All 4 Terms & Definitions
- Primary appraisal
- The first stage of evaluation, asking whether an event is relevant to the person's goals and concerns, and if so, whether it is benign/positive, irrelevant, or stressful. Stressful appraisals are further classified as harm/loss (damage that has already occurred), threat (anticipated harm), or challenge (anticipated harm that the person believes they can cope with). Primary appraisal determines whether an emotional response will be triggered and its basic valence.
- Secondary appraisal
- The evaluation of coping options and resources available to deal with the situation. Secondary appraisal asks: What can I do? Do I have the resources (internal or external) to cope with this? Whose fault is this? What will happen if I act? Secondary appraisal determines the specific emotion and its intensity: identical primary appraisals produce different emotions depending on what coping options the person perceives as available.
- Coping potential
- The person's evaluation of their ability to manage the demands of a stressful situation — either through problem-focused coping (acting on the situation) or emotion-focused coping (managing one's emotional response). Low perceived coping potential converts a challenge into a threat. The concept is central to Lazarus's transactional model of stress, which describes stress as arising from a mismatch between perceived demands and perceived coping resources.
- Relational meaning
- Lazarus's concept for the specific cognitive content underlying each discrete emotion. Each emotion is defined by a specific appraisal pattern — its "core relational theme." Anger = "a demeaning offence against me or mine"; anxiety = "facing an uncertain, existential threat"; guilt = "having transgressed a moral imperative"; sadness = "having experienced an irrevocable loss." These appraisal patterns are the proximate causes of the discrete emotions.