Enactive appraisal

Giovanna Colombetti

pp. 527-546

in: Steve Torrance (ed), Enactive experience, Phenomenology and the cognitive sciences 6 (4), 2007.

Abstract

Emotion theorists tend to separate "arousal" and other bodily events such as "actions" from the evaluative component of emotion known as "appraisal." This separation, I argue, implies phenomenologically implausible accounts of emotion elicitation and personhood. As an alternative, I attempt a reconceptualization of the notion of appraisal within the so-called "enactive approach." I argue that appraisal is constituted by arousal and action, and I show how this view relates to an embodied and affective notion of personhood.