Levels of processing in appraisal

207 Pages·2004·2.21 MB·French

by  Van Reekum, Carien

UNIVERSITE DE GENEVE FACULTE DE PSYCHOLOGIE ET
SECTION DE PSYCHOLOGIE DES SCIENCES DE L'EDUCATION

Sous la direction de Prof. Klaus R. Scherer

LEVELS OF PROCESSING IN APPRAISAL: EVIDENCE FROM
COMPUTER GAME GENERATED EMOTIONS

THESE
présentée à la Faculté de Psychologie et
des Sciences de l'Education de l'Université de Genève
pour obtenir le grade de Docteur en Psychologie
par
Carien VAN REEKUM
(Pays-Bas)

THESE N° 289

GENEVE 2000
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS...................................................................................................................3
CHAPTER 1...........................................................................................................................................5
INTRODUCTION AND REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE................................................................................5
1.1. Introduction and overview.......................................................................................................5
1.1.1. Working definitions..........................................................................................................................7
1.2. “Higher” cognitive processes involved in emotion elicitation................................................8
1.2.1. Introduction to appraisal theory and empirical evidence favouring appraisal approaches................8
1.2.2. Criticisms of appraisal theory.........................................................................................................11
1.3. Automatic evaluation processes involved in emotion elicitation............................................13
1.3.1. Affective priming...........................................................................................................................13
1.3.2. Attention allocation through automatic relevance evaluations.......................................................16
1.4. Multilevel models integrating both processing modes in emotion elicitation........................17
1.4.1. The early multi-level models..........................................................................................................18
1.4.2. LeDoux’s dual route model: Neuroscientific evidence of different processing levels....................21
1.4.3. Emotion models in cognitive psychology.......................................................................................23
1.4.4. Clinical approaches to emotional disorder.....................................................................................24
1.4.5. Multilevel appraisal theories..........................................................................................................27
1.5. Interaction between levels......................................................................................................30
1.5.1. Bottom-up versus top-down processing.........................................................................................31
1.5.2. Dominance of processing levels.....................................................................................................33
1.6. Summary and discussion........................................................................................................36
CHAPTER 2.........................................................................................................................................39
METHODOLOGICAL ISSUES IN STUDYING MULTILEVEL APPRAISAL MODELS AND AIMS OF PRESENT
STUDIES..............................................................................................................................................39
2.1. Experimental paradigm..........................................................................................................39
2.2. Measuring emotion: The issue of multiple responses............................................................41
2.2.1. Physiology......................................................................................................................................42
2.2.2. Expression......................................................................................................................................45
2.2.3. The time course of responses.........................................................................................................47
2.3. Overview of this research......................................................................................................49
2.3.1. Aims...............................................................................................................................................49
2.3.2. Method...........................................................................................................................................49
2.3.3. Hypotheses.....................................................................................................................................51
CHAPTER 3.........................................................................................................................................55
FIRST EXPERIMENT..............................................................................................................................55
3.1. Overview................................................................................................................................55
3.1.1. Overview of the measures and predictions.....................................................................................56
3.2. Method...................................................................................................................................58
3.2.1. Participants.....................................................................................................................................58
3.2.2. Equipment and game specifications...............................................................................................58
3.2.3. Design and manipulations..............................................................................................................60
3.2.4. Procedure.......................................................................................................................................61
3.2.5. Measurements................................................................................................................................63
3.3. Results....................................................................................................................................66
3.3.1. Overview of analyses.....................................................................................................................66
3.3.2. Reaction time and errors.................................................................................................................69
3.3.3. Psychophysiological data...............................................................................................................71
3.3.4. Subjective report data.....................................................................................................................83
3.4. Discussion..............................................................................................................................84
3.4.1. Results with respect to a mere discrepancy effect..........................................................................85
3.4.2. Conduciveness................................................................................................................................85
3.4.3. Evidence favouring two levels of appraisal....................................................................................87
CHAPTER 4.........................................................................................................................................93
SECOND EXPERIMENT.........................................................................................................................93
4.1. Overview................................................................................................................................93
4.1.1. Overview of the measures and predictions.....................................................................................96
4.2. Method.................................................................................................................................100
4.2.1. Participants...................................................................................................................................100
4.2.2. Equipment and game specification...............................................................................................101
4.2.3. Experimental design and manipulations.......................................................................................101
4.2.4. Procedure.....................................................................................................................................105
4.2.5. Measurements..............................................................................................................................106
4.2.6. Data reduction and scoring of parameters....................................................................................109
4.3. Results..................................................................................................................................111
4.3.1. Overview of analyses...................................................................................................................111
4.3.2. Conduciveness..............................................................................................................................114
4.3.3. Coping Potential...........................................................................................................................128
4.3.4. Exit interview: Appraisal questions and reported levels of involvement and cognitive load........136
4.4. Discussion............................................................................................................................140
4.4.1. Conduciveness..............................................................................................................................143
4.4.2. Coping..........................................................................................................................................150
4.4.3. General conclusions.....................................................................................................................154
CHAPTER 5.......................................................................................................................................157
GENERAL DISCUSSION......................................................................................................................157
RESUME.............................................................................................................................................171
REFERENCES...................................................................................................................................179
APPENDICES....................................................................................................................................188
2
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Had I fully understood at the start that the topic I chose for my dissertation would be
as much a conceptual as a methodological challenge, I would have probably opted
out. In the end, I didn’t, and that was mostly due to the great help and encouragement
I received during the past five years. First of all, I’d like to thank Klaus Scherer, who
provided me with ample opportunities to discover and experience the world of
science, and who has encouraged me to keep pushing the “levels” issue during these
five years. I thank the members of the Geneva Emotion Research Group, past and
present, for discussions, support, and tolerance of my error-prone and often cryptic
French. Janique Sangsue, Stéphanie Meylan and Tanja Bänziger have been very royal
with their help, merci bien. I also thank in particular Patricia Garcia-Prieto, Marcel
Zentner, Veronique Tran, and Susanne Schmidt for the lively discussions we shared
over good meals, and their suggestions, moral support, and friendship. The
inspirational skiing trips will be sorely missed! Thanks also goes to the members of
my thesis committee, professors Arne Öhman, Nico Frijda and Anik de Ribaupierre,
who have provided me with valuable feedback and comments during the past 5 years.
I had the pleasure of meeting Craig Smith and Leslie Kirby in person during my visit
to Craig’s lab in 1996, where both spurred me to continue the work I was doing, and
were always there to provide valuable insights and feedback when my brain started
spinning from process models-issues. I hope the collaboration and the fun will
continue. I also thank my late father Ton, my sisters Judith and Janine and brother
Rik, for their support and warmth, and in particular my mother Gerda, who never
ceased believing in me. I’m afraid that their belief and support resulted in these 200 or
so pages which are ahead of the reader. Mostly, I owe Tom Johnstone. I don’t think
this thesis would be as is if it weren’t for his input, support and caring both at work
and at home. He encouraged and helped me for many hours learning how to program
and to speak and write in English (with an Australian touch), to show the fun side of
signals, to keep working on the experimental paradigm, to keep writing, so many
things which are too numerous to name. I hope that we share work and home for a
long time to come.
3
CHAPTER 1

