Richard S. Lazarus was a psychologist who began rising to prominence in the 1960s, when behaviorists

Behaviorism

Behaviorism , also called the learning perspective , is a philosophy of psychology based on the proposition that all things that organisms do—including acting, thinking, and feeling—can and should be regarded as behaviors, and that psychological disorders are best treated by altering behavior...

 like B. F. Skinner

B. F. Skinner

Burrhus Frederic Skinner was an American behaviorist, author, inventor, baseball enthusiast, social philosopher and poet...

 held sway over psychology and explanations for human behavior were often pared down to rudimentary motives

Motivation

Motivation is the driving force by which humans achieve their goals. Motivation is said to be intrinsic or extrinsic. The term is generally used for humans but it can also be used to describe the causes for animal behavior as well. This article refers to human motivation...

 like reward and punishment

Punishment (psychology)

In operant conditioning, punishment is any change in a human or animal's surroundings that occurs after a given behavior or response which reduces the likelihood of that behavior occurring again in the future. As with reinforcement, it is the behavior, not the animal, that is punished...

. In that world, love or sadness existed, but were considered more ornamental than underpinning.

Lazarus was a professor in the Department of Psychology

Psychology

Psychology is the study of the mind and behavior. Its immediate goal is to understand individuals and groups by both establishing general principles and researching specific cases. For many, the ultimate goal of psychology is to benefit society...

 at the University of California

University of California

The University of California is a public university system in the U.S. state of California. Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the University of California is a part of the state's three-tier public higher education system, which also includes the California State University...

, Berkeley

University of California, Berkeley

The University of California, Berkeley , is a teaching and research university established in 1868 and located in Berkeley, California, USA...

 who was named by American Psychologist as one of the most influential psychologists. He was a pioneer in the study of emotion

Emotion

Emotion is a complex psychophysiological experience of an individual's state of mind as interacting with biochemical and environmental influences. In humans, emotion fundamentally involves "physiological arousal, expressive behaviors, and conscious experience." Emotion is associated with mood,...

 and stress

Stress (medicine)

Stress is a term in psychology and biology, borrowed from physics and engineering and first used in the biological context in the 1930s, which has in more recent decades become commonly used in popular parlance...

, especially their relation to cognition

Cognition

In science, cognition refers to mental processes. These processes include attention, remembering, producing and understanding language, solving problems, and making decisions. Cognition is studied in various disciplines such as psychology, philosophy, linguistics, and computer science...

.

He was well renowned for his theory of cognitive-mediational theory within emotion.

Lazarus was an unabashed promoter of 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

Reductionism

Reductionism can mean either an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts, or to simpler or more fundamental things or a philosophical position that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts, and that an account of it can...

 approaches to understanding human behavior.

At the heart of Lazarus's theory was what he called appraisal

Appraisal theory

Appraisal theory is the idea that emotions are extracted from our evaluations of events that cause specific reactions in different people. Essentially, our appraisal of a situation causes an emotional, or affective, response that is going to be based on that appraisal. An example of this is going...

. 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.

Lazarus liked to take on topics such as hope and gratitude. He was perhaps best known for his work on coping

Coping (psychology)

Coping has been defined in psychological terms by Susan Folkman and Richard Lazarus as "constantly changing cognitive and behavioral efforts to manage specific external and/or internal demands that are appraised as taxing" or "exceeding the resources of the person".Coping is thus expending...

, gaining attention for studies that showed that patients who engaged in denial about the seriousness of their situation did better than those who were more
"realistic." He also found that stress often had less to do with a person's actual situation than with how the person perceived the strength of his own resources.http://www.lists.ufl.edu/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ind0212&L=psyaging-l&T=0&P=1925

He wrote 13 books, five after he retired in 1991. One book, Passion and Reason: Making Sense of Our Emotions, was written with his wife of 57 years, Bernice Lazarus. They had two children, son, David, and a daughter, Nancy.

Emotion definition

Lazarus (1991) defines emotions according to 'core relational themes' which are intuitive summaries of the 'molar 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.

Known publications

• Adjustment and Personality, 1961
• Personality and adjustment, 1963, Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall.
• The Nature of Psychological Inquiry, 1964
• Psychological stress and the coping process, 1966, New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Personality, 1971, (2nd edition) Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall.
• Patterns of adjustment and human effectiveness, 1968, New York: McGraw-Hill.
• Patterns of adjustment, 1976, (3rd edition), New York: McGraw-Hill.
• "A cognitively oriented psychologist looks at biofeedback". American Psychologist. 30 (5), 553-561
• "On the primacy of cognition". American Psychologist, 1984. 39 (2) 124-129
• The riddle of man: An introduction to psychology,, Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice-Hall.
• Emotion and adaptation, 1991, New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0195092660
• The life and work of an eminent psychologist, 1998, New York: Springer. ISBN 978-0826111791
• Coping with aging, 2005, Oxford University Press, USA (December 23, 2005) ISBN 978-0195173024
• with Monat, Alan Personality, 1979, (3rd edition) Englewood Cliff, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
• with Folkman, Susan Stress, appraisal, and coping, 1984, New York: Springer Pub. Co ISBN 978-0826141910
• with Folkman, Susan Manual for the Hassles and uplifts scales Research edition., 1989, Palo Alto, Calif.: Consulting Psychologists Press.
• "Why We Should Think of Stress as a Subset of Emotion", in Handbook of Stress: Theoretical and Clinical Aspects, 2nd ed., L Goldberger and S. Breznitz (ed), New York, N.Y., Free Press, 1993.
• with Lazarus, Bernice N Passion and Reason: Making Sense of Our Emotions, 1994, Passion and reason: Making sense of our emotions New York: Oxofrd University Press ISBN 978-0195104615
• Fifty years of the research and theory of R.S. Lazarus: An analysis of historical and perennial issues, 1998, Mahwah, N.J.: Lawerence Erlbaum Associates. ISBN 978-0805826579
• Stress and emotion: A new synthesis, 1999, New York: Springer Pub. Co. ISBN 978-0826102614