This article focuses on Bob Zajonc’s views on unconscious emotion, especially in the context of the debates about the independence of affect and cognition. Historically, Bob was always interested in the “mere”—basic, fundamental processes. His empirical demonstrations of precognitive and preconscious emotional processes, combined with his elegant expositions of them, sharply contrasted with cold and complex cognitive models. Interestingly, Bob tended to believe that whereas the causes of emotion can be unconscious, the emotional state itself tends to be conscious. However, (...) he reconsidered this assumption and in his later work showed that subjects in affective priming experiments do not experience conscious affect, but instead act on basic preferences. Today, Bob’s insights continue to inspire research on “unconscious emotion.”. (shrink)

Zajonc and Markus published a chapter in 1984 that proposed solutions to the difficult problem of modeling interactions between cognition and emotion. The most radical of their proposals was the importance of the motor system in information processing. These initial preoccupations, when wedded with the vascular theory of emotional efference (VTEE), propelled theory and research about how the face works to control emotion and to control interpersonal interaction. We discuss the development of Bob’s thinking about facial expression—facial efference is the (...) term he preferred—as he moved toward predictions that sounded radical at the time, and which these days sound like precursors to advances in neuroscience and psychology subsumed under the term “embodied cognition.”. (shrink)