Richard Lazarus

American psychologist (1922–2002)

Richard S. Lazarus (March 3, 1922 – November 24, 2002) was an American psychologist who began rising to prominence in the 1960s. A Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Lazarus as the 80th most cited psychologist of the 20th century. He was well renowned for his theory of cognitive mediational theory within emotion.

After graduating from City College of New York and the University of Pittsburgh, Lazarus joined the faculty at the University of California, Berkeley in 1957. During the 1970s, Lazarus worked with PhD student Susan Folkman studying stress and coping. In her doctoral thesis, Folkman coined the terms "problem focused coping" and "emotion focused coping." Lazarus and Folkman co authored a book called "Stress, Appraisal and Coping" in 1984, which worked through the theory of psychological stress, using concepts of Cognitive appraisal and coping. In this book, they were the first to make the distinction between "problem focused coping" and "emotion focused coping" which could result in consequences for both physical and mental health. They described "emotion focused coping" as dealing with stress by regulating one's emotions and "problem focused coping" as "directly changing the elements of the stressful situation".

Lazarus advocated the importance of emotion, especially what he described as the marriage between emotion and thought. His views put him at odds not only with behaviorism but also with a movement that began toward the end of his career: attempts to explain all human behavior by looking at the structure of the brain. He was very opposed to reductionist approaches to understanding human behavior. Lazarus' cognitive mediational theory maintained that the interaction between emotion eliciting conditions and coping processes affect the cognitions that drive emotional reactions. At the heart of Lazarus's theory was what he called appraisal. Before emotion occurs, he argued, people make an automatic, often unconscious, assessment of what is happening and what it may mean for them or those they care about. From that perspective, emotion becomes not just rational but a necessary component of survival. According to Lazarus, there are two kinds of appraisal: primary appraisal, which is aimed at establishing the significance of an event's meaning to the organism; and, secondary appraisal, which assesses the ability of the organism to cope with the consequences of the event.

Lazarus (1991) defines emotions according to 'core relational themes' which are intuitive summaries of the 'moral appraisals' (e. g. of relevance, goal conduciveness) involved in different emotions. These themes help define both the function and eliciting conditions of the emotion. They include:

Anger a demeaning offense against me and mine. Fear facing an immediate, concrete, and overwhelming physical danger. Sadness having experienced an irrevocable loss. Disgust taking in or being too close to an indigestible object or idea (metaphorically speaking). Happiness making reasonable progress toward the realization of a goal.