Associations of Fear, Anger, Happiness, and Hope With Risk Judgments: Revisiting Appraisal-Tendency Framework With a Replication and Extensions Registered Report of Lerner and Keltner (2001)

The appraisal-tendency framework proposed that specific emotions predispose individuals to appraise future events corresponding to the core appraisal themes of the emotions. In a registered report with a U.S. American online Amazon Mechanical Turk CloudResearch sample (N = 780), we conducted an independent close replication of Experiments 1, 2, and 3 in Lerner and Keltner (2001). We found support for the appraisal-tendency framework for risk optimism in general, risk optimism for positive events, and risk optimism for ambiguous events, but not for risk preference and risk optimism for negative events. Extending the replication, we added hope as a positive-valence dispositional emotion with low certainty and control and failed to find support for the assumptions of the appraisal-tendency framework.