ABSTRACT
Surprisingly, the scientific study of affective influences on social judgments is a fairly recent development. Kaplan and Anderson presented an early critique of the conditioning theory of interpersonal attraction, arguing for an information integration model of affective influences on social judgments instead. Bower as well as Isen proposed that many affective influences on social judgments may be explained in terms of emotional states facilitating the accessing and retrieval of similar or related cognitive categories. Specific contextual and task variables, such as the target of judgments, or the judgmental dimension used, were found to interact with the universal priming effect predicted by affect-cognition models. The various priming formulations and their elaborations provided perhaps the most influential conceptual framework for exploring emotional influences on social judgments to date.
