Criteria for emotion-antecedent appraisal: A review.

In reviewing classic theories of emotion and the disputes among adherents of competing traditions, one is struck by the remarkable lack of concern with the antecedent or eliciting conditions for emotional reactions. Most of the past and current controversies, e.g. central vs. peripheral control of feeling, universal vs. culturally specific affect states, unspecific arousal vs. discrete emotions, seem to have been orientated toward the different reaction components of the emotion process (physiological arousal, motor expression, subjective feeling) and the nature of their interrelationships. This is all the more surprising since it would seem that the analysis of the specificity of the emotional response systems requires an investigation into the specificity of the respective eliciting conditions.