Affective integration in experience, judgment, and decision-making

Research on the role of affect in judgment and decision-making has attracted an increasing interest in recent decades. However, most current approaches ignore the temporal dependence of mental states and focus on effects rather than on mechanisms. This effectively leads to an approach of mapping a relatively well-defined, but largely static, feeling state to a tendency for a certain behavioral response. Expected and experienced consequences of actions are integrated over time into a unified overall affective experience reflecting current resources under current demands. This affective integration is shaped by contextual factors and continually modulates judgments and decisions. Here, based on a few promising recent empirical and theoretical advances, we advocate for an approach to studying the role of affect in judgment and decision-making that integrates affective dynamics into decision-making paradigms and explicitly models the temporal variation in decision processes that result from changing affective states. This approach, by identifying the key variables explaining how changes in affect influence information processing, may provide new insights into the role of affective dynamics in behavior.