ABSTRACT
Homo sapiens is a gregarious species, and coordinating our interpersonal behaviors can be a demanding cognitive task. Most interpersonal communication is imbued with affect. Every social encounter can influence our affective state, and affect in turn plays an important role in how we communicate and use language (see also Chapter 5, this volume). It is surprising to note that until recently, social and cognitive psychologists have remained uninterested in the role that affect plays in interpersonal communication. The importance of affect in social life was only rediscovered in the early 1980s (Bower, 1980; Zajonc, 1980), and the past few decades saw a dramatic increase in experimental research on affect by social psychologists. This chapter reviews a series of experiments demonstrating that affective states have an important and often adaptive influence on the way people produce and respond to social communication. Further, it is argued that the communicative consequences of affect may be best understood by analyzing the cognitive information processing consequences of affective states.
