Appraisal theory is familiar to theorists of emotion as the theory that emotions are representations of the significance of events for the organism. Fear, for example, results from the representation of objects as dangerous for the organism. Early appraisal theorists assimilated these appraisals to beliefs about the properties of the objects of emotion (Kenny 1963; Solomon 1976, 1993). Consequently appraisal theory has been criticized as overly intellectualistic and as ignoring the felt aspect of emotion. Fear is a visceral state whose essence is a feeling, not a judgement, runs the objection. Equally an emotional feeling may arise or persist in the absence of, or in opposition to, a judgment.
Recent versions of the theory avoid this objection by recognising that most emotional appraisals are in fact conducted by neural circuits that automatically link perception to the automatic regulation of visceral and bodily responses. Consequently appraisals issue almost instantaneously in feelings that reflect the nature of that appraisal. When we recognize a familiar person and see her smile, for example, the significance of that information for us has been represented and that representation used to initiate our own bodily response within a few hundred milliseconds (Adolphs et al. 2002; Sander et al. 2003; Sander et al. 2005; N'Diaye et al. 2009; Adolphs 2010).
The consequence of these appraisals is autonomically-regulated body states and action tendencies that produce changes in visceral and bodily state. These changes are sensed as affective feelings via specialised circuitry that evolved to monitor organismic state. At any given moment we experience a “core affect” which is the product of multiple appraisals along different dimensions at different time scales.
These affective processes essentially represent the significance of incoming information for the organism along a number of different dimensions—hedonic, prudential, dangerous, noxious, nourishing, interesting, and so on. These representations, however, relate an aspect of organismic functioning to a represented object; they do not represent a self per se. The detection of danger alerts the organism to the need for avoidance, for example. The consequent feeling of fear is a way of sensing the bodily consequences of that appraisal. The self as an entity need not be represented in either the initial appraisal or the consequent experience. The self-relevance (as appraisal theorists call it) of dangerous objects is however implicitly represented in the bodily experience of fear. The same is true of all affective experiences: they carry important information about the world and the way the organism is faring in it in virtue of the appraisal processes which generate them. But they do so without representing a self in any substantial sense. Rather they relate salient information to organismic goals represented at different levels of explicitness for different purposes (Tomkins 1962, 1991; Scherer 2004).
Cognitive neuroscience has identified circuits that function as “hubs” of distributed circuits that determine the subjective relevance of information. Lower-level hubs, of which the amygdala is a central component, implement rapid online appraisals (Sander et al. 2003; Adolphs 2010) and coordinate visceral and bodily responses. These lower level hubs associate affective experiences with online sensorimotor processing of the type often described as reflexive: that is initiated by, and dependent on, encounters with the environment. It follows that such experiences decay with the representation of the stimulus. They are stimulus dependent. Such reflexive affective processes can of course only sustain a feeling of self-relevance moment to moment.