On the Primacy of Cognition.

Zajonc and I differ greatly in our conceptualization of emotion and its relations with cognition, as well as in our evaluation of the evidence. My reply is in two parts. First, I discuss the boundaries of emotion as a phenomenon and whether sensory preferences can be regarded as emotions; second, I make an analysis of the evidence Zajonc regards as supporting his claims for the independence of cognition and emotion and the primacy of emotion. My aims are to sharpen the philosophical and empirical issues that underlie our disagreement and to emphasize the indeterminancy of the issue of cognitive versus emotional primacy. This latter issue is less important than the task of exploring the cognitive contents or meanings that shape each kind of emotional reaction. Finally, I offer a brief programmatic statement about what cognitivists can do to advance our understanding of emotion over the life course. The latest riposte by Zajonc (1984) has, in my view, not helped to clarify our understanding of the relationship between cognition and emotion. Zajonc takes my reasoning (Lazarus, 1982) to task in two major ways. First he complains that my position cannot be falsified because I defined emotion as requiring cognitive appraisal, then that I have ignored the evidence that emotion can occur without cognitive activity, which he cites. I believe he is wrong about my epistemological position and wrong that the evidence supports the primacy of emotion or its independence from cognition. The body of this reply consists of a discussion of the definitional issue and why I think the empirical case he makes is specious. My objective is to sharpen the issue and sustain my position and that of like-minded cognitivists. The Definitional Issue Definitions do not arise out of the blue; they are an integral part of a theory that helps delimit the phenomena of interest and organize observations. In my view, emotion reflects a constantly changing personenvironment relationship. When central life agendas (e.g., biological survival, personal and social values and goals) are engaged, this relationship becomes a source of emotion. Therefore, an emotional experience cannot be understood solely in terms of what happens inside the person or in the brain, but grows out of ongoing transactions with the environment that are evaluated. Cognitive activity is a necessary precondition of emotion because to experience an emotion, people must comprehend—whether in the form of a primitive evaluative perception or a highly differentiated symbolic process—that their well-being is implicated in a transaction, for better or worse. A creature that is oblivious to the significance of what is happening for its well-being does not react with an emotion. This same point has been stated cogently in various ways by numerous multidisciplinary scholars who responded recently to an article on a general psychobiological theory of emotions by Panksepp (1982) appearing in The Behavioral and Brain Sciences. The conception that the meaning or significance of a transaction is crucial to emotion forces us to restrict its definition to some psychophysiological phenomena and to reject others as outside its purview. The searching question is what an emotion is or is not. Zajonc evades this question. Thus, he takes me to task for doing what any good theorist should do with definitions, but he does not do himself—namely, specify the phenomena of interest. Emotion, for example, is not just physiological arousal, though such arousal is one of the traditional defining attributes. Arousal can be produced by exercising vigorously or entering a hot or cold room. Doing this will produce an emotion only if we appraise the encounter (e.g., the physical and social conditions and the bodily state it produces) as having a bearing on our well-being, as when, for example, it presents some physical danger or brings blissful relief from discomfort. Startle is a reaction that has long but erroneously been included under the rubric of emotion. Ekman (in press) presents new experimental evidence that startle might better be regarded as a reflex, like the knee jerk, because it does not behave as do other reactions we call emotions. He examined facial and bodily responses under four conditions: when subjects did not know at what moment a blank pistol would be fired; when they did know the moment; when they tried to inhibit the startle reaction; and when they attempted to simulate a genuine startle. Ekman contrasted emotions with startle. He found that the startle was easy to elicit and was consistently the initial response to a gunshot; in contrast, there is no single elicitor that will always call forth the same emotion in adults. Moreover, the startle response could not 124 February 1984 • American Psychologist Copyright 1984 by the American Psychological Association, Inc. Vol. 39, No. 2, 124-129 be totally inhibited; in contrast, emotions can. Nor could the startle be simulated