Perhaps the most ubiquitous and basic affective decision of daily life is
deciding whether we like or dislike something/somebody, or, in terms of
psychological emotion theories, whether the object/subject has positive or
negative valence. Indeed, people constantly make such liking decisions within
a glimpse and, importantly, often without expecting any obvious benefit or
knowing the exact reasons for their judgment. In this paper, we review
research on such elementary affective decisions (EADs) that entail no direct
overt reward with a special focus on Neurocognitive Poetics and discuss
methods and models for investigating the neuronal and cognitive-affective
bases of EADs to verbal materials with differing degrees of complexity. In
line with evolutionary and appraisal theories of (aesthetic) emotions and data
from recent neurocognitive studies, the results of a decision tree modeling
approach simulating EADs to single words suggest that a main driving force
behind EADs is the extent to which such high-dimensional stimuli are
associated with the “basic” emotions joy/happiness and disgust
