Patterns of cognitive appraisal in emotion.
1985/01/01 by Craig A. Smith, Phoebe C. Ellsworth · 3,854 citations
Psychology · #Appraisal theory #Arousal #Certainty #Cognition #Cognitive appraisal #Cognitive psychology #Control (management) #Cultural Differences and Values #Developmental psychology #Emotion and Mood Recognition #Emotions and Moral Behavior #Psychology #Situational ethics #Social psychology
paper · doi:10.1037/0022-3514.48.4.813
published in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 48(4), 813-838 (American Psychological Association)
openalex publication_date 1985/01/01 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/06
Abstract
There has long been interest in describing emotional experience in terms of underlying dimensions, but traditionally only two dimensions, pleasantness and arousal, have been reliably found. The reasons for these findings are reviewed, and integrating this review with two recent theories of emotions (Roseman, 1984; Scherer, 1982), we propose eight cognitive appraisal dimensions to differentiate emotional experience. In an investigation of this model, subjects recalled past experiences associated with each of 15 emotions, and rated them along the proposed dimensions. Six orthogonal dimensions, pleasantness, anticipated effort, certainty, attentional activity, self-other responsibility/control, and situational control, were recovered, and the emotions varied systematically along each of these dimensions, indicating a strong relation between the appraisal of one's circumstances and one's emotional state. The patterns of appraisal for the different emotions, and the role of each of the dimensions in differentiating emotional experience are discussed.
Citations
Cited by
- A Threat to Cohesion: Intragroup Affective Polarization in the Context of Intractable Intergroup Conflict
- Beyond Proximity: Representational Isolation and Emotional Response in Climate Politics
- What Makes Online Content Viral?
- Feeling Love and Doing More for Distant Others: Specific Positive Emotions Differentially Affect Prosocial Consumption
- Group-based Hatred in Intractable Conflict in Israel
- An attributional theory of achievement motivation and emotion.
- Soil Survey of Benton County
- Valence is a basic building block of emotional life
- People are increasingly bored in our digital age
- Exploring the Framing Effects of Emotion
- Moral Emotions and Moral Behavior
- Emotion and Decision Making
- Toward an integrative social identity model of collective action: A quantitative research synthesis of three socio-psychological perspectives.
- The Role of Emotions in Marketing
- The limits of appraisal theory for political emotions: Evidence from two U.S. surveys
- How Affect Propagates among LLM Agents: Emergent Emotional Contagion in Crowd Simulation
- Not a Bioweapon, or is it? The Role of Perceived Threats and Media Use in COVID-19 Misperceptions
- Examining the effects of negative performance feedback: the roles of sadness, feedback self-efficacy, and grit
- Logic of Montage
- Anger, Fear, or Sadness: Faculty Members' Emotional Reactions to Collective Pay Disadvantage
- Emotions and the policy process: enthusiasm, anger and fear
- Categorical Emotions or Appraisals - Which Emotion Model Explains Argument Convincingness Better?
- Targeting Social Messages with Emotions of Change: The Call for Optimism
- Emotion and the Framing of Risky Choice
- Emotional Rescue: How Affect Helps Partisans Overcome Collective Action Problems
- Toward a General Framework of Biased Reasoning: Coherence-Based Reasoning
- Guilt, shame, and antiwar action in an authoritarian country at war
- Origins of societal anger: the interplay between perceived personal economic decline and anti-immigration attitudes
- Predicting the future from fear: An RI‐CLPM analysis of risk appraisals and long‐term psychological well‐being
- Conviction Narrative Theory: A theory of choice under radical uncertainty
- Transactional theory and research on emotions and coping
- Why emotions matter: Expectancy violation and affective response mediate the emotional victim effect.
- Effects of Fear and Anger on Perceived Risks of Terrorism
- Anxious and egocentric: How specific emotions influence perspective taking.
- The Role of Emotions in Advertising: A Call to Action
- Boredom begets boredom: An experience sampling study on the impact of teacher boredom on student boredom and motivation
- Multidimensional scaling of emotional responses to music: The effect of musical expertise and of the duration of the excerpts
- Fear and citizen coordination against dictatorship
- Predicting burnout with a hassle-based measure of role demands
- Profiles of attribution for work–family conflict episodes and their relation to negative emotions
- Iceberg of discontent? Emotional responses to welfare state development and political trust
- William James and emotion: Is a century of fame worth a century of misunderstanding?
