Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

The consonance constraint satisfaction model, recently used to simulate the major paradigms of cognitive dissonance theory, is extended to deal with emotional arousal phenomena in dissonance. The impact of arousing drugs is implemented in the simulations by a scalar that modulates the intensity of unit activations representing the relevant cognitions and the connection weights representing their implications. The simulations show that even exotic dissonance phenomena can be explained in terms of the relatively commn process of constraint satisfaction.