Review
Cognitive approaches to emotions

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Highlights

  • Cognitive approaches explain emotions in ways that enable people to understand their experience of them.

  • Emotions are caused by evaluations of events or people in relation to concerns.

  • Accounts are offered of three representative cognitive theories of emotions: the action-readiness theory, the core-affect theory, and the communicative theory.

  • The communicative theory of emotions explains how psychological illnesses are caused.

  • The communicative theory explains how emotions function in social relations, reasoning, music, and fiction.

Cognitive approaches offer clear links between how emotions are thought about in everyday life and how they are investigated psychologically. Cognitive researchers have focused on how emotions are caused when events or other people affect concerns and on how emotions influence processes such as reasoning, memory, and attention. Three representative cognitive theories of emotion continue to develop productively: the action-readiness theory, the core-affect theory, and the communicative theory. Some principles are common to them and divergences can be resolved by future research. Recent explanations have included how emotions structure social relationships, how they function in psychological illnesses, and how they are central to music and fiction.

Section snippets

How cognitive psychologists approach emotions

The study of emotions has recently expanded in psychology. It has extended, too, into fields that range from history to neuroscience and from literary theory to psychiatry. Intense debates now occur on definitions of emotions, on what the best measurements are, and even on whether emotions are real psychological states. These debates can make the field seem confusing. Cognitive approaches, based on the mind's organization of conscious and unconscious knowledge, offer a clarifying perspective

Action-readiness theory of emotions

The longest standing cognitive theory of emotions that remains under active development is Frijda's action-readiness account 9, 10, 11. Like Ortony, Clore, and Collins's componential theory 12, 13, to which it is comparable, Frijda's theory holds that emotions are built from elements that are not themselves emotions. For the componential theory, these are stimulus–response pairs; for Frijda they are ‘ur-emotions’, states of readiness for certain kinds of action [11], each of which gives

How three cognitive theories of emotion concur and differ

The three theories presented here are not the only ones being developed, but they are representative of cognitive approaches to emotions. They accept that experiential, physiological, and behavioral aspects are typical but not invariable in emotions and that measures of these aspects do not always cohere [15], so they avoid problems of whether any one measure always indicates an emotion. Clarification also occurs by seeing, as shown in Figure 2, how emotion-based states have different time

Evidence for cognitive approaches

In investigating cognitive approaches, Roseman and Evdocas have shown experimentally that appraisals are not just post hoc impressions, but causes of emotions [37]. It has also been found that appraisal rather than the situation determines the emotion; appraisal predicts the intensity of emotions and the same sorts of appraisal yields the same sorts of emotion [38]. The best method of reducing the intensity of a distressing emotion once it has started is reappraisal of events giving rise to it

Emotions and psychological illnesses

Hard-nosed psychiatrists attribute psychological illnesses to defects in the brain; psychoanalysts attribute them to unconscious conflicts; cognitive therapists attribute them to faulty reasoning [48]. A recent development, however, proposes that psychological illnesses are due to emotions experienced more intensely than usual 49, 50; such illnesses are, indeed, emotional disorders. In such a disorder, a cognitive appraisal elicits a basic emotion appropriate to the situation, but excessive in

Concluding remarks

Cognitive theorists propose that emotions are sources of value that originate in cognitions. These cognitions appraise events: real as in everyday life, imagined as in fiction, or abstract as in music. The nature of the emotion that occurs is a matter of controversy. It may derive from an ur-emotion of action readiness or from core affect or it may be one of a small number of basic emotions. A goal of future research is to decide among these possibilities (Box 4). In any event, an emotion can

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