ABSTRACT
C onsider the two most famous characters from the TV series Star Trek, Captain Kirk and Mr. Spock. Mr. Spock, a “Vulcan” allegedly unable to experience emotions, bases his judgments and his behavior on a thoughtful consideration of the situation and on a rational integration of the relevant information. In contrast, Captain Kirk's thinking, judgment, and behavior seem often to be influenced by his affective states. Quite in line with Mr. Spock's view, the early approaches in psychology proposed that affect serves to reduce individuals' ability to think rationally, thus impairing their judgments and decisions (for an overview see Forgas, 2000). Research conducted within the last three decades, though, conveys a fundamentally different picture. Affective states need not create irrational behavior but may rather provide a very useful source of information, signals, and motives that are essential for adaptive regulation of cognitive processes and behavior. By “regulation”—the core concept of this chapter—we refer to all kinds of adjustment processes that serve to keep stimuli and reactions within an appropriate range, and to prevent them from exceeding critical boundaries. Regulatory processes occur in various dimensions, such as the intensity and density of stimuli, adjusting social and physical distance, optimal time or effort expenditure, or establishing an acceptable range of behaviors on the conformity versus deviance dimension, or on the novelty versus familiarity dimension.
