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THEORY-055: An appraisal of an event's pertinence to the agent's concerns elicits the emotion, as a state of action readiness, and emotions differ by their mode of action readiness

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Properties7
StatusProposed
Tagsemotion-and-affect, cognition, agency
SourceLIT-540 — Impulsive action: emotional impulses and their control
RivalsTHEORY-057 — Emotion categories are populations of variable instances grouped by the perceiver's concepts, not natural kinds with a shared neural or appraisal mechanism
Presupposed byTHEORY-126 — A collective emotion is the synchronous convergence of individuals' affective responses to one event or object, produced bottom-up by shared appraisal, contagion and group membership, and it needs no group subject; it takes a We-mode form when the appraisals rest on collectively intentional states
AnswersQUESTION-044 — When an organization is said to be angry or afraid, is the emotion fixed by a mode of action readiness the organization has, or by the attributor's emotion concept grouping variable states?
SupportsCLAIM-432 — A corporation can be an agent fit to be held responsible and the bearer of functional affect in Frijda's sense, so psychopathy's affective features can be assigned to it as well as its conduct: it lacks remorse, functionally, when harm it does to others is not among the concerns its own appraisals track and gains precedence over what it does only when a regulator or a market turns it into a threat to the corporation's concerns; that profile, threat without remorse, is the construct's, and it is changed by redesigning the corporation's concerns, not its members' characters, CLAIM-440 — An organization's appraisal is the negotiation among its perspectives, a common currency is that negotiation's admitting an ordering of the options it faces, and goal-conduciveness valence is a regime in which an ordering of the organization's own states by their bearing on its maintenance prevails in the negotiation; so valence presupposes contested rankings, not frustrated demands, its sign is whether the organization runs ahead of or behind a reference course along the potential ordering, its intensity is how far the negotiation's decisions follow that ordering, and ambivalence, where no ordering prevails, differs from neutrality, where one prevails and the organization keeps to its course

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Note of 2026-10-27: the concept separated from the account

The status review of this date (ADR-057) found that most of this account’s dependents used only its concept of action readiness with control precedence, and not its thesis about elicitation or its mapping of emotions to modes. The concept is now TERM-094, adopted. CLAIM-039, CLAIM-275, CLAIM-283 and CLAIM-355 are stated in the term and no longer grounded here. CLAIM-432, CLAIM-440 and CLAIM-442 engage the account itself and still are. The account stays Proposed. Its blocker is the one its promote_when names: the fuller statements (LIT-546, LIT-550) are Unavailable, and the record holds no test that only the order of explanation can account for.

Source

Frijda, Ridderinkhof & Rietveld (2014), LIT-540, read in full in NOTE-433: “Action readiness elicitation”, “States of action readiness”, “The aims of impulsive actions” and the Conclusion. The paper extends Frijda’s The Emotions (LIT-546), and says so: “action readiness and changes in action readiness form the key to what we call ‘emotions’”. The book itself is unread, and so is Lazarus’s Emotion and Adaptation (LIT-550). Neither can carry this account, and both are named so that a reader knows where the fuller statements are.

What was actually shown

The paper has no data of its own. Its claims, in the order it gives them:

  • Elicitation (C2 in NOTE-433). An event becomes emotional when it is appraised as pertinent to a concern, meaning a goal, need or value. This happens “in a fraction of a second”, and largely “automatically and non-consciously”. “In the absence of concern pertinence, there is no motive, no motive state, no change in action readiness; in short, no emotion.” Inside the theory this is close to a definition.
  • What is elicited (C1). A state of action readiness: “not representations of desirable states, but actual preparations for action”. It has control precedence, meaning persistence, resumption after interruption, and priority over other actions.
  • Emotions differ by mode. Hostility corresponds to anger, avoidance to fear, submission to awe, and disinclination to act to apathy. The mapping is given by examples, and the record holds no defence of it against variation between instances (Limitations in NOTE-433).
  • Cited evidence. Rated control precedence tracks rated intensity (Sonnemans & Frijda 1994; C4 in NOTE-433). Observers rate facial expressions for action tendencies about as consistently as they do for emotion labels (Tcherkassof et al. 2007). The record has read neither study.