INTRODUCTION AND REVIEW OF THE LITERATURE

1.1. Introduction and overview

Cognitive theories of emotion are concerned with the elicitation of emotion and
attempt to specify the mechanisms underlying the elicitation of emotion. In contrast
with those theories that marked the debut of emotion psychology (e.g. James, Wundt),
where the emphasis was on subjective feeling states as markers of emotion, the
cognitive theories are characterised by describing how the object of emotion is
evaluated and how the evaluation process, in combination with motivation, defines the
nature of the emerging emotion. The proposal that emotion is the result of what an
event or object means with respect to our individual goals and concerns is not new,
having been discussed by Aristotle and, in the 17th century, by Spinoza (see Frijda,
1986). Contemporary cognitive theories of emotion, appraisal theories in particular,
have elaborated these pioneering philosophical notions into comprehensive and
detailed accounts of the evaluative processes that underlie the elicitation and
differentiation of emotions.

Despite evidence supporting the appraisal approach to emotion, in particular with
respect to the predicted differentiation of emotions, the extent to which cognition
plays a central role in emotion elicitation as proposed by appraisal theory is heavily
debated (see Lazarus, 1982, 1984; Zajonc, 1980, 1984). Indeed, perhaps due to the
fact that appraisal theories were first developed in the sixties (Arnold, 1960a, b;
Lazarus, 1968) as a reaction to behaviourism and so emphasise the involvement of
thought processes as a mediator between object and response, appraisal theories have
been depicted by critics as overestimating the importance of “thought” as the core
process in emotion elicitation (e.g. Zajonc, 1984). The interest in the influence of
unconscious processes on thought and behaviour, as reflected in the New Look III
(e.g. Greenwald, 1992; Kihlstrom, 1987), gave rise in cognitive psychology to the
discussion of “automaticity” issues, an area in which some of the critics on appraisal
theory find their origin (e.g. Zajonc, 1980).
5
As outlined by Leventhal and Scherer (1987) such debates often hedge upon the
definition of “cognition” rather than on the premises of appraisal theories themselves.
In order to end such debates, and also to clarify that appraisal is not limited to
propositional representations of knowledge, various process models of emotion have
recently been proposed, (e.g. Smith, Griner, Kirby, & Scott, 1996; Power &
Dalgleish, 1997; Robinson, 1998) following the early suggestion of Leventhal and
Scherer to distinguish and specify the different levels of processing at which
appraisals are proposed to take place. The use of process models in emotion
psychology is not new (e.g. Leventhal, 1979; Öhman, 1979), but their use in appraisal
theories is recent. These process models are all characterised by the inclusion of at
least two modes of evaluative processing; a higher, conceptual mode and a low,
automatic or schematic mode.

