The Feeling Body: Affective Science Meets the Enactive Mind

4. Reappraising Appraisal

4.1 Introduction I now leave the debate around basic emotions and turn to the so-called cognitive approach in affective science and its central notion, appraisal. In particular, in this chapter I focus on the relationship between this notion and what are usually seen as the bodily aspects or components of emotion (e.g., autonomic arousal, expression, action tendencies). As we shall see, in psychology, appraisal has typically been characterized as a factor or component of emotion neatly distinct from these bodily aspects. In other words, appraisal has been characterized as a disembodied cognitive phenomenon. At the same time, the bodily aspects of emotion have been relegated to the role of noncognitive “responses,” extrinsic to the process of appraising. The enactive approach entails a very different conceptualization of appraisal. As we saw in chapter 1, the enactive approach characterizes cognition at its most basic level as a process of sense making enacted by the situated organism as it brings forth its own world of meaning. In this chapter, we shall see that this notion of cognition has implications for the notion of appraisal and its relationship to the body; specifically it implies that appraisal is not neatly distinct from the bodily aspects of emotion but in fact embodied. Before outlining this idea, I trace the history of the notion of appraisal in psychology, showing how the cognitive approach to emotion became progressively uninterested in the body in the 1960s and 1970s. At the time, the body was seen, at best, as contributing to emotion merely in the form of an undifferentiated pattern of physiological arousal that needed to be interpreted by cognition to give rise to specific emotions. Experimental research was primarily interested in the effects on emotion of manipulating 4 Reappraising Appraisal 84 Chapter 4 cognition, with little or no interest in the body (for instance, in its possible autonomic differentiation or in its possible influence on appraisal itself). This attitude changed in the 1980s, and cognitive emotion theorists today see the body as an important and differentiated component of emotion. In addition, they acknowledge that the body can affect appraisal. Even so, however, they still view appraisal as clearly distinct from the body. Even in complex interactive frameworks such as the component process model discussed earlier, appraisal remains a disembodied, “wholly heady” cognitive phenomenon whose function is to evaluate objects and events and steer the body accordingly. Next I point out that some recent neuroscientific accounts have started to challenge this framework, arguing that cognition and emotion overlap widely at the brain level. These arguments undermine the view that appraisal can be neatly separated from the rest of emotion as its cognitive component (or from emotion altogether, when it is seen as its cognitive antecedent). Finally, I turn to the enactive approach, to its notion of cognition as sense making, and what it implies for the notion of appraisal. After showing in which sense, from an enactive perspective, appraisal is not disembodied but enacted by the living organism, I turn to the phenomenology of appraising (rarely discussed in affective science) and argue that, at the level of lived experience, it is not appropriate either to separate appraisal from the rest of emotion, including its bodily feelings. 4.2 Beginnings The notion of appraisal was introduced in modern psychology by Magda Arnold (1960a), largely as a reaction against the most influential emotion theories of the time. These theories, Arnold remarked, were interested only in the bodily and behavioral aspects of emotion, with no concern for how emotions are elicited in the first place. Notably both James (1884) and Lange ([1885] 1922) had identified emotions with perceptions of bodily changes; behaviorism had reduced emotions to “pattern-reactions” in the body (e.g., J. Watson 1919); and activation theories had identified emotions with different degrees of “activation” or “energy” of the organism (e.g., Duffy 1941). Arnold complained that these accounts could not explain why, for example, the same stimulus can induce different emotional responses in different individuals; or why at different times the same Reappraising Appraisal 85 individual can react differently to the same stimulus. She then argued that these differences depend on the fact that individuals respond not to stimuli per se but to appraised stimuli. In particular, stimuli elicit emotions when they affect an individual “personally,” in relation to her or his aims: “To arouse an emotion, the object must be appraised as affecting me...