Defining Threats: Cognitive and Emotional Bases

Why do decision makers and citizens view some countries as threatening and other countries as relatively unthreatening? How stable is this sense of threat across time? In this paper we respond to these questions by developing and testing a model we refer to as the affective memory model which systematically integrates cognition, emotion and memory. The model predicts that factual knowledge of objects decays across time faster than affective evaluations and that new information is interpreted through the affective evaluation filter. If the individual is warm toward an object, he or she is more likely to accept new positive information and reject new negative information. The process is simply reversed when an object is disliked. Thus, the affective memory model predicts spiralling toward extremes rather than a rational decision making convergence on "truth." Using a series of laboratory experiments, we find strong support for the claim that factual knowledge decays more rapidly than affective attachment, but very little evidence that new information is filtered through an affective evaluation.