Running from William James' Bear: A Review of Preattentive Mechanisms and their Contributions to Emotional Experience

Abstract There is a growing consensus within the appraisal community that there are multiple levels of processing that contribute to emotional experience, and a number of multiprocess appraisal models have been developed. This paper examines the considerations that led to such models, examines the models in depth, and argues for a new multiprocess model. In particular, the distinction between schematic and conceptual processing, a centrepiece of many previous models, is extremely difficult to examine methodologically. Instead, this paper examines the role of preattentive mechanisms in the genesis of emotional reactions. It is claimed that fear and anxiety, but no other emotions, can be generated solely by unconscious processing, and that two distinct preattentive modules account for this dissociation. A good deal of research suggests that judgements of valence can be made preattentively, and this paper argues that the urgency of the stimulus is coded as well. When an urgency module signals that the situation is threatening, fear and anxiety are generated unconsciously. This allows for rapid behavioural reactions in situations in which such immediate responding is adaptive.