Eliciting Events and Cognitive Appraisals

Next, let’s discuss the components that change with positive emotions and compare these changes to those that typically occur with negative, basic emotions. Keep in mind that the components that change vary according to the specific positive emotion. Whether a physical, external stimulus is required to elicit a positive emotion depends on the emotion. For instance, joy may be caused by hearing about good news and pride by a compliment, both events that are not physical changes in the environment. In comparison, negative emotions like disgust and fear are caused by a change in the external environment. Some emotions, such as awe, may be caused by a physical external stimulus, such as someone that is greater than the self. The major point to remember is that unlike with negative emotions, for a positive emotion to be elicited, a physical stimulus is not required.

In one study (Campos et al., 2013), participants recalled one experience of a positive emotion and wrote about the positive emotion experience. Participants’ descriptions were coded for themes. These themes could be viewed as cognitive appraisals or eliciting events.

In Table 2 above, make note of themes that are unique to each emotion and themes that are present in more than one emotion.  For instance, accomplishment is unique to pride, but confidence to take on new challenges in present in both joy and pride.  If two themes are present in one emotion, what might this suggest?

Below is a summary of themes that were found in more than one emotion.

• Positive valence was a theme in all 8 positive emotions.
• Except for interest, all emotions mentioned an appreciation for present circumstances suggesting positive emotions occur in environments that are safe, comfortable, and rewarding. Also note, this finding suggests that contentment was not necessarily unique from other emotions.
• Both pride and joy resulted in the theme of confidence to take on new challenges
• Both gratitude and love shared the common themes of vulnerability and commitment, which might suggest they are part of the same emotion family.

Other work (Keltner & Haidt, 2003; Shiota et al., 2007)) suggests that awe is defined by two unique cognitive appraisals.  These appraisals are vastness – feeling small in comparison to something larger in one’s environment and accommodation – changing one’s cognitive schemas to account for new information.

More Cognitive Appraisals

In line with eliciting events, cognitive appraisals depend on the emotion that is experienced. For instance, pride is caused by an internal attribution, but awe is caused by an external attribution. (We will discuss cognitive appraisals in more depth later when we discuss Tong’s (2014) study).

In Scherer’s (1997) study, he investigated the cognitive appraisal changes for one positive emotion – joy.  For a review of Scherer’s (1997) study, go to the modern theories section on cognitive appraisals.

Means (see Table 3), collapsed across all world regions, show that participants reported the following appraisals when recalling a joy experience: a little expectedness, pleasantness, goal conduciveness, not unfair, external causation: close others; coping: no action required; moral, and an increase self-esteem.  In Figure 1, we can see that the cognitive appraisal patterns for joy are universal across all world regions (Note: the presence of a circle around a datapoint indicates that the country with the circle showed means significantly different from the mean of the remainder of the sample; circles are not shown in this figure).  Recall that in Scherer (1997) the only emotion to show universality across the eight appraisal dimensions was joy!

In a study by Tong (2014), American and Singaporean undergraduate students recalled and described a personal experience of one randomly selected emotion. Then, participants rated each emotion along the below 13 cognitive appraisals.

Because of the large number of cognitive appraisals, Tong used factor analysis to reduce the 13 appraisals to four broad cognitive appraisal dimensions (similar to the factor analysis completed for the circumplex models). Table 4 defines these four broad appraisal dimensions.

The conceptual maps below show how each of the 13 emotions were rated along the appraisals external influence and achievement (Figure 2) and difficulty and clarity (Figure 3). Based on the ratings, do you think any positive emotions might be the same emotions? Which ones? Keep in mind that there are more cognitive appraisals than those tested in this study, and we are only looking at one emotion component. We would have to investigate physiology, facial expressions, etc., to really determine whether two positive emotions represent the same construct.

An earlier study (Smith & Ellsworth, 1985), similar to Tong, asked participants to recall 15 different positive and negative emotions.  For each emotion, participants rated their cognitive appraisals. The six appraisal dimensions identified in this study are defined in Table 6.

The three figures below show the location of positive and negative emotions for a combination of appraisal patterns.  Based on these figures, please note a few take-home points:

1. Figure 4 – Effort and Pleasantness: This study found that all positive emotions were rated as moderate to highly pleasant, including challenge. This is in contrast to Tong’s (2014) study that found challenge was more unpleasant than pleasant (Table 5 and Figure 3).  Most negative emotions were rated as highly unpleasant and requiring high effort, whereas most positive emotions were rated as pleasant and requiring minimal effort.
2. Figure 5 – Certainty and Attention: All positive emotions were rated as high in attention but varied in their uncertainty. For instance, hope was high attention-high uncertainty, whereas happiness, challenge, and pride were high attention-high certainty.
3. Figure 6 – Situational/Human Control and Self/Other Control: The dimension situational control-human control is unrelated to perceptions of whether the self or other people caused the event. Except for interest, the positive emotions were perceived to be caused by the self. Contrast that with negative emotions – some of which were caused by others (e.g., anger and disgust) while some were caused by the self (e.g., shame and guilt).  People perceived most positive emotions to be under human control but hope and interest were viewed as under situational control, but not really caused by the self or others.