Cognitive Theory of Emotion
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Synonyms
Definition
The term “cognitive theory of emotion” denotes a family of emotion theories, developed mostly in psychology and philosophy, which share the assumption that emotions (the episodic states of persons denoted in everyday language by words like “joy,” “sadness,” “hope,” “fear,” “anger,” “pity,” etc.), or at least a core subset of emotions, presuppose for their existence certain cognitions about the eliciting events. Typically it is assumed that these emotion-relevant cognitions determine, alone or together with noncognitive mental states (in particular, desires), whether or not an event elicits an emotion, the kind of emotion it elicits (e. g., joy, sadness) and the intensity of the elicited emotion (e.g., weak joy, intense joy).
Introduction
In the classical formulation of cognitive emotion theory, the emotion-relevant cognitions are beliefs or judgments, such as...
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