Author:

Abstract:

To accommodate the observation that emotions can arise spontaneously, appraisal theorists have argued that emotion-antecedent appraisal can be automatic (Frijda, 1993; Scherer, 1993). Previous studies support the automaticity of individual appraisal variables such as novelty, goal relevance, intrinsic valence, and goal conduciveness. To study the automaticity of coping potential, we developed a variant of the sequential priming task in which primes are events in a pacman game (signaling low or high coping potential) and targets are words. I describe the first results obtained with this task. I also discuss the difficulty to disentangle coping potential and valence.