as Schachter's supervisor, and the pair became very close lifelong friends. When Festinger moved to the University of Michigan's Institute for Social Research in 1948, Schachter followed. This was where Schachter gained his Ph.D. in 1949, under supervisor Festinger, writing his dissertation on how individuals with differing opinions who were working in small groups were treated by the members of the group whose opinion matched with the majority.