A social psychology theory posits that attitudes have three components — affect, cognition and behavior. The cognitive dimension refers "to beliefs that one holds about the attitude object, and behavior has been used to describe overt actions and responses to the attitude object." Affect, meanwhile, describes "the positive and negative feelings that one holds toward an attitude object", that is, the emotional dimension of an attitude. Modern theorists have modified the tripartite theory to argue that an attitude "does not consist of these elements, but is instead a general evaluative summary of the information derived from these bases."