In this chapter, we review behavioral research connecting affective embodiment and evaluative cognition. We argue that affect and belief exist in a dynamic relationship. Evaluative beliefs elicit affective experience, and affective experience provides data for evaluative conception. We propose that such reciprocal relationships exist because emotions are, in part, embodiments of evaluation. That is, emotions exist when the same goodness or badness is represented simultaneously in multiple systems. Indeed, emotion is arguably nothing but the co-occurrence of evaluation in thought, feeling, physiology, expression, and so on. The embodied nature of some of these representations makes evaluative beliefs especially compelling. Thus, in contrast to a mere idea that something may be good or bad in some way, an emotion is an embodied commitment to such a reality.

Our general research program focuses on the idea that embodied affective reactions act as critical information for making judgments, guiding cognitive processing, and selecting events to remember. However, in this chapter we focus on how such embodiment serves to validate or invalidate evaluative beliefs. We also suggest that the impact of an idea in art often depends on its ability to elicit embodied reactions, that is, its ability to move people.

The experience of emotion has two discriminable components – valence and arousal (Barrett, this volume; Russell, 2003). In turn, these components are embodied representations of value and importance (Clore & Schnall, 2005).