evaluate the risk and benefits of using intuition. Their results show that this is a troublesome decision tool. Affective reactions that accompany judgements are not necessarily voluntary, but are automatic responses. Zajonc states that “one might be able to control the expression of emotion, but not the experience of it itself.” However, he also clarifies that feelings are not free of thought and that thoughts are not free of feeling. The experiential system also takes past experiences into account. In other words, if a person has already experienced a certain issue, he or she is more likely to take more precautions towards the issue. Experimental findings Many studies have been done to further look into affect heuristics and many have found that these heuristics shape our attitudes and opinions towards our decisions, especially risk perception. These studies demonstrate how affect is an important characteristic of the decision-making process in many different domains and aspects as well as how it can lead to a strong conditioner of preference. As demonstrated below, affect is independent of cognition which indicate that there are conditions where affect does not require cognition. Subliminal affective response The cause of affect does not necessarily have to be consciously perceived. A study conducted by Winkielman, Zajonc and Schwarz (1997) demonstrated the speed at which an affective reaction can influence judgements. To do this they used a subliminal priming paradigm where participants were "primed" through exposure to either a smiling face, a frowning face, or a neutral polygon presented at about of a second. This was considered an amount of time where the nature of the stimuli could not be recalled. Participants were then exposed to an ideograph (e.g. a Chinese character) for two seconds and asked to rate the ideograph on a scale of liking. Researchers found that participants preferred the ideograph preceded with a smiling face as opposed to those preceded by a frowning face or neutral polygon despite the fact that the smiling face was only shown for of a second. The same experiment demonstrated the persistence of initial affect. During a second session, participations were primed with the same characters, but these characters were preceded by a different face that they were not previously exposed to (e.g. those previously exposed to the smiling face were now exposed to the neutral polygon). Participants continued to show preference for the characters based on the first association, even