Introducing
Your new presentation assistant.
Refine, enhance, and tailor your content, source relevant images, and edit visuals quicker than ever before.
Trending searches
Lazarus' Theory of Emotion
509
Lazarus' Theory of Emotion
Experiment
Secondary Appraisal
- Lazurus' theory was based on experiments.
- Participants were shown films that were designed to create emotions.
- E.g. a safety film of accidents at work.
- The films also had music to accompany them, each designed to stimulate a different appraisal of the events.
- One soundtrack indicated that the accidents involved actors so that participants would assume that the accidents weren't real.
- This kind of appraisal is what Lazarus called denial- participants said to themselves it wasn't true and it didn't actually happen.
- So, the participants who appraised the film like this, felt less anxiety than those who saw the accidents that were portrayed to be real.
2. The Second Step
'determines the response'
- This is the way in which the emotion is expressed in behavior.
- For example, feeling anger towards your Parents might be expressed quite differently to anger against a policeman.
- The anger might be the same but the response different.
Lazarus' Cognitive Appraisal Theory (1982)
Criticism
- Richard Lazarus argued that cognitive appraisal always comes before emotion.
- He also said that assessment of the situation is made in regards to the implications on the individuals well-being.
- Lazarus (1982) concluded that 'Cognitive appraisal underlies and is an integrated feature of all emotional states.' But he admits that some can be unaware of it.
- Critics of this view argue that although cognition and emotion often work together, emotions can be generated without cognitive appraisal.
- E.g. Zajonc (1980) examined studies where stimuli, e.g. pictures, were shown to participants for a very short period of time whilst they were doing something else. Later, when asked to choose which was their favourite from a wider range of stimuli, they tended to choose the one that was shown to them. Apparently, participants had no memory of the stimuli that was shown to them and so Zajonc argues that this indicates that emotions can occur without cognitive appraisal.
Primary Appraisal
Lazarus stated in his theory of emotion that:
1. The first step was an
'Assessment of the situation according to it's implication for the person's well being and how it may affect you.'
- This determines the type and intensity of the emotion that will be felt.
- An example would be sadness, a more intense emotion would arise from the loss of a loved one.