As cognitive psychology established itself in the 1970s, it became increasingly apparent that it was a “cold” approach to cognition, and doubts began to arise as to whether or not it could provide the machinery necessary to account for affect and emotion. In 1981, Donald Norman identified the topic of emotion as one of twelve major challenges to cognitive science (Norman, 1981). It was at about this time that the three authors of this volume decided to collaborate in an attempt to explore the extent to which cognitive psychology could provide a viable foundation for the analysis of emotions. Certainly, it was no problem for cognitive psychology, with the help of schema theory, to explain such facts as that the same thing can be perceived from different perspectives. This was already encouraging, because the capacity to view a situation from different perspectives struck us as lying at the heart of the fact that different people often experience different emotions in response to the same objective event.

Many emotion theorists have argued that cognitive appraisal is central to emotion, yet no one has been able to say anything much more detailed than that. This book is an attempt to give at least the outlines of an account of how such appraisals are made. In it we present many detailed observations about specific emotions, their organization, and the specific cognitive processes involved in their elicitation, but we would be satisfied if this effort succeeded in demonstrating only that a systematic and comprehensive account of the cognitive antecedents of the emotions is possible.