- When the future self hurts the present self: the psychological effects of augmented reality aging filters on state body image
- Negative Emotion, Positive Effect? An Empirical Study of the Impact of Fear on User Satisfaction in Immersive Virtual Reality Sports
- It's Amazing – But Terrifying!: Unveiling the Combined Effect of Emotional and Cognitive Trust on Organizational Member' Behaviours, AI Performance, and Adoption
- How (why) could this have happened? The influence of construal level on shame versus guilt and related action tendencies
- What music makes us feel: At least 13 dimensions organize subjective experiences associated with music across different cultures
- Do Machines Think Emotionally? Cognitive Appraisal Analysis of Large Language Models
- Do Facial Expressions Predict Ad Sharing? A Large-Scale Observational Study
- Source factors in persuasion: A self-validation approach
- Is shooting for fairness always beneficial? The influence of promotion fairness on employees' cognitive and emotional reactions to promotion failure
- The synergy of neuromarketing and artificial intelligence: A comprehensive literature review in the last decade
- Leadership, affect and emotions: A state of the science review
- How users cognitively appraise and emotionally experience the metaverse: focusing on social virtual reality
- Can Nervous Nelly negotiate? How anxiety causes negotiators to make low first offers, exit early, and earn less profit
- Toward an Understanding of When Executives See Crisis as Opportunity
- Make it Your Own: How Process Valence and Self‐Construal Affect Evaluation of Self‐Made Products
- Emotion-Aware, Emotion-Agnostic, or Automatic: Corpus Creation Strategies to Obtain Cognitive Event Appraisal Annotations
- Wetting the bed at twenty‐one: Embarrassment as a private emotion
- Emotion, cognitive structure, and action tendency
- Visual Interest Prediction with Attentive Multi-Task Transfer Learning
- The Social Ladder: A Rank-Based Perspective on Social Class
- Nature adds color to life: Less boredom in natural versus artificial environments.
- Emotional Responses Shape the Substance of Information Seeking under Conditions of Threat
- Beyond valence: Toward a model of emotion-specific influences on judgement and choice
- Theory convergence in emotion science is timely and realistic
- History of Social Psychology: Insights, Challenges, and Contributions to Theory and Application
- Basic Affective Beliefs
- What emotional reactions can tell us about the nature of others: An appraisal perspective on person perception
- Fear, Social Projection, and Financial Decision Making
- Just Feelings? The Role of Affect in the Formation of Organizational Fairness Judgments
- Organizational change and rigidity during crisis: A review of the paradox
- Beauty as an Emotion: The Exhilarating Prospect of Mastering a Challenging World
- Antecedents of everyday positive emotions: An experience sampling analysis
- The DSM: mindful science or mindless power? A critical review
- The effects of nonconsciously priming emotion concepts on behavior.
- Autonomic nervous system activity in emotion: A review
- Conspiracy theories, election rigging, and support for democratic norms
- The effects of self‐emotion, counterpart emotion, and counterpart behavior on negotiator behavior: a comparison of individual‐level and dyad‐level dynamics
- Observer Bias: An Interaction of Temperament Traits with Biases in the Semantic Perception of Lexical Material
- Compassion, pride, and social intuitions of self-other similarity.
- The Gag Reflex: Disgust Rhetoric and Gay Rights in American Politics
- Boredom at Work: A Neglected Concept
- Affective Signals of Threat Increase Perceived Proximity
- Emotional Intelligence
- Worry at work: How organizational culture promotes anxiety
- A survey of state-of-the-art approaches for emotion recognition in text
- Cognitive Appraisals and Interest in Visual Art: Exploring an Appraisal Theory of Aesthetic Emotions
- The Emotionally Intelligent Decision Maker
- Emotions are emergent processes: they require a dynamic computational architecture. [europepmc]
- Appraisals, emotions and emotion regulation: An integrative approach. [europepmc]
- Appraisal patterns of envy and related emotions. [europepmc]
- Levels of valence. [europepmc]
- Fear and Anger Responses to Local News Coverage of Alcohol-Related Crimes, Accidents, and Injuries: Explaining News Effects on Policy Support Using a Representative Sample of Messages and People. [europepmc]
- A longitudinal study of the effects of coping motives, negative affect and drinking level on drinking problems among college students. [europepmc]
- Fear and anger have opposite effects on risk seeking in the gain frame. [europepmc]
- Arousal, valence, and the uncanny valley: psychophysiological and self-report findings. [europepmc]
- Evoking and Measuring Identification with Narrative Characters - A Linguistic Cues Framework. [europepmc]
- A New Layered Model on Emotional Intelligence. [europepmc]
- Reconsidering the Differences Between Shame and Guilt. [europepmc]
- fNIRS Evidence for Recognizably Different Positive Emotions. [europepmc]
- What the face displays: Mapping 28 emotions conveyed by naturalistic expression. [europepmc]
- Combining Inter-Subject Modeling with a Subject-Based Data Transformation to Improve Affect Recognition from EEG Signals. [europepmc]
- Mapping the Passions: Toward a High-Dimensional Taxonomy of Emotional Experience and Expression. [europepmc]
- Emotionotopy in the human right temporo-parietal cortex. [europepmc]
- Toward an Integrative Psychometric Model of Emotions. [europepmc]
- Investigating the "Flow" Experience: Key Conceptual and Operational Issues. [europepmc]
- The Facial Action Coding System for Characterization of Human Affective Response to Consumer Product-Based Stimuli: A Systematic Review. [europepmc]
- Associations Between Fear of COVID-19, Affective Symptoms and Risk Perception Among Community-Dwelling Older Adults During a COVID-19 Lockdown. [europepmc]
- Understanding Emotions: Origins and Roles of the Amygdala. [europepmc]
- Hope, fear, and consumer behavioral change amid COVID-19: Application of protection motivation theory. [europepmc]
- Emotions in simulation-based education: friends or foes of learning? [europepmc]
- Uncertainty Makes Me Emotional: Uncertainty as an Elicitor and Modulator of Emotional States. [europepmc]
- Intolerance of uncertainty heightens negative emotional states and dampens positive emotional states. [europepmc]
Related