Affect, Memory, and Social Cognition

Abstract

Since time immemorial, philosophers, writers, and artists have sought to under stand how and why our feelings and emotions come to influence our memories, thoughts, and judgments. Indeed, clarifying the relationship between such basic mental faculties as affect, cognition, and conation remains a perennial goal in psychology (Hilgard, 1980). Surprisingly, most psychological research in this century proceeded on the implicit assumption that affect, cognition, and conation can be studied as separate, independent features of the human mind. Of the two paradigms that have dominated our discipline so far, neither behaviorism nor cognitivism have traditionally paid much attention to the study of affect. Early work exploring the links between affect and cognition relied either on psychoanalytic principles such as projection (Feshbach & Singer, 1957) or on conditioning theories (Clore & Byrne, 1974; Griffitt, 1970) to account for the apparent infusion of affectively valenced material into our memories, thoughts, and judgments. During the past decade or so, interest in the role of affect in cognition and behavior has increased dramatically. Contemporary theories are predominantly based on cognitive principles to explain affect infusion (Bower, 1981, 1991; Clore, Schwarz, & Conway, 1994; Fiedler, 1990,1991; Forgas, 1992b, 1995a, 1998a, 1998b, 1998c, Kruglanski, 1989). In this chapter, we discuss some of the influences of affective states on cognitive processes, especially those involved in memory and judgment.