This work attempts to empirically test the suggestion that appraisal processes take
place at different levels of processing, and to identify where these process models
need to be further developed, in particular with respect to the concurrent operation
and interaction of such levels in emotion elicitation. In what follows, after proposing
some working definitions and a list of terms applied throughout this work, a brief
overview of literature relevant to levels of processing-models in appraisal will be
provided which will roughly follow the structure of such models. First, theoretical
ideas and evidence concerned with evaluations performed at a high level of cognitive
processing of a propositional or conceptual kind will be outlined, including a brief
overview of appraisal theory. Zajonc's criticisms of appraisal theory, and the ensuing
debate between Lazarus and Zajonc, will then be summarised. Arguments of Zajonc
and others are based upon evidence that unconsciously perceived stimuli influence
behaviour and preferences, whose ideas and studies concerned with lower levels of
affective processing will next be reviewed.

The review of these disciplines of emotion research, one concentrating on automatic
evaluations, the other involving a more propositional, high level of processing leads to
the following section on the process models which integrate both modes in emotion
elicitation. In this section, the precursors to these models will first be summarised.
Some clinically oriented information processing models of affective disorders and
6
cognitive functioning which can be applied to emotion elicitation in general will then
be reviewed. Reflecting the focus of the current research, the overview of multi-level
models will end with a discussion of appraisal-based process models including the
early suggestion of Leventhal and Scherer (1987).

The review of process models of emotion leads to the question of how different
processing levels interact in emotion-antecedent appraisal. Substantial space is
devoted to a review of recent brain research concerned with emotion elicitation, since
neuroscience approaches to emotion provide valuable insights of how different
structures within the neocortex interact with subcortical structures. The chapter
concludes with a summary of some of the questions raised in the literature review and
an overview of the experimental design that was used to address these questions in the
present work.

1.1.1. Working definitions

The word “emotion” refers to a wide scope of phenomena, from fleeting likes and
dislikes to full-blown emotional states, which are often interchangeably used in the
literature. Even though among emotion researchers the exact definition of emotion
differs slightly, high agreement is found in the literature on at least three observable
indicators of emotion, which make up the classic emotional response triad:
Expression, physiology and subjective feeling. Although this definition holds in a
large number of cases, not all emotions are always accompanied by an observable
(facial) expression, as Ekman (1992) outlines. Frijda (1986) notes that emotions have
an object, and alter the action readiness of a person. One is angry at someone or
something, and one wants to do something about it, such as removing the obstacle. In
this work, the term “emotion” will be used in a liberal sense, referring to a state
elicited by a person's evaluation of an object which changes the person's action
readiness as indicated by changes in at least some of the response systems, such as
physiology. Emotions defined in this more liberal sense differ from affective feelings
of likes and dislikes, pleasantness and unpleasantness (or preferences) by the
implication of bodily responses with respect to a specific object.

7
While describing the processes involved in emotion elicitation, a variety of terms will
be used. The term “cognition” used here is broadly defined to include all processing,
from simple sensory information processing to complex, propositional, or semantic
processing. Some theorists prefer to include only the latter class of processing to
define “cognition”, and referral to this restricted meaning of the term “cognition” will
be clearly indicated when discussing the contributions of these theorists. The variety
of terms used to refer to different cognitive processes involved in emotion elicitation
could potentially cause much confusion. In order to avoid this, terms such as “higher
level", "conceptual" and "controlled" processing will be applied in the review of the
literature interchangeably, as will the terms, “lower level”, “pre-attentive”,
“schematic” and “automatic”. In general, “higher level processing” includes
processing described as explicit (Graf & Schacter, 1985), controlled (Shiffrin &
Schneider, 1977), or “conceptual” (e.g. Leventhal, 1979, 1984). “Lower level
processing” includes but is not restricted to “pre-attentive processing” (e.g. Öhman,
1986). It also includes “schematic” (e.g. Leventhal, 1979, 1984; Norman & Shallice,
1985) and “automatic” processing (Shiffrin & Schneider, 1977; Logan, 1988). For the
experimental part of this work, concepts referring to the way in which information is
processed will be further defined and instantiated in the respective empirical sections.

