A Quantum Probability Model for the Constructive Influence of Affective Evaluation

People experience simple affective evaluations every day. Commonplace events, such as listening to breakfast radio, deliberating over what to have for lunch, or unwinding in front of the television in the evening, all have the potential to generate a positive or negative affective impression, depending on how we feel about the music on the radio, the menu choices, or the television program we are watching. Affective evaluation is a fundamental and basic activity of the human cognitive system and is central to most theories of cognition and emotion (Musch and Klauer 2003). Research on affective priming suggests that affective evaluations can be formed automatically, independently of other cognitive processes, without fully processing the features of the stimulus and can be generated in response to novel stimuli (e.g., Bargh et al. 1992; Damasio 1994; Duckworth et al. 2002; Fazio et al. 1986; Greenwald et al. 1989; LeDoux 1996; Zajonc 1980). What is perhaps more surprising is that the process of articulating an affective evaluation might also be constructive. That is, the simple affective impression that we might form in response to music, food, or a television program, can alter relevant representations depending on whether or not we are required to state our affective impression. This was the main premise in recent research by White et al. (2013, 2014), which was inspired by cognitive applications of quantum probability (QP) theory.