Current theories of infant fear emphasize the importance of the infant's cognitive appraisal of threat (e.g., Campos & Stenberg, 1981; Sroufe, Waters, & Matas, 1974). Rather than arguing that the infant responds primarily to the arousing properties of a stimulus, these theories propose that the infant, by the end of the first year, actively evaluates and assigns meaning to events. Some form of active appraisal seems necessary to explain why the same event can sometimes elicit fear and sometimes laughter (Sroufe et al., 1974). However, without an understanding of the factors that enter into the infant's appraisal of threat, appraisal theory does not provide a satisfying explanation for why the infant finds some events scary and others pleasurable.