You Are Walking Down a Deserted Alley Late at Night

Multiple Choice

You are walking down a deserted alley late at night, and you hear a sudden noise to your left. Your sympathetic nervous system prepares your body for fight or flight, and you experience fear. Just before you turn to run, however, you see a cat race away from the trash can he was digging in. "Oh, that was the noise," you think. Instead of experiencing fear, you laugh wildly at what you had imagined was coming after you in the alley. This set of events is best described by which theory of emotion?

A) the common sense theory
B) the James-Lange theory
C) Schachter's cognitive theory
D) the Cannon-Bard theory