Emotion and Adaptation

572 Pages·1991·36.83 MB·English

by  Richard S. Lazarus

Emotion and Adaptation
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EMOTION
AND
ADAPTATION
Richard S. Lazarus
New York Oxford
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1991
Oxford University Press
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Copyright © 1991 by Oxford University Press, Inc.
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Al! rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lazarus, Richard S.
Emotion and adaptation / Richard S. Lazarus.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Emotions. 2. Adaptability (Psychology) I. Title.
BF531.L37 1991 152.4-dc20 91-9611
ISBN 0-19-506994-3
2 4 6 8 9 7 53
Printed in the United States of America
on acid-free paper
To Bernice, my impressive wife,
our two wonderful children, David and Nancy,
their fine spouses, Mary and Rick,
and our always lovable grandchildren,
Jessica, Adam, Maiya, andAva Rose.
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Preface
I had the good fortune to publish a book in 1966 entitled Psychological Stress and
the Coping Process, which to some extent anticipated the movement of psychology
over the next 25 years from a behavioristic to a cognitive-mediational outlook. I
would like to believe I contributed to the change. Nearly 20 years later, in 1984,
with Folkman, I followed this up with another book, Stress, Appraisal, and Coping.
The central construct of both books, and my research from almost the beginning,
was appraisal, which is about how people construe the implications of what is hap-
pening in their lives for their well-being.
Since then there has been another remarkable shift (or, rather, an expansion of
interest) from psychological stress to emotion. Although stress and coping are still
important, social scientists have begun to realize that these concepts are part of a
larger rubric —the emotions. A consequence is that appraisal — and coping too —
which previously had to deal only with a simple stress dimension from low to high,
or a few basic types of stress such as harm/loss, threat, and challenge, had to be
refashioned. Appraisal must now be made to account for the differences among dis-
tinctive negative emotions such as anger, fright, anxiety, guilt, shame, sadness,
envy, jealousy, and disgust and positive emotions such as happiness, pride, love, and
relief, as well as some emotional phenomena whose status is problematic such as
hope, compassion, and the aesthetic emotions. A modern theory of emotion and
adaptation, which is what this book is about, requires propositions about the role of
appraisal in each individual emotion.
This book, which I have wanted to write for a long time, was conceived in the
light of the above reasoning, and I began to work on it with dedication about four
years ago. I wanted to create a rich and complete conceptualization that would make
clear the issues underlying the metatheoretical and theoretical decisions that a viable
cognitive-motivational-relational theory requires. It turned out to be a remarkably
challenging venture, a fascinating experience that once again proves that the best
way to learn is to write. As in so many writing ventures, what started out modestly
grew and grew as my awareness expanded and I filled in the gaps of my knowledge.
I think of this book as a monograph of my late years, a labor of love, one that I want
to be the best book on emotion that I could write. Like all such ventures, it can never
be truly finished, but conscious of the rapid peaking of professional interest in emo-
tion, I decided not to obsess indefinitely and —with some lapses —closed the book to
new thoughts and references as of winter 1990.
VIII PREFACE
Emotion is an interdisciplinary field connecting several life sciences —biology,
psychology, sociology, and anthropology. It also has roots in philosophy. I have tried
to do justice to the prodigious breadth of subject matter, but the literature, both his-
torical and contemporaneous, research centered and theoretical, is so huge that I
have had to be very selective. To my regret, important works have appeared since
the winter of 1990, and these would have been relevant. The interesting interchanges
between A. W. Kruglanski and commentators in Psychological Inquiry (1990,
Volume 1, pp. 181-230) addressed the difficult question of how broad and abstract
or how detailed a theory should be. And in the same issue (pp. 231-283), inter-
changes between Michael Lewis and his commentators addressed intentionality and
motivation in the context of emotional development. These show how ongoing and
fluid the effort at understanding always is. In any case, I hope I will be forgiven for
any omissions of work and insights by those whose research I respect. To include the
entire literature would have made this book impossibly long, and dull.
This is, fundamentally, an issues and idea book, a theory and a set of proposi-
tions about the emotion process and its consequences, not a review. I have often
used an instantiation strategy in which a point or theme is illustrated by a specific
set of experimental or clinical observations, and have frequently drawn on literary
examples that offer dramatic illustrations. It would be an affectation to lay claim to a
balanced treatment. In complex, lively, and interdisciplinary fields, even the most
scholarly work cannot provide an unbiased account. I am also impressed with the
