The Belief–Desire Appraisal Theory of Emotion

ABSTRACT

I introduce the Belief–Desire Appraisal Theory of Emotion (BDA). BDA makes three main claims: (a) Emotions are psychological episodes whose paradigmatic instances are constituted by coordinated changes in appraisals, action tendencies, bodily responses, and subjective feelings; (b) appraisals—which are rapid, low‐level evaluations of situational relevance to one's concerns—drive and explain the changes in the other components; and (c) appraisals are operations on belief–desire pairs (this is BDA's central claim). Thus, BDA treats belief–desire pairs as the central explanatory components of emotions. This enables unificatory and parsimonious explanations of psychological phenomena across philosophy and cognitive science.