Many psychologists think that there are few basic emotions, and most emotions are combinations of these few. Here we advance a hypothesis that the number of principally different emotions is near infinite. We consider emotions as mental states with hedonic content, indicating satisfaction and dissatisfaction. Basic emotions correspond to bodily signals, and there are relatively few of them. Our...

People like to feel good about past decisions. This paper models selfjusti…cation of past decisions. The model is axiomatic: axioms are de…ned on preference over ex ante actions (modeled formally by menus). The representation of preference admits the interpretation that the agent adjusts beliefs after taking an action so as to be more optimistic about its possible consequences. In particular, t...

Cognitive dissonance is one of the most influential theories in social psychology, and its oldest experiential realization is choice-induced dissonance. Since 1956, dissonance theorists have claimed that people rationalize past choices by devaluing rejected alternatives and upgrading chosen ones, an effect known as the spreading of preferences. Here, I show that every study which has tested thi...

The article deals with the problem of cognitive dissonance that represents itself as discrepancy between bases communicants, exteriorized at level language. Cognitive may be caused by various reasons, including linguistic ones connected inappropriate choice language means and communicative strategies, well social other extralinguistic factors, which refer to semantic conceptual incompatibility ...

Cognitive dissonance is one of the most influential theories in social psychology, and its oldest experiential realization is choice-induced dissonance. Since 1956, dissonance theorists have claimed that people rationalize past choices by devaluing rejected alternatives and upgrading chosen ones, an effect known as the spreading of preferences. Here, I show that every study which has tested thi...

The consonance constraint-satisfaction model, which has simulated the major paradigms of classical cognitive dissonance theory, is here extended to deal with more contemp orary findings concerning self-affirmation phenomena in dissonance reduction. The key addition to the model, which has also figured in recent simulations of arousal phenomena, is to lessen activity level within the neural netw...