On the Relationship between Affect and Cognition

Abstract

The relationship between affect and cognition was explored by means of an attitude instrument, the implicative meaning (IM) procedure. The instrument was developed as a measure of attitudinal cognition, but it bears considerable resemblance to other procedures that have been hypothesized to be indirect measures of attitudinal affect. Two samples of Ss (Ns of 75 and 84) and 12 attitude objects were studied. The correlations between IM scores and an independent measure of affect were low (sample means of .39 and .45). In terms of variance controlled, the majority of correlations controlled, at best, only 25% to 40% of the reliable common variance, indicating a lack of equivalence. These data support a conceptualization of attitude which distinguishes affect from cognition.

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