Toward a Multiple Memory Systems Model of Attitudes and Social Cognition

March, Gaertner, and Olson (this issue) highlight a critical weakness of most contemporary models of attitudes, whereby a valence-based account of attitude associations often fails to map onto patterns of behavior. This disconnect—between valencebased models of the mind and actual behavior—has long been recognized in domains of psychology outside of social cognition. For example, Harmon-Jones and colleagues have shown that neural, physiological, and behavioral responses to attitude objects are better explained in terms of their approach-avoidance associations than by valence (Gable & Harmon-Jones, 2010; Harmon-Jones & Allen, 1998). Harmon-Jones’s action-based model of cognitive dissonance applied this thinking directly to the issue of attitude change and behavior (Harmon-Jones, Amodio, & Harmon-Jones, 2009; 2010). Similarly, neuropsychology studies have revealed that, in classical fear conditioning tasks, patients with bilateral amygdala damage can form accurate judgments of rewarding/aversive stimuli yet fail to exhibit physiological arousal or behavioral responses that characterize an adaptive response to threat (whereas hippocampal patients show the opposite pattern; e.g., Bechara et al., 1995). Circumplex models of emotion have been noted for likening particular emotions, such as anger and fear, based on their similar negative valence/ high arousal profile, despite their nearly opposite effects in behavior (e.g., Carver & Harmon-Jones, 2009). These are just a few well-known programs of research that previously addressed this crucial disconnect between valence and behavior. Given the precedence for distinguishing valence ascriptions from behavioral responses—especially with regard to threat— we were always surprised that the issue has not received more attention in social psychological models of attitudes. And so, not surprisingly, we were excited to read about March et al.’s (this issue) dual implicit process model of evaluation (DIPM), as it reflects an important shift in thinking among attitude theorists in the field of social cognition. In their article, the authors make a compelling case for the limitations of existing attitude models for explaining the threat response and support their view with evidence from neuroscience on how amygdala function can support threat responses in a way that does not align with valence-based attitude models. Although the authors did not cover our own work on this issue, we (i.e., the first author) have been arguing this same basic point for the past 15 years, invoking contemporary cognitive neuroscience models of learning and memory while providing data showing dissociations between semantic associations and threat-relevant evaluative associations in the brain and behavior (e.g., Amodio & Devine, 2006; Amodio & Hamilton, 2012; Amodio, Harmon-Jones, & Devine, 2003; Gilbert, Swencionis, & Amodio, 2012). This work has led us to develop the memory systems model (MSM) of attitudes and social cognition (Amodio, 2008; Amodio & Ratner, 2011b), which goes beyond the dualimplicit process model posited by March et al. (this issue) to incorporate several additional modes of learning, memory, and behavioral expression that have been established in the cognitive neuroscience literature. Given the relevance of our work on the MSM to the present article, and in light of its omission, we take the opportunity here to describe the general framework and several of our findings. We then comment on a few specific points of March et al. (this issue) to offer the authors and readers some ideas for further development and theoretical refinement.