Appraisal Theory occupies a significant, if sometimes contested, position in the depth-psychology corpus, functioning as the conceptual bridge between cognitive evaluation and emotional response. Across the texts assembled here, it appears primarily as a framework for explaining how organisms — human and otherwise — assign meaning and valence to events, thereby generating differentiated emotional states. Siegel draws on appraisal processes to map how the developing brain moves from primary orientation to elaborative valuation, linking appraisal directly to hedonic tone, arousal, and the formation of emotional states predisposing action. Ogden situates appraisal within trauma theory, noting how traumatic expectation disrupts the extended, revisable appraisal that healthy orienting requires. Pargament grounds appraisal in Lazarus’s stress-and-coping framework, tracing how primary and secondary appraisals shape emotional quality — anger, guilt, sadness — according to specific evaluative configurations. Lench and Roseman develop the most formally articulated position, proposing a multi-dimensional appraisal structure in which combinations of motivational, probabilistic, agentive, and control-related dimensions sort situations into emotion categories. Schore locates related processes in the orbitofrontal cortex’s ‘valence tagging’ function. The central tension across the corpus is between evolutionary, hard-wired appraisal mechanisms and the plasticity of learned evaluative schemas — a tension with direct implications for psychopathology, coping, and therapeutic change.