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Cognitive-Affective Processing System

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Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences

Synonyms

Beliefs; Emotions; Processing goals

Definition

While the distinction between emotions and reason dates back to Aristotle (1954), contemporary social psychologists have continued to rely on this distinction, especially in the domain of attitudes and persuasion. That is, people’s affect (e.g., feeling happy) and cognition (e.g., belief about usefulness) have been conceptualized as separate components or bases of overall attitudes, which refer to the global evaluations of issues, objects, persons, or groups on a valence dimension ranging from negative to positive (e.g., Rosenberg and Hovland 1960; Zanna and Rempel 1988). In addition, much empirical evidence has demonstrated that affect (i.e., emotions) and cognition (i.e., beliefs) contribute to unique variances in attitudes (e.g., Abelson et al. 1982; Breckler 1984; Crites et al. 1994; Trafimow and Sheeran 1998). Importantly, there are no assumptions about the mental effort that is requiredto process emotions or beliefs. That...

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. National University of Singapore, Singapore, Singapore

    Ya Hui Michelle See

Authors
  1. Ya Hui Michelle See
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Correspondence to Ya Hui Michelle See .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Oakland University, Rochester, MI, USA

    Virgil Zeigler-Hill

  2. Oakland University, Rochester, MI, USA

    Todd K. Shackelford

Section Editor information

  1. Division of Social Sciences, New College of Florida, Sarasota, FL, USA

    Catherine Cottrell

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See, Y.H.M. (2020). Cognitive-Affective Processing System. In: Zeigler-Hill, V., Shackelford, T.K. (eds) Encyclopedia of Personality and Individual Differences. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-24612-3_1788

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