Affect, Attitudes and Decisions: Let's Be More Specific

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the role of affect in attitudes and decision-making. First we will briefly discuss the role of affect in attitude-formation and -change processes. Two issues have played an important role in this research area: first, the distinction between affect-based and cognition-based attitudes; second, the effects of mood on persuasion. Generally these traditions rely on a crude dichotomy between positive and negative affect and rather general, holistic measures of affect. Moreover, these traditions tend to emphasize automatic information processing. We focus on controlled information processing and continue with a discussion of the role of affect in expectancy-value models of behaviour such as Ajzen's theory of planned behaviour. Affect received only limited attention in these models. It will be argued that people anticipate post-behavioural affective consequences of their actions, and take these into account when deciding about their behavioural preferences. We will argue that the inclusion of anticipated postbehavioural affective outcomes could improve the predictive validity of expectancy-value models. Next, we will contrast research on affect and attitudes with research on behavioural decision-making. The latter area tends to focus on more specific affective determinants of behaviour. One of these is anticipated regret. Antecedents of anticipated regret will be discussed and the predictive validity of anticipated regret will be tested in the context of Ajzen's theory of planned behaviour. Finally we will show that it is relatively easy to increase the salience of postbehavioural affective reactions such as regret and worry and that this increased salience has an impact on both behavioural intentions and self-reported behaviour. Implications for the study of affect in expectancy-value models of behaviour will be briefly discussed.