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ABSTRACT: Affect is considered by most contempo-rary theories to be postcognitive, that is, to occur only after considerable cognitive operations have been ac-complished. Yet a number of experimental results on preferences, attitudes, impression formation, and de-_ cision making, as well as some clinical phenomena, suggest that affective judgments may be fairly inde-pendent of, and precede in time, the sorts of percep-tual and cognitive operations commonly assumed to be the basis of these affective judgments. Affective re-actions to stimuli are often the very first reactions of the organism, and for lower organisms they are the dominant reactions. Affective reactions can occur without extensive perceptual and cognitive encoding, are made with greater confidence than cognitive judg-
Robert B. Zajonc (Fri,) studied this question.