title: On Elementary Affective Decisions: To Like Or Not to Like, That Is the Question.
abstract: Perhaps the most ubiquitous and basic affective decision of daily life is deciding whether we like or dislike something/somebody, or, in terms of psychological emotion theories, whether the object/subject has positive or negativevalence. Indeed, people constantly make such liking decisions within a glimpse and, importantly, often without expecting any obvious benefit or knowing the exact reasons for their judgment. In this paper, we review research on suchelementary affective decisions (EADs) that entail no direct overt reward with a special focus onNeurocognitive Poeticsand discuss methods and models for investigating the neuronal and cognitive-affective bases of EADs to verbal materials with differing degrees of complexity. In line with evolutionary and appraisal theories of (aesthetic) emotions and data from recent neurocognitive studies, the results of a decision tree modeling approach simulating EADs to single words suggest that a main driving force behind EADs is the extent to which such high-dimensional stimuli are associated with the "basic" emotions joy/happiness and disgust.
authors.affiliation: Department of Experimental and Neurocognitive Psychology, Freie Universität BerlinBerlin, Germany; Center for Cognitive Neuroscience, Freie Universität BerlinBerlin, Germany; Dahlem Institute for Neuroimaging of Emotion, Freie Universität BerlinBerlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Arthur
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Jacobs
authors.affiliation: Department of General and Biological Psychology, Bergische Universität Wuppertal Wuppertal, Germany.
authors.forename: Markus J
authors.initials: MJ
authors.lastname: Hofmann
authors.affiliation: Department of Education and Psychology, Freie Universität Berlin Berlin, Germany.
authors.forename: Annette
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Kinder
keywords: basic affective tone; beauty; decision tree modeling; elementary affective decisions; liking; ludic reading; neuroaesthetics; neurocognitive poetics