Having now dealt with the background issues, we move to our discussion of the distinct emotion types. We start by discussing the three main groups of emotions that involve reactions to events relative to one's own goals. The emotions in one of these groups result from considering the prospect of certain events occurring. These Prospect-based emotions will be discussed in Chapter 6. In this chapter we shall examine the other two groups of Event-based emotions, in which people's emotional reactions to events are more or less independent of their prior expectations. One of the groups that we shall discuss pertains to the fortunes of others and the reactions that one has to them. But first, we shall discuss what we call the “Well-being” emotions, with “joy” and “distress” being representative terms that refer to them. In distinguishing Well-being emotions from Prospect-based emotions, we do not intend to suggest that the degree to which events are unexpected is irrelevant for the Well-being emotions. Unexpectedness influences the intensity of all emotions. However, the Well-being emotions result from focusing attention on the events themselves rather than on events as tempered by the prospect of their occurring. As suggested in Chapter 2, these emotions are essentially “pure” cases of being pleased or displeased.

The Well-being Emotions

The internal structure of the Well-being emotions is quite simple.

In the last chapter, we introduced the variables of desirability, praiseworthiness, and appealingness as central variables, each of which is uniquely associated with a class of emotions, namely, Event-based emotions, Attribution emotions, and Attraction emotions, respectively. There are, however, a number of other factors that affect the intensity of emotions, and it is these that constitute the focus of this chapter. Some of these factors can influence the intensity of all three classes of emotions; these we refer to as “global variables.” Others, that we call “local variables,” have relatively local effects on emotions in particular groups. In other words, they are variables that are influential for some emotions, but not for others.

When one considers the multitude of factors that obviously can affect the intensity of emotions in one way or another, at one time or another, the total number of intensity-affecting variables that we identify might seem to be surprisingly small. In order to keep our analysis of intensity within manageable bounds, we have adopted a condition that all proposed intensity variables must satisfy. Specifically, for something to be a local or global intensity variable it must be capable of affecting intensity independently. The purpose of this requirement is to exclude from the class of intensity variables any factor that appears to have its effect only by virtue of the fact that it modulates the effect of another intensity variable.

One of the most salient aspects of the experience of emotions is that they vary a great deal in intensity both within and between people. This means that a theory of emotion must address the question of what determines intensity. Our general view is that the intensity of emotions is influenced by a number of variables, all of which are present in the construal of the situation that gives rise to the emotion in the first place. Thus, in order to address the question of intensity, we first need to consider the mechanism whereby emotion-inducing stimuli are appraised. This will provide us with the background we need to properly approach the intensity question. In the first part of this chapter we discuss the macrostructure of the knowledge representation system that we assume in order to deal with the appraisal issue. This we call the “appraisal structure.” In the second part, we use this system to show how the three central intensity variables of the theory can be explained. These variables are desirability, praiseworthiness, and appealingness, and they correspond to the three foci of valenced reactions, namely, events, agents, and objects.

The Appraisal Structure

Most of the things that people do are motivated. People rarely engage in random actions devoid of goals and purposes. In some sense, therefore, people must have a structure of goals, interests, and beliefs that underlie their behavior.

We often experience emotions in response to expected or suspected events (e.g., fear), and in response to the confirmation or disconfirmation of such events (e.g., relief). Emotions resulting from the consideration of such prospects and their confirmation or disconfirmation comprise the group that we call the “Prospect-based” emotions. In many cases the prospect of an event involves a conscious expectation that it will occur in the future, although, as we shall see shortly, the fact that it appears to be possible for there to be experiences of what might be called “retrospective” fear and relief suggests that this need not always be so. In this chapter we discuss these emotions and a number of related issues.

The Prospect-based Emotions

The Prospect-based emotions are all characterized as reactions to (i.e., being pleased or displeased about) the prospect of an event, or to the confirmation or disconfirmation of the prospect of an event. In those cases involving the confirmation or disconfirmation of the prospect of an event, the most typical cases are ones in which the event has already occurred (or failed to occur) but in which the prospect of the event had earlier been entertained. However, a person can also react to the prospect of an event counterfactually, by thinking about or imagining what it would have been like had the contemplated event transpired.

The last two chapters dealt with emotions that result from reactions to desirable or undesirable events. However, there are also important qualitative differences among emotions that depend on how we believe salient events to have come about. When we consider this question, we focus on an agent whom we take to have been instrumental in the event, rather than on the event itself, although, as we shall see in the section on Compound emotions in this chapter, sometimes emotions result from focusing on both simultaneously. Just as the central variable for the Event-based emotions is the desirability of the event computed in terms of its goal relevance, so in the case of the Attribution emotions the central variable is praiseworthiness (which, in its technical sense, we take as including blameworthiness) computed in terms of the standards that are invoked in evaluating the agent's action. From an adaptive standpoint, focusing on an agent's actions may be important because, particularly in the case of undesirable events, it raises the possibility of controlling and being prepared for similar events in the future.