value of debate about issues for both readers and participants, and so I have been
unabashedly speculative and sometimes quite opinionated where it seemed appro-
priate. I hope what I have written will stimulate constructive debate and guide
research.
For whom has the book been written? When I began I wanted to reestablish and
extend my historical role as an innovator of appraisal theory and research, and to
advance a comprehensive cognitive-motivational-relational theory. It was to be an
analysis and position statement for colleagues who were afficionados, not a bal-
anced examination of diverse ways of thinking. I wanted it to be clear and to avoid
excessive jargon so that people from diverse fields without extensive backgrounds
in psychology could read and understand what I was saying. When one writes for
knowledgeable colleagues, however, who are ready with inevitable "yes, buts," it is
difficult to avoid some jargon, drawn upon in defense of controversial ideas, but I
have tried to walk a line between being colloquial and lapsing into academic osten-
tation.
Despite the passion with which I have presented and defended certain views,
what has emerged is also, I believe, a broad contemporaneous treatment of the sub-
ject matter of emotion; to present a comprehensive theory is also to address, per-
force, a large range of issues, which any ambitious theory must confront. Therefore,
I believe the book provides a text that can be read and understood by upper division
undergraduate students, graduate students, and professionals. And because the emo-
tions are so central to the work of practitioners in general medicine, psychiatry, clin-
ical psychology, health psychology, social work, and nursing, it should also have
utility in these fields as well as in hard-nosed cognitive science and other fields of
psychology such as personality, social, developmental, and physiological psychology.
Preface ix
The one subject I have not tried to address, except in passing, is the basic neuro-
physiology, biochemistry, and genetics of emotion. Though I inveigh against reduc-
tionism and avoid taking refuge in neurophysiology, I don't deny that it is relevant
to the emotions. Nor have I ignored biology. For example, I hope one of the con-
structive things I have done, in light of the usual polarity between biological univer-
sals and sociocultural, developmental sources of variability, is to try in Chapter 5 to
reconcile these positions and find a proper place for both, as any good emotion theo-
ry should.
A number of persons whose help in bringing this book into being deserve my
gratitude, with the usual reservation that they arc not responsible for my failings.
Foremost among them is Paul Ekman, who provided me with the resources of his
sharp mind and considerable acumen in commenting on early drafts, and who made
it possible through a seminar at UCSF in 1988-1989 to have his colleagues and stu-
dents read and criticize them. I learned much from these dialogues. An NIMH-sup-
ported postdoctoral training program during the 1989-1990 academic year, which
Ekman and I co-directed at Berkeley, and an outstanding faculty from many univer-
sities, including Judy Dunn, Seymour Epstein, Michael Goldstein, John Gottman,
Jerome Kagan, Jaak Panksepp, Robert Levenson, Richard Davidson, and Klaus
Scherer, as well as Arlie Hochschild, George De Vos, and Mardi Horowitz who
gave special lectures, were a tremendous source of inspiration and helped me
become aware of and think through much I had not previously thought about.
1 spent three months a few summers ago as a Visiting Professor at the University
of Heidelberg with my wife, the guest of Professor Reiner Bastine, in what was then
West Germany, writing on a rented word processor and lecturing widely on the ideas
I was cultivating for this book. I gave lectures at Heidelberg, Mainz, the Free
University of Berlin, the University of Amsterdam and the European Congress of
Psychology meeting in that city, the University of Geneva, the University of
Wurzburg, the University of Munich, and Bamberg University, I express my great
appreciation to my hosts on these travels, to those to whom I lectured because of
their wonderful, searching questions, which helped me greatly in shaping the formu-
lations that follow, to those at Heidelberg where we resided, and to others such as
Professor Lothar Laux and Dr. Hannalore Weber of Bamberg, whose intellectual
explorations with me about emotion added greatly to the quality and richness of this
book.
A number of colleagues read and commented constructively on portions of the
book. Their contribution must not be understated because the kindest thing a col-
league can do in academe is to really read and criticize what you write in a sincere
effort to help you make it better. Craig A. Smith, who spent two postdoctoral years
with me at Berkeley, was most generous of his time in giving me very searching and
invaluable criticism on all chapters and making valuable suggestions that I often
drew on heavily without identifying them in the text. Eric Gillett meticulously
reviewed a number of chapters I was working on while at Heidelberg, and provided
me with a much needed psychoanalytic perspective in my struggles to integrate
appraisal theory with the unconscious. Eleanor Rosch benefited the manuscript with
her unique blend of sophisticated cognitive science and her continuing search for
broader and deeper analyses of human meanings in Eastern and Western thought.