ABSTRACT
The antecedents of social judgment are so numerous as to make the prediction of an individual’s impression of another person, or change in the impression over time, a frustrating exercise. Affective reactions may be mediated by the matching of basic visual features, or patterns, of the event to their corresponding mental representations; and this connection may be learned, or innate. The distinction between affective reaction and constructs such as mood, emotion, and evaluation can be made on a number of different dimensions. Moods are relatively protracted feeling states that affect a variety of cognitive and behavioral responses. Affective reactions also differ from emotions. This distinction may be made in terms of their necessary antecedents. A final, related construct, evaluation, is typically equated with purer forms of cognition.
