SUBJECTIVELY SALIENT DIMENSIONS OF EMOTIONAL APPRAISAL

Four empirical studies of cognitive appraisals in emotion are reported . In studies 1 and 2 a sinplified version of the repertory grid method was used to determine subjectively salient dimensions of cognitive ap praisal. For a representative sample of 30 emotions, subjects consider ed pairwise comparisons of remembered eliciting events (study 1) or th ose typically conducive to the emotions (study 2) and indicated attrib utes on which the situations differed. The attributes were classified using a category system derived a priori from the theoretical and empi rical literature. Some evidence was obtained for the majority of the 2 5 distinguished potential dimensions of appraisal, and no further dime nsions of appraisal were suggested by the data. The most frequently me ntioned dimensions - accounting together for 85% of the attributes - w ere subjective evaluation, causality/agency/responsibility, focus of e vent, controllability, importance, moral evaluation, stability, social relation positive-negative plus close-distant, self-evaluation, time of event, evaluation of others, intentionality/activity and expectedne ss. A reduced set of 22 dimensions for which some evidence was obtaine d in the grid studies was further examined in studies 3 and 4 using a nominal scale analogue of the rating method. It was found that (a) the appraisal dimensions which emerged as the most salient ones in the gr id studies tended to be those relevant for the greatest number of emot ions, (b) the dimensions were largely statistically independent within the investigated domain of emotions, and (c) they permitted from mode rate to good statistical classification of the situations into the emo tion categories. Potential limitations of the grid method as well as t he issue of the criteria for cognitive appraisals in emotion are discu ssed.