John T. Cacioppo & Gary G. Berntson (1994), Psychological Bulletin 115(3):401–423 — DOI-10.1037/0033-2909.115.3.401
Key takeaways
Registered, not read. According to the authors’ 2010 review (LIT-1438), this paper is where the following ideas start:
- The bivariate evaluative plane. Positive and negative activation are two axes. A reciprocal diagonal runs from pure positivity to pure negativity, and a coactivity diagonal runs from low-low (neutral) to high-high (ambivalent).
- The response surface. A net predisposition toward or away from the target, over the plane. Its isocontours make the mapping many-to-one, so neutral and ambivalent states produce the same middling output. The 2010 review’s Figure 2 is “Adapted from Cacioppo, J. T., & Berntson, G. G. (1994)”.
- Distinct activation functions. These give a negativity bias (higher gain for negativity) and a positivity offset (a higher intercept for positivity). The 2010 review’s Figure 3 is adapted from this paper.
Standing in the record
Filed on 2026-10-23 for the record’s proposal that hedonic valence is one ordering serving as the negotiation’s potential (CLAIM-440). Its fourth consequence, “Ambivalence is not neutrality”, is a distinction this paper drew for attitudes. See NOTE-1101 for how the two accounts of that distinction differ.
No instruction for machine-learning practice; nothing here belongs in the anthology.