Agnes Moors, Yannick Boddez & Jan De Houwer (2017), Emotion Review 9(4):310–318 — DOI-10.1177/1754073916669595
Key takeaways
- The goal-directed process (pp. 4–5). It weighs action options by outcome value and action–outcome expectancy. “The action option with the highest utility activates its corresponding action tendency (i.e., goal to act), and this action tendency may or may not translate in an overt action” (p. 4). It sits in a cybernetic cycle (after Carver and Scheier 1990, LIT-1441): “Cybernetic models further assume that people must balance multiple goals, which implies that several cycles may run in parallel” (p. 5). The cycles are nested, and keeping lower-order goals in balance is itself a higher-order goal (pp. 5–6).
- The reversal (pp. 8–11). Standard models give stimulus-driven processes the default, either in a default-interventionist architecture or in a “parallel-competitive architecture in which both types of processes constantly operate in parallel, but compete to determine behavior” (p. 8; Daw, Niv and Dayan, LIT-580). On Moors’s account goal-directed processes should win instead, so “most of the competition does not occur between stimulus-driven and goal-directed processes, but instead between different goal-directed processes. Which process wins the competition is not only determined by complexity proportional to operating conditions, but also by the values and expectancies of outcomes” (p. 11).
- Appraisal theories are stimulus-driven (p. 13). “none of the current appraisal theories include an appraisal of the utility of specific action options afforded by a stimulus (i.e., affordances), and they do not hypothesize that the action tendency with the highest utility is always activated.” Their links from appraisal patterns to action tendencies “are better conceived of as sophisticated types of stimulus-driven processes” (p. 13).
- Control precedence without irrationality (p. 15). If emotional actions ensue “from action tendencies with control precedence (i.e., that take priority over other action tendencies) because these action tendencies, in turn, ensue from stimuli that are relevant for highly valued goals (Frijda, 2007), then there is no a priori reason to deny the role of goal-directed processes in the causation of emotional actions.” Emotionality is graded: “Episodes can be called more or less emotional” (p. 15). Emotions “can themselves be regarded as decision processes, ones that rely on the very same mechanisms as non-emotional decision processes, but in which the stakes are higher” (pp. 15–16).
- Evidence (pp. 16–20). Frequency and felt automaticity are weak criteria. Outcome revaluation and contingency degradation are stronger, but a null result leaves room for hidden goals. Four complexities are named: multiple outcomes of one action, multiple actions to one outcome, old action–outcome links kept beside new ones, and meta-expectations.
- Behaviour change (pp. 20–21). Change values and expectancies rather than install habits, for example by making long-term outcomes vivid: “This provides an opening for long-term goals to gain dominance over short-term ones” (p. 21).
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-23 as the novelty check for the record’s proposal that an organization’s appraisal is the negotiation among its perspectives (CLAIM-440, TERM-076). Moors already holds the competitive half of it: action selection, emotional action included, is a competition among goal-directed processes, and control precedence is what wins it when the stakes are high. What she does not hold is the other half. Her competition is settled on one scale, expected utility, which the proposal treats as something a negotiation may fail to produce. It also gives no account of valence. The bearing is set out in NOTE-1117. Her book-length statement of the theory, LIT-1433, is unread.
No instruction for machine-learning practice; nothing here belongs in the anthology.