Handbook of the History of Social Psychology by Kruglanski Arie W.;Stroebe Wolfgang;

Author:Kruglanski, Arie W.;Stroebe, Wolfgang;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis Group
Published: 2012-08-15T00:00:00+00:00

Appraisals

Students of emotion usually have little to say about attributions, and prefer to use the concept of “appraisals”—evaluations of the occurrences in which emotions arise. The idea that people’s emotions are determined by the meaning they assign to the crucial event—their appraisals of it—has a very long history dating back at least to Aristotle, but textbooks on emotion commonly agree that Arnold’s (e.g., 1960) pioneering writings did much to spur the present-day usage of the term “appraisal” (also see Schorr, 2001). For Arnold, an emotion basically is the felt tendency toward some object arising from the conscious or unconscious appraisal of this object as suitable or unsuitable to the self. This line of thought didn’t attract much interest in social psychology at the time Arnold first advanced her ideas, at least partly because of the popularity of Schachter’s (Schachter & Singer, 1962) two-factor theory of emotion. Where Arnold had spoken of externally directed meanings, Schachter’s model held that interpretations of one’s internal physiological arousal shape the specific emotional states. Nonetheless, rapidly mounting criticisms of the Schachter formulation, together with the negative findings in experimental studies (see Schorr, 2001, p. 25), brought increased attention to appraisal theorizing more in line with Arnold’s views.

Close examination of appraisal theorizing shows that the writers in this camp don’t entirely agree as to what are the exact features of anger-arousing appraisals (see Berkowitz & Harmon-Jones, 2004). But by and large, they typically hold that anger results when an external agent has deliberately and wrongly impeded goal attainment.

Yet with all of the evidence researchers have obtained in accord with appraisal theorizing, some important ambiguities still confront this type of analysis, as Berkowitz and Harmon-Jones (2004) pointed out. For one thing, a good number of studies have now demonstrated that people become angry at times after experiencing a negative event even when they don’t regard this occurrence as improper (see Berkowitz & Harmon-Jones, 2004, pp. 111–113), suggesting that in these instances at least, it is the unpleasant feeling produced by the aversive incident that generates the anger. Berkowitz and Harmon-Jones also pointed out that appraisal/attributional formulations have little to say as to why facial expressions and bodily movements associated with the anger/aggression syndrome frequently give rise to angry feelings independently of interpretations of the surrounding situation (Ekman, 1993; Laird & Bresler, 1992), indicating still another way in which attribution conceptions are incomplete and do not form a comprehensive analysis of emotion arousal.

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