Abstract: The term valence can refer to either the affective response caused by a stimulus (e.g., “I felt bad when I heard about the car accident”) or the semantic knowledge about a stimulus (e.g., “car accidents are bad”). I will first discuss this difference in terms of a distinction between two types of formats of mental representations. Next, I will review a series of experiments that demonstrate the potential dissociation between affective and semantic valence. Theoretical and empirical implications of this distinction will be discussed.