How Incidental Affect Alters Subsequent Judgments: Insights From Behavioral, fMRI, and Psychophysiology Studies

People do not have stable, coherent and readily accessible preferences that can be reliably measured through self-report. Instead, judgments are constructed on the spot and recent, contextual factors exert a disproportionate influence on judgments (Payne, Bettman, and Johnson, 1992; Slovic, 1995). These contextual influences include feelings that are unrelated to the judgment (such as moods, emotions, and expectation of receiving a reward, Schwarz & Clore 1983, Cohen, Pham & Andrade 2008). Why is the brain susceptible to these types of rewards that engender such changes in revealed preferences? To address this question, we studied the impact of incidental affect on behavioral measures of experienced value (studies 1-3) and the neural representation of experienced value (study 2), an essential computation in the process of value-based decision-making.