1.2. “Higher” cognitive processes involved in emotion elicitation

1.2.1. Introduction to appraisal theory and empirical evidence favouring appraisal
approaches

Appraisal theory originated in the sixties with the work of Arnold (1960) and Lazarus
(Lazarus, 1968; Lazarus, Averill, & Opton, 1970) emphasising that for a stimulus to
be emotion-arousing, it needs to be evaluated as having personal meaning. These
appraisals of the meaning of an event and our relation to that event are determined by
our current goals and shaped by our past experiences. The meaning attributed to an
event through appraisal determines the nature of the emotional response. These early
contributions underscored that appraisals do not necessitate awareness and probably
often occur in an automatic fashion. Although appraisal theory would in principle not
object to include both a high and a low level of cognitive processing in emotion-
8
antecedent appraisal, most evidence in favour of the appraisal approach is strongly
based upon high-level processes, such as introspection and explicit memory
processes. Hence, the review of appraisal theory is placed under the header of “higher
level emotion-antecedent processing” (see also below, under “criticism on appraisal
theory”).

Following Arnold and Lazarus’ early theoretical formulations, empirical evidence
supporting the appraisal approach was soon to come. In a series of experiments,
Lazarus and collaborators (Speisman, Lazarus, Mordkoff, & Davison, 1964; Lazarus
& Alfert, 1964) showed how different commentaries accompanying a rather stressful
film (on ritualised subincision) influenced the stress reactions of participants watching
the film. In general, when the film was accompanied with commentaries that were
detached, emphasising the scientific/anthropological aspects of the film, or
commentary in which the ritual was described as important and not painful for the
young boys undergoing subincision (the denial condition), the participants showed
lower skin conductance responses than when the film was presented without
commentary or when the traumatic aspects of the film were emphasised.

Lazarus and Alfert (1964) replicated and extended findings of Speisman et al., by
varying the moment in which the commentary was given to the participants. In one
condition, the participants were presented with some denial commentary preceding,
but most denial commentary during the film, whilst in another condition full denial
commentary was provided only preceding the film, with a silent presentation serving
as a control condition. Results showed that skin conductance activity was reduced and
pleasantness ratings higher in the denial conditions compared to the silent condition.
Furthermore, the condition in which full denial commentary was provided beforehand
and not during the film showed the lowest skin conductance stress reactions. These
results indicated that denial information influenced the way in which the event was
appraised and hence was responded to. Furthermore, providing such information
beforehand, thus allowing time to assimilate the information and to form ideas about
what was happening in the ritual depicted in the film, was most effective in changing
people’s appraisal of the film as threatening or stressful. The study thus shows how a
high level of cognitive activity, in particular the formation of expectations and beliefs
about what is happening, can effectively influence an appraisal of threat to highly
9
negative stimuli, and thus alter the emotional response. Hence, the emotional response
is less dependent upon the objective characteristics of an event, but rather is strongly
determined by the subjectively evaluated meaning of an event.

Since this pioneering work, a large number of “appraisal theories of emotion” have
been developed in an attempt to predict the elicitation and differentiation of emotions
on the basis of a detailed set of appraisal criteria (Frijda, 1986; Oatley & Johnson-
Laird, 1987; Lazarus, 1991; Roseman, 1984, 1991; Scherer, 1984a, b; Smith &
Ellsworth, 1985; Weiner, 1986). In spite of the divergent disciplinary and historical
traditions of the authors involved, one finds a high degree of convergence with respect
to the appraisal dimensions or criteria postulated by different theories (see Lazarus &
Smith, 1988; Manstead & Tetlock, 1989; Reisenzein & Hofmann, 1990, 1993;
Roseman, Spindel, & Jose, 1990; Scherer, 1988). These include the perception of a
change in the environment that captures the subject's attention (novelty and
expectancy), the perceived pleasantness or unpleasantness of the stimulus or event
(valence), the importance of the stimulus or event to one's goals or concerns
(relevance and goal conduciveness or motive consistency), the notion of who or what
caused the event (agency or responsibility), the estimated ability to deal with the event
and its consequences (perceived control, power or coping potential), and the
evaluation of one's own actions in relation to moral standards or social norms
(legitimacy), and one’s self-ideal.

Furthermore, appraisal theory in general posits that these evaluations organise the
response components, such as physiology and expressive behaviour (Lazarus, 1991;
Frijda, 1986; Scherer, 1984a, b; Smith, 1989). In particular Scherer (1984, 1986, in
press) and Smith (1989, 1991) explicitly propose that each appraisal dimension
influences each of the response components. Smith proposes that with respect to facial
activity, the expressive units might each convey information of specific appraisal
components (see also Smith & Scott, 1997), whereas appraisals of coping directly
affect the autonomic and postural changes required for the specific action serving to
adapt to the situation. In the framework of his Component Process Model, Scherer
(1986, in press) provides detailed predictions as to how the appraisal checks, which in
his theory take place in a fixed sequential manner, each trigger specific changes in the
autonomic nervous system (ANS), and for facial and vocal expressions, result in a
10