ABSTRACT
It was the seminal work of Lazarus and his colleagues which brought the role of cognitive appraisal to prominence in stress research. Lazarus sees appraisal as the process that mediates or actively negotiates between environmental demands and resources and the goal hierarchy and personal beliefs of the person. Lazarus defines appraisal as a negotiation between demands and the goal hierarchy and personal beliefs of the person, thus identifying the role of motivation and existing cognitions in the process. In terms of personal beliefs or existing cognitions we are concerned essentially with the attribution of meaning and the phenomic world which the person has constructed to that point in time. The approach of Lazarus and colleagues was heavily influenced by the expectancy-value perspective, which was popular in social cognition in the early 1970s, and this influence is clear in their identification of motivation and beliefs as the central aspects of cognitive-mediational processes.
