A philosophical approach to Appraisal theory

Abstract

Emotions have been studied by psychology from a primarily physiological approach as a strategy for empirically validating their production. This was a consequence of methodological behaviorism and its influence on psychological research. There was a tendency to dissociate emotions from cognitions and to present them as the results of purely physiological processes. In the 1970s, appraisal theory (Magda B. Arnold) emerged, proposing a different approach that rescues a cognitive dimension to emotions. But is this approach really new? We argue here that although its contributions are scientifically consistent and novel, the context in which they are formulated draws on some elements of the classical philosophy of Aristotle and Saint Thomas Aquinas. We will limit ourselves here to reviewing two papers (Peters and Lazarus) in order to link and weigh a psychological theory with an underlying philosophy.