 Empirical evidence that affect can exist separated from what under normal conditions would have been its object supports thinking of it in such less object-bound ways. In experiments the nonconscious mechanisms that bind pleasure to objects can be fooled about the pleasure’s source (which presumably they evolved to track), resulting in personal-level ignorance or error about this and even the unconscious formation of arbitrary new preferences through experimental manipulations. For example, experimental subjects may be caused to like a beverage better by initial exposure to it after a photograph of a smiling face under conditions in which there is no awareness of the face being seen or of the affective response it caused. This presumably works by pleasantness being ‘misattributed’ by unconscious cognitive mechanisms that, ignorant of any more appropriate cause for the positive affect, attribute pleasantness to the next salient stimulus they find, with an enduring liking for the beverage resulting from this. Similar spillover of affect from unattended sources, for example, of unattended physical discomfort leading to anger at a salient target, seems common in everyday life. Such phenomenona are all presumably explained by affective processes being detachable from what would have been their objects under more cognitively optimal  conditions.[24]