THE PLACE OF APPRAISAL IN EMOTION

The concept of ''appraisal'' has been used in the literature in a dual way: to refer to the content of emotional experience, as well as to t he cognitive antecedents of emotions. I argue that appraisal in the fo rmer sense is what is contained in information in self-reports and tha t this information is of limited use for making inferences on emotion antecedents. This is so because emotional experience may contain appra isals that are part of the emotional response rather than belonging to its causes. They often result from elaboration of the experience afte r it has begun to be generated. Although in most or all emotions some cognitive appraisal processes are essential antecedents, these process es may be much simpler than self-reports (and the semantics of emotion words) may suggest. The appraisal processes that account for emotion elicitation can be assumed to be of a quite elementary kind.