correctly by any subject. On the basis of these findings, the startle response seems fixed and rigid in comparison to emotions, and once elicited it seems to run its course. Thus, from the perspective of a relational and cognitive conceptualization of emotion, I think we should exclude startle from the rubric of emotion, as I advocated in my earlier discussion in this journal (Lazarus, 1982). Historically, there has been much concern about diverse phenomena for which emotion terms are employed, such as moods, sentiments, emotion traits, and actual emotional reactions (cf. Ortony & Clore, 1981). Moods usually refer to sustained general states, such as sadness and contentment, that may or may not be considered emotions depending on theoretical and definitional conventions. Sentiments refer to characteristic ways a person evaluates an object (person, idea, thing); they operate as dispositions to react emotionally to that object but are not in themselves emotions. Another questionable category of emotion consists of personality traits, such as cheerful, which could in some instances describe an actual emotion, as in "I feel cheerful," but could in other instances describe a trait, not an actual emotional response, as in "I am a cheerful person. " Some emotion terms are heavily detached, lukewarm, or cold, such as interested, whereas others, such as enraged, are hot. As Ortony and Clore pointed out, it makes a considerable difference how such terms are used by subjects in emotion research. In the 1940s and 1950s, a period characterized by the scientific outlook sometimes called logical positivism, the dominant view in psychology was that emotions could not be defined and studied as such but represented intervening variables (cf. Brown & Farber, 1951; Lazarus, 1968; Lazarus, Kanner, & Folkman, 1980). Although similar attitudes still exist, the more restrictive treatment of emotions in the past has given way to a view that allows much greater latitude in their study; this view depends heavily on what subjects report, but can be supplemented by simultaneous assessments of behavioral and physiological response variables. Emotions are commonly conceptualized and studied as an organic mix of action impulses and bodily expressions, diverse positive or dysphoric (subjective) cognitive-affective states, and physiological disturbances. Although there are arguments about whether these physiological disturbances are diffuse or patterned, an emotion is not I acknowledge with appreciation several valued colleagues who carefully read, criticized, and made suggestions on an earlier draft of this article. They include Paul Ekman, Susan Folkman, Barbara Mellers, and Philip Tetlock; Carol Carr warrants special mention for her skilled editorial assistance. Regrettably, acute limitations in our resources dictate that reprints will not be available. definable solely by behavior, subjective reports, or physiological changes; its identification requires all three components, since each one can be generated by conditions that do not necessarily elicit emotion, as in the example of arousal by exercise given above. An emotion researcher must worry about which response states or processes can be called emotions and which cannot; meeting one or even two of the three response criteria is not enough. With respect to the debate between Zajonc and me, a critical question is, On what basis should preferences (e.g., for taste, smell, or photographs of faces) be regarded as emotions? We must ask a similar question about aesthetic reactions to a pretty picture, a pleasing sunset, a stirring piece of music, or a fine piece of literature. Some years ago, while examining emotion and feeling in psychology and art, Arnheim (1958) pointed out that emotion in artistic experience is not merely a passive receipt or apprehension of information, but requires active, involved participation. As with sensory preferences, what may pass for an emotional (aesthetic) response may be nothing more than a pro forma statement that implies emotion but does not necessarily reflect it, as when one casually says, "That's a pretty picture" in a manner more indicative of labeling than emotion. Although preferences can involve emotions, even strong ones, they often seem to fall at the ambiguous borderline between emotion and nonemotion. On the one hand, statements of preference can be "cold cognitions" expressing merely a social requirement to make a choice, or on the other hand, they can be expressions of genuine emotional involvement. In the research Zajonc cites, we do not know whether in expressing a preference (e.g., "I like him more") subjects are experiencing an emotion, as indicated by multileveled response criteria, or merely expressing an intellectual choice. If the latter, then preferences must be excluded from the category of emotions; if the former, they fall under the rubric of emotion. Zajonc fails to come to grips with this problem, and he makes no mention of the alternative st