Getting from situations to emotions: appraisal and other routes

Abstract

Comments on the original article by S. Siemer and R. Reisenzein regarding the process of emotion inference. When processing situational information, people can reach emotional conclusions without explicitly registering corresponding appraisals. Does this mean that appraisal cues must be guiding inference in less obvious ways? If one assumes that the emotional meaning of any situation depends on the protagonist's relation to what is happening, then emotion inference can never entirely bypass relational information. However, not all relational information is specifically appraisal-based. Further, actual emotion causation, like emotion inference, can involve explicit or implicit appraisals or even no appraisals at all. Indeed, humans do not first learn to associate emotions with situations by extracting appraisal information.