Thought and Feeling: Cognitive Alteration of Feeling States

Recently there has been growing awareness and acceptance of the proposition that people do not exist in a world of physically defined forces and events, but in a world defined by their own perceptions, cognitions, conclusions, and imaginations. We respond and react not to some objectively defined set of stimuli, but to our own apperceptions of stimuli that we define subjectively. The original essays in this volume center on one aspect of this process of attribution: The extent to which the perception of events and causes results in the determination, modification, or alteration of emotions, feelings, and affective states.