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Affect and Cognition
The distinction between affect and cognition has been studied extensively. A cognitive concept used
in psychology research is appraisal, which refers to one's perception of an object's qualities such as
its future prospects, its relevance to one's goals, its causal antecedents, and so on (Russell, 2003).
Traditional psychological theories insist that affect is “post-cognitive”; that is, it occurs only when
considerable cognitive operations have been accomplished (Zajonc, 1980). Zajonc (1980) drew a
picture depicting a “typical information-processing model of affect,” in which an affective reaction,
such as liking, disliking, preference, evaluation, or the experience of pleasure or displeasure, is
“based on a prior cognitive process in which a variety of content discriminations are made and fea-
tures are identified, examined for their value, and weighted for their contribution” (p. 151). For
example, a classic psychological theory, the theory of reasoned action (Fishbein and Ajzen, 1975),
posits that cognitive beliefs predict individuals' attitude, which has an affective component.
The second paradigm on affect-cognition relationships, however, argues that affect and cogni-
tion are “separate and partially independent systems” (Zajonc, 1984). Affect could precede cog-
nitive process in a behavioral chain. Or, in Zajonc's words, preferences need no inferences (1980).
Berkowitz's three-step theory about how affect and cognition interact to influence behavior goes
further and identifies two distinct types of affect: low-order affective reactions and high-order
affective reactions (Berkowitz, 1993). While a low-order affective reaction is elicited by “rela-
tively basic and automatic associative processes” (Berkowitz, 1993), a high-order affective reac-
tion comes from a more deliberate cognitive processing. Therefore, affect may occur either before
or after cognitive processing. Consistent with this theory, Epstein (1993) created cognitive-
experiential self-theory (CEST), in which affect (called experiential system) and cognition (called
rational system) operate in parallel.
All these theories share a single opinion that affect and cognition are interdependent. Even
Zajonc's theory, which addresses affect's independence from cognition, admits that affect and
cognition are just “partially” independent from each other and they usually “function conjointly”
(1982). Similarly, Berkowitz (1993) argues in his theory that high-order affect arises from con-
trolled, deliberate processes involved in thinking, reasoning, and consciousness. Leventhal (1984)
suggests that affect arises from two sources, one of which is “a memory route” that involves cog-
nitive and conceptual processing.
While the second paradigm seems more convincing and actually has become more and more
accepted by researchers in psychology and other relevant fields, the first paradigm has also received
theoretical and empirical support. Actually, we can regard the first paradigm on the cognition
affect causal flow as a part of the relationship between cognition and affect. Therefore, the next
question is: How are affect and cognitive interdependent, and specifically, under what circumstance
does affect influence cognition, or vice versa? Several theories tried to answer this question by intro-
ducing various moderators representing a variety of conditions.
Affect infusion model (AIM) (Forgas, 1995) identified four processing strategies, in which
affect may have different influences on cognition, such as performance appraisal, reactions to
feedback, and task perceptions. Affect infusion refers to “the process whereby affectively loaded
information exerts an influence on and becomes incorporated into the judgmental process, enter-
ing into the judge's deliberations and eventually coloring the judgmental outcome” (p. 39). One
mechanism of interest is affect priming, which implies that affect may indirectly influence judg-
ments during substantive processing through its selective influence on attention, encoding,
retrieval, and associative processes in a way similar to mood-congruence. Specifically, affect can
selectively facilitate the learning of mood-congruent information, facilitate the recall of information
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