The Attribution Emotions

The situations in which people find themselves or in which they find others are frequently viewed as resulting from actions of one sort or another. Responsibility for these actions is often attributed to an agent. Thus, the Agent-based emotions are Attribution-of-responsibility or, simply, the Attribution emotions.

Any theory of emotion, whatever its focus, is likely to be bounded in the sense that there are aspects of the problem that it does not address and is not intended to address. Certainly, this is the case with the theory that we have proposed. We have chosen to focus on the cognitive antecedents of emotions because we think they play a crucial causal role in the experience of emotion. This focus has led us to concentrate on issues relating to the cognition–emotion interface while neglecting a host of other critically important questions. For example, physiology is essential for emotional experience but we have ignored it because it is not relevant to the question of the role that cognition plays in the elicitation of emotions. Nor have we taken a position on the role of facial expression in emotions. Such issues, while certainly important, simply are not ones that we have chosen to address. In this final chapter, we discuss some of the implications of the view of emotion that we have proposed with the goal of trying to show how and where we think they might be relevant to other issues. At the same time, this will give us an opportunity to identify some of the weaknesses in our approach that we ourselves recognize. This in no way, of course, precludes the possibility that there are other weaknesses that we have not recognized.

Emotions have many facets. They involve feelings and experience, they involve physiology and behavior, and they involve cognitions and conceptualizations. There are important questions that can be asked about the expression of emotions, especially through the face, and the language of emotion constitutes an interesting research domain in its own right. In this book we are primarily interested in the contribution that cognition makes to emotion. The most general issue we shall address concerns the question of emotional differentiation–the question of what distinguishes one emotion from another–and our approach will be concerned more or less exclusively with trying to characterize the differences between emotions in terms of the different kinds of cognitions we take to be responsible for them. Taking the perspective of empirical psychology and cognitive science, we start with the assumption that emotions arise as a result of the way in which the situations that initiate them are construed by the experiencer. Our general plan is to try to impose some structure on the limitless number of possible emotion-eliciting situations. This is primarily an undertaking in theoretical psychology, although our proposals are intended to be consistent with existing data, as well as making their own empirically testable predictions. What we are trying to do, therefore, is to specify the “psychological” structure of emotions in terms of personal and interpersonal situation descriptions. Given these goals, we make no attempt to review the massive literature on the diverse aspects of the psychology of emotion.

Having offered a fairly detailed analysis of the different emotions that arise when people react to events and to the actions of agents, we are left with the final major group of emotions, those resulting from reacting to objects or aspects of objects. While the structure of this group is quite simple–there being only one positive and one negative emotion type–in reality, these emotions are among the most complex of human reactions. The Attraction emotions are rooted in evaluations of appealingness, which in turn are based on attitudes. In this context, the notion of an attitude has to be treated sufficiently broadly to include tastes as well.

The Attraction Emotions

The Attraction emotions are momentary reactions of liking and disliking, and as such, they are among the most salient experiences we have. At the same time, they appear to be more immediate, more spontaneous, and less affected by accessible cognitive processes than almost all of the other emotions. The foundations upon which they are built–attitudes–do not all readily lend themselves to detailed analysis, although it is possible to identify some factors that affect them. The other emotions we have discussed are cognitively differentiated forms of more basic and undifferentiated affective reactions. They achieve their distinctiveness by virtue of these cognitive constraints. Thus, the Prospect-based emotions are reactions to the prospect of events, the Fortunes-of-others emotions are concerned with people's reactions to events as they affect other people, and so on.

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.

In discussing the merits and dangers of using linguistic evidence, the last chapter introduced the notion of an emotion type. An emotion type is a distinct kind of emotion that can be realized in a variety of recognizably related forms. The example we gave was of the emotion type, fear, which can be manifested in varying degrees of intensity (marked in English by words such as “concern,” “fright,” “petrified,” and so on), and for which there can be various subtle shifts in emphasis (for example, an emphasis on a particular kind of associated behavior is captured by the word “cowering,” and an emphasis on the object of fear as being psychological rather than physical is captured by the word “anxiety”). This notion of an emotion type is central to the theory. In order to provide a coherent account of the emotions, it is essential to reduce somehow the infinitude of phenomenally possible emotions to manageable proportions. We do this by focusing on the distinct emotion types rather than on the multitude of discriminable emotional states. The question that we then have to address is: What are the distinct emotion types and how are they related to one another?

It seems to us that the distinct emotion types cannot be arranged informatively into any single space of reasonably low dimensionality. Rather, we suspect that the emotions come in groups for which the intragroup structure is quite simple even though the intergroup structure is not (Fillenbaum & Rapaport, 1971).