Excitation Transfer

Excitation transfer is the phenomenon in which residual physiological arousal left over from one emotionally stimulating event carries forward and intensifies a person's emotional reaction to an entirely separate, subsequent event, even one unrelated to the first, because the bodily arousal produced by the earlier event, driven by activation of the sympathetic nervous system, dissipates more slowly than a person's conscious interpretation of what caused that arousal in the first place. The communication researcher Dolf Zillmann developed excitation transfer theory in 1971, building on the earlier two-factor theory of emotion proposed by Stanley Schachter in 1964, which held that an emotional experience results from combining a state of physiological arousal with whatever cognitive label a person applies to explain that arousal in the moment. Under excitation transfer theory, if a person is still physiologically aroused from an earlier event, such as a stressful commute or a frightening scene in a film, by the time a second, unrelated arousing event occurs, such as an argument or a romantic encounter, some portion of the lingering arousal from the first event gets misattributed to the second, intensifying whatever emotional response, whether anger, fear, amusement, or attraction, the second event produces. Zillmann applied the theory prominently to research on media violence and aggression, proposing that lingering arousal from watching violent or exciting media content can transfer into and amplify a person's aggressive response to an unrelated provocation encountered shortly afterward.