Affect, attitudes, and decisions: Let's be more specific

Focuses on the role of affect in attitudes and decision making. The authors discuss the role of affect in attitude-formation and -change processes and 2 issues that have played a role in this research: the distinction between affect-based and cognition-based attitudes and the effects of mood on persuasion. The authors focus on controlled information processing and continue with a discussion of the role of affect in expectancy-value models of behavior. It is argued that people anticipate post-behavioral affective consequences of their actions, and take these into account when deciding about their behavioral preferences. The inclusion of anticipated postbehavioral affective outcomes could improve the predictive validity of expectancy-value models. The authors also contrast research on affect and attitudes with research on behavioral decision making and specific affective determinants of behavior, such as anticipated regret. Antecedents of anticipated regret are discussed and the predictive validity of anticipated regret is tested. The authors show that it is easy to increase the salience of post-behavioral affective reactions such as regret and worry and that this salience has an impact on both behavioral intentions and self-reported behavior.