| There has long been interest in how people make sense of affective situations and derive affective information from various cues. Traditionally the situation in which an emotion occurs has been thought to dominate in providing affective information, with a person's facial expression providing little, if any, information. The reasons for such a view are reviewed. Integrating this review with the findings of key studies by Frijda (1969) and Smith and Ellsworth (1985, 1987), inconsistency between situational and facial expression information is used in an attempt to delineate which affective cues and what appraisals are important in understanding complex affective situations.; Subjects in the study were presented with a written situation and then a photograph showing how the protagonist looked in that situation. The study investigated four emotions: happiness, sadness, anger, and fear. Seven orthogonal dimensions of appraisal were found: Pleasantness, Self Power, Certainty, Human Agency, Effort, Attention, and Situational Control. Overall, the face was a more important determinant of subjects' emotional inferences than the situation. Appraisals characteristic of the four emotions studied were also examined. When people perceived an emotion different than might be expected based on the situation, they also appraised that situation differently. These shifts in emotion and the accompanying shifts in characteristic appraisal are discussed. |
