Stanley Schacter

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 a large number of 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.