Appraisals=> emotions: Innate, acquired, or both?

• Harold's History by FACULTY Don Nathanson, 9/9/96
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    • innate mechanisms vs. appraisal by Don Nathanson, Faculty, 4/3/97
      
      

I don't see any contradiction here. If there weren't (originally) innate emotion-producing mechanisms for appraisals to activate, it's hard to see how emotions could result from them. When I talk about appraisals, I mean to include those that are performed by hard-wired neural structures such as the infant is born with -- with or without functional modification based on accumulated experience. Obviously it's a matter of what one means by "appraisal." When a newborn is hungry (or has soggy diapers, or misses his Mom's company) and cries, I consider that he has appraised his situation as one in which he needs to be taken care of. Otherwise, he'd smile, gurgle, go back to sleep, or do something other than cry. The fact that he makes his appraisals exclusively or nearly exclusively on the basis of innate capacities doesn't, in my dictionary, mean they're not appraisals. They're just done infant-style, not older-kid-style or grownup-style. The semantics is important, I think. I'm sure you remember the debate that Richard Lazarus and Robert Zajonc had in the pages of American Psychologist back in the '80s. It seemed obvious to me at the time that the issue of cognitive vs. affective primacy was a non-issue: all the important differences between Zajonc and Lazarus turned on whether unconscious, involuntary data processing was a form of "cognition." Yet I don't recall either of them recognizing this. If anybody reading this doesn't feel comfortable using the term appraisal to describe how infants "decide" what emotion to have, then let's collect suggestions for a new or different word. I like your idea of the infant "apprais[ing] the world as a vale of tears." Considering the sort of time frame infants have, that's probably about the way he sees things -- until Mom shows up and feeds, changes and cuddles him. (Later in life, if his luck is bad enough, he might go back to that view. At least until he gets a good therapist. Such as you or me.)

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