Misattribution Under Fear-Producing Circumstances: Four Failures to Replicate

Four studies were done in an attempt to test the misattribution explanation of earlier findings showing a connection between aversive arousal and attraction. All four studies indicated that subjects do not attribute arousal to a female confederate when a clear and salient aversive stimulus is present. Instead, subjects correctly assigned causality to the experimental situation. All four studies also failed to reproduce the original attraction finding, i.e., aversive circumstances were not found to enhance attraction for the confederate.