Arnold And Lazarus's Appraisal Theory Analysis

Appraisal theory arose from Arnold and Lazarus who emphasized that there must be an appraisal of significant meaning for an emotional arousing stimulus. That is, our current goals along with past experiences determine the significance of an event and our connection to it during appraisal. The significance of the event by appraisal determines the type of emotional response exhibited. Early skeptics to appraisal theory made mention that appraisals do not bring forth awareness and likely occur in automatic fashion. In fact, most evidence in favor of appraisal theory is based off of high level processing such as self-examination and recollection processing. In this paper, the justification for appraisal theory will be presented with the help of empirical evidence. …show more content…
They conducted an experiment where they had study participants relate to a central character. The central character performed badly in a course which carried importance for one scenario. The character appraised his situation after. He blamed the useless teaching aids by other-accountability. He blamed himself, arguing that he made a lot of mistakes by self-accountability. He worried that there was a large chance he would finish with a poor academic record through low emotion-focused coping potential. He believed that it would be impossible to succeed in his chosen academic path through low future expectancy. They determined that the predicted effects reported by participants on emotional states were the same as the appraisal manipulations. For example, guilt was more common in self accountability than other accountability, while anger was more common in other accountability than self-accountability. These results conclude that emotions can be altered by manipulation of the appraisals, suggesting that appraisals are in fact an important factor for emotional