ROLE OF APPRAISAL IN EMOTION 1 The Role of Appraisal in Emotion

The idea that appraisal plays a role in emotion can be traced back to Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, and Hume, who considered it self-evident that the states variously called passions, affects, or emotions are differentiated by the type of evaluation or judgment a person makes of the eliciting event. This shared conviction was shattered by James' (1884/1968) claim that "that the bodily changes follow directly the perception of the exciting fact, and that our feeling of the same changes as they occur is the emotion". While James meant " feeling " when he wrote "emotion" and he later acknowledged that the nature of the bodily changes was determined by the overwhelming "idea" of the significance of a situation for well-being (e.g., the probability that the bear will kill us or that we will kill it; James, 1894, p. 518), a century of debate and misunderstanding was launched (Ellsworth, 1994). Appraisal did not play much of a role in this debate nor did it in the (biological versions of) basic emotion theories, pioneered by Tomkins (1962) and his disciples Ekman (1972) and Izard (1977), which dominated the emotion domain from the 60s to the 80s. The term appraisal was first used in a technical sense by Arnold (1960) and Lazarus (1966). Detailed development of this notion only occurred in the early 80s (Scherer, 1999; Schorr, 2001) leading to what is now referred to as appraisal theories. Theorists in this tradition propose that most, but not all, emotions are elicited and differentiated by people's evaluation of the significance of events for their well-being (Ellsworth & Scherer, 2003). Currently, many contemporary emotion theories mention appraisal. For instance, Ekman (2004, p. 121-126) postulated "automatic appraisal mechanisms" as triggers of emotion. Barrett (2006) suggested that appraisal can play a role in the generation of core affect and Russell (2003) suggested that appraisal may be one of several independent components of an emotion episode. Yet, not all theories that mention appraisal qualify as appraisal theories. In the present chapter, we propose two related criteria for a theory to count as an appraisal ROLE OF APPRAISAL IN EMOTION 3 theory: (a) appraisal theories consider appraisal as a typical cause of emotion (or of emotional components), and because of this, (b) appraisal is the core determinant of the content of feelings. Before addressing the relation between appraisal and emotion, we consider definitions of the terms emotion and appraisal. This …