Affect and Emotion

Research on affect and emotion is interested in how feelings influence and are influenced by social cognition. Where different situations can evoke different emotions and how the same situation can evoke different emotions in different people.

Affect
When there is a demand on an individual they use the resources available to them to deal with the demand. If the resources available equal or exceed the perceived demand, the individual will be motivated and challenged. Avoidance behaviours will however be felt by the individual if the resources are felt to be inadequate to meet the demand. (This can play a major role in producing anxiety in individuals)

Affect-infusion model: the effects of mood on social cognition/social judgements reflect current mood.

There are four ways in which people process information about one another (Forgas):

1. Direct access (directly accessing the schemas or judgments stored in memory
2. Motivated processing (forming a judgement on the basis of specific motivations to achieve a goal
3. Heuristic processing (rely on cognitive short cuts or heuristics)
4. Substantive processing (carefully and deliberately make a judgement from numerous sources