The Emotion Process: Event Appraisal and Component Differentiation

Abstract

Much emotion research has focused on the end result of the emotion process, categorical emotions, as reported by the protagonist or diagnosed by the researcher, with the aim of differentiating these discrete states. In contrast, this review concentrates on the emotion process itself by examining how (a) elicitation, or the appraisal of events, leads to (b) differentiation, in particular, action tendencies accompanied by physiological responses and manifested in facial, vocal, and gestural expressions, before (c) conscious representation or experience of these changes (feeling) and (d) categorizing and labeling these changes according to the semantic profiles of emotion words. The review focuses on empirical, particularly experimental, studies from emotion research and neighboring domains that contribute to a better understanding of the unfolding emotion process and the underlying mechanisms, including the interactions among emotion components. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Psychology Volume 70 is January 4, 2019. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Beyond valence: a meta-analysis of discrete emotions in firm-customer encounters

“…A variety of different theoretical accounts have been used to describe the elicitation of emotions and the processes that are involved in this. As outlined in our definition above, we follow the idea that the construction of emotions starts with a change of core affect which is subsequently interpreted through a cognitive appraisal process (Russell 2003;Scherer and Moors 2019). Following Russell's (2003) seminal work, we define core affect as a non-reflective and always present neurophysiological state which can be described by the dimensions of valence (i.e., positive-negative; pleasure-displeasure) and arousal (i.e., activation-deactivation).…”

Anti‐elite politics and emotional reactions to socio‐economic problems: Experimental evidence on “pocketbook anger” from France, Germany, and the United States

“…This process involves cognitive appraisals along several dimensions (valence, goal relevance, novelty, fairness, agency, and intentionality), physiological arousal and action tendencies. Together these components form a subjectively experienced emotion (Scherer & Moors, 2019). Anger is associated with events appraised as undesirable and caused by others.…”

Are we together or not? The temporal interplay of monitoring, physiological arousal and physiological synchrony during a collaborative exam

“…An emerging body of learning research (e.g., Harley et al 2015;Harley et al 2019) have investigated physiological arousal in connection with the arousal dimension of emotion in the traditional circumplex model (Russell 1980), which reflects how physiologically activating the emotion is (Pekrun 2006). Still, many theories of emotion (see e.g., Scherer and Moors 2019) also acknowledge the role of information processing in evoking the physiological arousal and steering function, in terms of how arousal is appraised as an emotion (Schachter and Singer 1962), especially in the context of collaborative learning. This is to say that, through appraisals and interception, physiological arousal can be linked to cognition as well as emotion (Barrett 2017;Critchley & Garfinkel, 2018).…”