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Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences pp 723–733Cite as

Cognitive Theory of Emotion

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Synonyms

Appraisal theory; Belief-desire theory of emotion; Judgment theory of emotion; Perceptual theory of emotion

Definition

The term “cognitive theory of emotion” denotes a family of emotion theories, developed mostly in psychology and philosophy, which share the assumption that emotions (the episodic states of persons denoted in everyday language by words like “joy,” “sadness,” “hope,” “fear,” “anger,” “pity,” etc.), or at least a core subset of emotions, presuppose for their existence certain cognitions about the eliciting events. Typically it is assumed that these emotion-relevant cognitions determine, alone or together with noncognitive mental states (in particular, desires), whether or not an event elicits an emotion, the kind of emotion it elicits (e. g., joy, sadness) and the intensity of the elicited emotion (e.g., weak joy, intense joy).

Introduction

In the classical formulation of cognitive emotion theory, the emotion-relevant cognitions are beliefs or judgments, such as...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of Psychology, Department of General Psychology II, University of Greifswald, Greifswald, Germany

    Rainer Reisenzein

Authors
  1. Rainer Reisenzein
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Correspondence to Rainer Reisenzein .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Oakland University, Rochester, MI, USA

    Virgil Zeigler-Hill

  2. Oakland University, Rochester, MI, USA

    Todd K. Shackelford

Section Editor information

  1. Institute of Psychology, University of Lodz, Lodz, Poland

    Monika Wróbel

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Reisenzein, R. (2020). Cognitive Theory of Emotion. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24612-3_496

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