ABSTRACT
Research on affect and social cognition has been one of the most active areas of exploration in psychology during the 1980s and the 1990s (Forgas, 2000). This interest started with the discovery, documentation, and theoretical explanation of affect congruence phenomena is the early 1980s. The associative network model (Bower, 1981) provided perhaps the first truly integrative theoretical treatment of these effects. However, by the mid-1980s there was a clear recognition that affect congruence in cognition and judgments is a context-dependent phenomenon, and several competing theoretical explanations for affect congruence or its absence in cognition were proposed. By the late 1980s, the information-processing consequences of affective states also received growing attention. The third period, still continuing today, is marked by the emergence of integrative theoretical models seeking to account for both the informational and processing consequences of affect and for both affect congruence and incongruence within a comprehensive framework.
