According to the distinguished philosopher Richard Wollheim, an emotion is an extended mental episode that originates when events in the world frustrate or satisfy a pre-existing desire (Wollheim, 1999). This leads the subject to form an attitude to the world which colors their future experience, leading them to attend to one aspect of things rather than another, and to view the things they attend to in one light rather than another. The idea that emotions arise from the satisfaction or frustration of desires - the ‘match-mismatch’ view of emotion etiology - has had several earlier incarnations in the psychology of emotion 2. Early versions of this proposal were associated with the attempt to replace the typology of emotion found in ordinary language with a simpler theory of drives and to define new emotion types in terms of general properties such as the frustration of a drive. The match-mismatch view survived the demise of that revisionist project and is found today in theories that accept a folk-psychological-style taxonomy of emotion types based on the meaning ascribed by the subject to the stimulus situation. For example, the match-mismatch view forms part of the subtle and complex model of emotion episodes developed over many years by Nico Frijda (Frijda, 1986). According to Frijda, information about the ‘situational antecedents’ of an emotion - the stimulus in its context, including the ongoing goals of the organism - is evaluated for its relevance to the multiple concerns of the organism. Evaluation of match-mismatch - the degree of compatibility between the situation and the subject’s goals - forms part of this process.

The result of the evaluation process is an understanding of the situation in terms of the possible actions it affords and the urgency of adopting a course of action. This understanding may in turn initiate physiological changes readying the organism for action and the formation of dispositions to act on various anticipated contingencies. Each stage of the emotion process is regulated by cognitive activity outside the emotion process itself, and the whole emotion process operates in a ‘continual updating’ mode leading to a varied emotion episode, rather than ‘running its course’ to result in a single emotion. Many other ‘cognitive appraisal’ theories of emotion share Frijda’s conception of an ongoing process of evaluation with feedback and hence are theories of emotion episodes rather than theories of the elicitation of a single emotion. But at the heart of all these models are claims about the features of the emotion-eliciting situation that lead to the production of one emotion or another at some point in the episode. These claims are usually expressed as a set of dimensions against which the situation is assessed, one of which often corresponds to match-mismatch. Many theorists label points in the resulting evaluation hyperspace with the names of emotion categories, which would seem to imply that the type-identity of an emotion is determined by the evaluation process.