Positive Emotion, Appraisal, and the Role of Appraisal Overlap in Positive Emotion Co-Occurrence (Tong & Jia 2017)
The experience-sampling companion to Tong (2015), and the file the are-appraisals-causes-or-descriptions debate page named as still pending — “one further appraisal paper remains in raw/… on present evidence it is unlikely to supply the missing manipulation either.” That prediction is confirmed. What the paper does supply is the thing the 2015 recall study could not: the appraisal profiles of positive emotions, captured in daily life as events happen, rather than reconstructed from memory.
(Filed as 2017 per the Emotion volume — Vol. 17, No. 1, 40–54 — though published Online First 11 July 2016; the same journal-volume convention the wiki used for Barrett (2017). Received Oct 2014, accepted May 2016. Second author Lile Jia, also NUS, is not given his own page — Tong is the appraisal specialist and lead; see eddie-tong.)
What is new here relative to Tong (2015)
Three things, in order of importance to the wiki.
1. The taxonomy survives the move out of the memory. Tong (2015)‘s single largest flagged limitation was that its recall-and-rate paradigm ‘invites concerns over memory biases and schematic responses’ — participants rated appraisals of a remembered emotion, so the correspondence could be ‘culturalised conceptual knowledge’ rather than lived experience. This study answers that specific worry with method: appraisals and emotions are rated within 15 minutes of a real event, sampled quasi-randomly across two ordinary days. 61 of 75 predictions replicate. The appraisal–emotion correspondence is not an artefact of reconstructing memories.
Be precise about how much this buys. It removes the memory-reconstruction component of the schematic-knowledge concern. It does not remove the deeper concern — that even an in-the-moment rating of “how much joy did you feel / how pleasant was this event” could apply the same learned associations. And it supplies no manipulation, so it says nothing about whether the appraisal produced the emotion. See the debate section below.
2. Appraisal overlap explains why positive emotions co-occur. This is the paper’s title contribution and its genuinely novel construct — appraisal-overlap. Positive emotions are notoriously entangled (they correlate far more than negative emotions do); the standard explanation is shared valence. Tong & Jia show, with an a-priori hypothesis-driven design, that two positive emotions co-occur to the extent they share their theoretically predicted appraisals — and that this holds even after pleasantness is stripped out, so co-occurrence is not merely a valence effect. See appraisal-overlap for the POA/NOA machinery and the four postulates.
3. A differentiator for contentment and joy. Tong (2015) reported that contentment and joy could be separated by no appraisal at all — the taxonomy’s clearest failure. Here the EMA data recover one: understandability. Joyful people rate the situation as understood; contented and serene people do not necessarily. It is a single thread, and Tong still allows that these emotions may differ only in intensity — but it is a real refinement of the earlier null, arrived at with a better method.
Why it still does not close the causes-or-descriptions debate
The debate page predicted this file would not supply the missing manipulation, and it does not. The paper is explicit — more explicit than Tong (2015):
Because appraisals can influence emotions and emotions can also shape appraisals, and also because the current study employed a nonexperimental paradigm, this article does not take a stand on the causal directionality between appraisals and emotions.
That sentence concedes the whole causal question and even grants bidirectionality (citing evidence that emotions bias subsequent appraisals). What the study demonstrates is real-time correspondence between appraisal and emotion — which Barrett’s descriptive reading (categorization produces both at once) predicts exactly as well as the causal reading (appraisals generate the emotion). EMA improves the quality of the correspondence evidence — it is now naturalistic, not remembered — without touching the mechanism dispute. The wiki’s position on causation is unchanged; its confidence that the appraisal taxonomy is empirically real, not a recall artefact, goes up. See are-appraisals-causes-or-descriptions.
The valence thread
The paper lands squarely on the wiki’s recurring valence-primacy finding, and lands on both sides of it, as Tong (2015) did.
For valence’s primacy: pleasantness is the appraisal on which positive emotions overlap most massively — dPleasantness is smaller than the overlap on all nonpredicted appraisals (η² = .94) and even smaller than the overlap on all other predicted appraisals combined (η² = .92). Those are enormous effects. Pleasantness is ‘the central unifying denominator underlying positive emotions.’
Against valence’s sufficiency: with pleasantness removed, the remaining predicted appraisals still carry co-occurrence structure (Postulates 3 and 4). Positive emotions are not merely a bag of pleasant states; they share specific nonpleasant appraisals, and those predict which ones travel together. And challenge — negatively related to pleasantness yet counted a positive emotion — shows valence cannot even assign the right sign.
This is the appraisal-theory image of the split core-affect documents from the interoceptive side: valence is where affect is grounded (the least-dispensable dimension) and not what individuates the emotions built on it. Held together with Tong (2015), the wiki now has two first-hand appraisal-theory sources delivering the identical dual message about valence, from recall and from experience sampling.
What the wiki gains, precisely
A second primary appraisal-theory source; the naturalistic replication that retires Tong (2015)‘s memory-bias caveat; a new construct (appraisal-overlap) linking appraisal structure to emotion co-occurrence; a refinement of the contentment≡joy null; and one more independent affirmation that pleasantness is the strongest but not the only organiser of positive emotion. What it does not gain — again — is any evidence that appraisals cause emotions, or any measurement of the body. See eddie-tong for the author and the tradition.