An Appraisal Account of Individual Differences in Emotional Experience

Abstract

People can differ tremendously in the emotions they experience, both in general as well as in response to specific events, and such differences have large impact on their lives. Based on recent research on individual differences in appraisal and emotion, we propose a framework to understand the basis for individual differences in emotional experience. In this framework, individual differences in how people appraise their circumstances and in how these appraisals are related to emotional experience are seen as crucial in determining how people differ in both contextualized emotional experience and more stable emotional dispositions. We discuss parallels with other explanatory frameworks, implications for the nature of emotion traits, and directions for future research. A large part of what makes us individuals is our emotions. We all have unique ways of emotionally responding to the events that constitute our lives, be it the TV that breaks down or the birth of a child. Indeed, people vary in many of the defining features of emotions (Barrett, 2009; Davidson, 1998; Kuppens, Stouten, & Mesquita, 2009), and these differences constitute a large part of what makes people’s personalities different (Clark & Watson, 2008; Meyer & Shack, 1989). Individual differences in emotion also predict what makes people happy or unhappy, the decisions they make in their lives, their well-being, and so on. It is therefore important to have a good understanding of what makes people emotionally different. In this study, we propose a framework that aims to explain individual differences in emotional experience. Although emotions consist of other components as well (e.g., behavior, physiology), our focus is on the subjective experience of emotion. Individual differences in emotional experience have classically been studied on two different levels: the state level and the trait level. The state level is concerned with understanding how people emotionally respond to specific events, whereas the trait level is more concerned with how people can be characterized in terms of how they feel on average. Our framework aims to address individual differences at both these levels. As such, the main question we want to address is how we can understand individual differences in emotional experience, both in general as well as in response to specific events. We would like to point out that our analyses focus on proximal psychological sources of individual differences in emotional experience and do not directly speak to distal (e.g., genetic) causes or proximal biological factors, although we expect these levels of explanation to be heavily intertwined.