In the same 1984 model, Lazarus and Folkman named a second judgement that runs alongside the first. Secondary appraisal is the assessment of resources and options: what can I do about this, what will it cost me, will it work, who will help. It is not second in time; the two appraisals interact continuously. The pairing is what matters. High threat plus a judgement that you have options produces effortful, focused action. High threat plus a judgement that nothing you do will change the outcome produces anxiety that turns into passivity, and it is the reason two people who lost the same job on the same day behave completely differently in week three. Secondary appraisal is also where controllability enters the model, and controllability is the variable that later research kept finding to be decisive: it determines which kind of coping helps, and it is the exact quantity that the learned-helplessness literature is about. This node is definitional; it cites the primary theoretical source and carries no effect size of its own. What you can do with it: when you catch a threat appraisal, you can make the second judgement explicit and ask which parts of this situation actually respond to my actions and which do not, rather than leaving the answer implicit.
Cognitive appraisal theory, developed by Richard Lazarus and Susan Folkman, holds that emotional responses are determined not by events themselves but by an individual's interpretation and evaluation…