Richard Lazarus

This article covers the evolution of thought about the nature of emotion and its causation as reflected in the work of Richard S. Lazarus, winner of the 1991 Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award by the American Psychological Association. Lazarus’s work was exceptionally impactful in so far as it resuscitated the study of emotion which had largely disappeared from psychology. Lazarus’s thinking was powerfully affected by the Greek philosopher Aristotle, and his personal appreciation of the power of psychoanalytic theory for clarifying the nature of human emotion. His work began from studying unconscious cognitive recognition of nonsense syllables conditioned to shock and progressed to studying how instructional sets were powerful cognitive determinants of emotion elicited by films. Next, he focused on the elaboration on components of coping considered by Lazarus to be critical for the regulation of emotion. Lazarus’s thinking was sharpened in a debate with the social scientist Robert Zajonc—a debate that led to the expansion of Lazarus’s explanation of the origins of emotion and cognition with a link to motivation and their implications for interactions between the emoting person and the social and physical world. The entry presents a climax of Lazarus’s thinking in what he called patterns of appraisal in the generation of emotions such as anger and pride. It ends with the citation of books reflecting elaborations of Lazarus’s theorizing in the work of other emotion researchers.