Gross’s review (LIT-554, NOTE-429) shows that this order of explanation, evaluated situation then response tendency, was the field’s consensus model in 1998. His Figure 1 is “a distillation of major points of convergence” across Lazarus, Frijda and others. That shows how widely the account was held. It is not evidence that the account is true.

The rivalry, stated exactly

Barrett (LIT-542) names causal appraisal theories “highly doubtful”, because “meaning does not trigger action, but results from it”. The rival is THEORY-057. Neither paper cites the other, so the record holds the relation as rivals (ADR-022). They are closer than the labels suggest:

  • Both are predictive. Frijda: “A motive itself can be conceived of as being set to expect a particular input, along the lines proposed in predictive coding theory”. Both have actions anticipated through their exteroceptive and interoceptive sensory consequences.
  • Both let instances vary, and both group them by function. “When angry one can kick, shout insults, turn one’s back.” Frijda’s mode is what such equifunctional actions share.
  • They disagree on two points. The first is order: in Frijda an appraisal of the event generates the readiness, while in Barrett the prediction, including its action plan, comes first and meaning is its result. The second is where the unity lies: for Frijda in the agent’s readiness to change its relation to the object, and for Barrett in the perceiver’s goal-based concept. The second point is the one a result could decide, which is why promote_when asks for it.

Whether the first point is fully empirical is open. Frijda’s appraisal already covers “possibilities for action that the event affords”, so his appraisal and Barrett’s action-first prediction may partly redescribe one process.

The agency holdings

The paper’s second thesis is that impulsive action is purposive with “no explicit goal representation” (C3). The appraised object stays “before one’s eyes or before one’s mind’s eye” and guides the action, as an intention in action (Searle 1983, Pacherie). What makes the action purposive is its “pragmatic anticipation”, meaning its predicted sensory effects. This puts the account between two positions the record holds. Brooks (LIT-436, NOTE-351) builds robots with no goals at all, whose coherence is “in the eye of an observer”. Frijda keeps a real motive in the agent, carried by anticipation and not by a represented end state. He also says that “assuming an action to have a motive is an inference from observing a variety of equifunctional actions”. That is Dennett’s intentional strategy (LIT-440, NOTE-350) applied to emotion, with the difference that Frijda takes the motive inferred to be a real state. Barrett calls the same inference, from action to emotion, the “mental inference fallacy”. On that point the two rivals disagree about method as well as substance.

What this does not say

  • It does not say that appraisal is deliberate or conscious. Frijda’s appraisal is fast and mostly non-conscious. The rival’s charge is about causal order, not about deliberation.
  • It does not say that emotions have a neural signature. The account’s candidate for what instances share is functional, a mode of readiness, so Barrett’s Table 1 evidence against neural essences does not reach it directly.
  • It does not cover feeling. The paper leaves out emotional experience (Limitations in NOTE-433). The felt layer is THEORY-045, which is compatible with this account.
  • It does not include the paper’s claim about regulation, which is that much regulation is one state of readiness checking another. That claim is THEORY-056, and the constructionist side holds it too, so it does not depend on this account winning.
  • Lazarus’s version is not held. Concern pertinence here is Frijda’s term. Whether Lazarus’s relational themes are the same account is not something the record can say until LIT-550 is read.

Note of 2026-10-30: what holds it back

The record holds none of the results promote_when names. Kuppens et al. (LIT-1872, NOTE-1423), read in full, find no appraisal and no action tendency singly necessary or sufficient for anger in recalled episodes. That weighs against the claim that emotions differ by mode: the nearest item to Frijda’s hostility, wanting to express opposition, was only marginally associated with anger. But the study varies which episodes are recalled, not an event’s pertinence. Every variable is the same person’s report. Every situation was unpleasant, so concern pertinence may have held throughout. The rival predicts the same result, and promote_when sets this kind of evidence aside. LIT-546 and LIT-550 remain Unavailable.

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