Nico H. Frijda, K. Richard Ridderinkhof and Erik Rietveld (2014), Frontiers in Psychology 5:518 — DOI-10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00518
Key takeaways
- Emotion is defined by action readiness. Appraisal of how an event bears on what one cares about produces a readiness to change one’s relation to it, such as approaching, avoiding, opposing or submitting. That readiness has urgency and priority over other activity. “In the absence of concern pertinence, there is no motive, no motive state, no change in action readiness; in short, no emotion.”
- An action can be purposive without a represented goal. The appraised object stays before the agent and guides the action, which is chosen from the agent’s repertoire for its effect on the relationship, or primed by affordances.
- Regulation is mostly more emotion. Appraising the likely consequences of an impulse raises a competing readiness (fear of retaliation checks anger), so impulse control is the interaction of motive states. The authors present this as an alternative to dual-process “reflective over impulsive” models, and side with Hume.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-03 at the owner’s request, as the read substitute for Frijda’s The Emotions (LIT-546). The book is 544 pages, has no lawful full text, and is filed Deferred beside this paper. The paper extends the book in the LIT scheme’s sense: it builds on the book’s two central constructs and could not stand without them. It says so (“As elaborated in earlier work, action readiness and changes in action readiness form the key to what we call ‘emotions’”, citing Frijda 1986 and 2007), and takes control precedence from the same source. What the paper adds is the application to impulsive action and the claim that regulation is the interaction of several states of readiness.
Why this paper and not another. The owner allows a shorter work by the same author that introduces the same theory. “The laws of emotion” (1988) would have been the closer substitute, since it is a compact statement of the whole theory, but it could not be read lawfully from here (see the history note). This 2014 paper is the best lawfully readable alternative. It is Frijda’s own late statement of action readiness, concern and appraisal, and it bears directly on the regulation question Gross raises. It is narrower than the book: nothing here on emotional experience, the laws, or the book’s treatment of physiology and expression.
It bears on two other filings in this batch.
- Gross (LIT-554). Gross’s first open challenge is whether regulation can be told apart from generation, and he attributes the “part and parcel” view to Frijda (1986). This paper defends that view in Frijda’s own words and gives it a mechanism. It does not cite Gross’s 1998 review.
- Barrett (LIT-542). The two papers are rivals, but closer than the labels suggest. Both treat motives and perception as prediction (“A motive itself can be conceived of as being set to expect a particular input, along the lines proposed in predictive coding theory”, citing Friston and Clark). Both have actions anticipated through their exteroceptive and interoceptive consequences. The difference is in the order of explanation. Here appraisal elicits action readiness, and modes of readiness map onto emotion names. Barrett has categorization constructing the emotion, and denies the categories a shared mechanism.
No instruction for machine-learning practice, and no anthology topic holds it.