On Being Annoyed

What is it that unites episodes of the emotion of annoyance? The paper considers possible analyses of the content of the state of annoyance, and concludes that this emotion should be understood to involve a negative construal of an object, event, or state of affairs as having failed to exemplify one of a suite of kinds of everyday quality or excellence. This account permits us to see what is common to a varied range of superficially‐disjointed emotional responses, and to make sense of the conditions under which annoyance is appropriate or inappropriate. Moreover, it reveals something of what we care about in everyday and social contexts, in our ordinary dealings with persons and artefacts.