The scientific study of emotion faces a potentially serious problem: after over a hundred years of psychological study, we lack consensus regarding the very definition of emotion. We propose that part of the problem may be the tendency to define emotion in contrast to cognition, rather than viewing both “emotion” and “cognition” as being comprised of more elemental processes. We argue that considering emotion as a type of cognition (viewed broadly as information (...) processing) may provide an understanding of the mechanisms underlying domains that are traditionally thought to be qualitatively distinct. (shrink)

Jerome Neu has been one of the most prominent voices in the philosophy of emotions for more than twenty years, that is, before the field was even a field. His Emotions, Thought, and Therapy (1977) was one of its most original and ground-breaking books. Neu is an uncompromising defender of what has been called the cognitive theory of emotions (as am I). But the ambiguity, controversy, and confusions own by the notion of a cognitive theory of emotion is what (...) I would like to focus on here. In so doing I will indicate some of the way sin which my own theory has developed. (shrink)

CHAPTER Emotional Cognition An introduction Simon C. Moore and Mike Oaksford There has been a marked shift in the perceived role of emotion in human ...

Israel Scheffler's "In Praise of the Cognitive Emotions" (1977, 1991) extends earlier analyses of the role of emotions in rational undertakings. It shows that some emotions – "rational passions," "perceptive feelings," "theoretical imagination" and "cognitive emotions" – are essentially cognitive in origin and may serve cognitive purposes. Though it analyszes the interplay of emotion and cognition, cognition is the focus and the emotions that are examined revolve about it. This prompts us to wonder about the effect of (...) a "Copernican revolution." If emotion were to be put in the center, would there also be cognitions which are essentially emotional in origin and/or serve emotional purposes? Here we explore the possibility of "informed expression," "emotional cognizance" and "emotional cognitions," drawing primarily from aesthetic, religious, spiritual, and ethical experience. (shrink)

The representation of events, in primates at any rate, is a separate process from their emotional evaluation. The same holds for cognitive evaluation. Here too representation and evaluation are separate operations. Acknowledging the symmetry leads to the notion of free representation.

ABSTRACT One striking feature of On the Genealogy of Morals is how it is written. Nietzsche employs a literary style that provokes his readers' emotions. In Beyond Selflessness, Christopher Janaway argues that such a literary approach is integral to Nietzsche's philosophical goals. Feeling the emotions Nietzsche's style arouses is necessary for understanding the views he defends. I argue that Janaway's position is mistaken. The evidence at our disposal fails to establish that emotion is ever necessary for cognition. However, (...) I maintain that we do have good evidence for a slightly weaker claim. The emotionally sensitive person is epistemically better off than the cold and dispassionate person. There are some truths he or she will be more likely to believe and will have better reasons for believing. I conclude that Janaway is right to defend the philosophical importance of Nietzsche's literary writing style. His error is simply that he overstates the case. (shrink)

The academic journey to a widely acknowledged Machine Consciousness is anticipated to be an emotional one. Both in terms of the active debate provoked by the subject and a hypothesized need to encapsulate an analogue of emotions in an artificial system in order to progress towards machine consciousness. This paper considers the inspiration that the concepts related to emotion may contribute to cognitive systems when approaching conscious-like behavior. Specifically, emotions can set goals including balancing explore versus exploit, facilitate action (...) in unknown domains and modify existing behaviors, which are explored in cognitive robotics experiments. (shrink)

Some have claimed that since machines lack emotional “qualia”, or conscious experiences of emotion, machine intelligence will fall short of human intelligence. I examine this objection, ultimately finding it unpersuasive. I first discuss recent work on emotion that suggests that emotion plays various roles in cognition. I then raise the following question: are phenomenal experiences of emotion an essential or necessary component of the performance of these cognitive abilities? I then sharpen the question by distinguishing (...) between four possible positions one might take. I reject one of these four positions largely on empirical grounds. But the remaining three positions all suggest that even if emotional qualia play an important role in human cognition, emotional qualia are not essential to the performance of these cognitive abilities in principle, so, e.g., a machine that lacks emotional qualia might still be able to perform them. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophers have not, at least until very recently, been much concerned with the study of the emotions. It was not always so. The Stoics thought deeply about this topic. Although they were divided on points of detail, they agreed on the broad outline of an account. In it emotions are valuational judgments and resulting affective states.

Lewis discusses the dynamic mechanisms of emotional-cognitive integration. I argue that he neglects the self and its neural correlate. The self can be characterized as an emotional-cognitive unity, which may be accounted for by the interplay between anterior and posterior medial cortical regions. I propose that these regions form an anatomical, physiological, and psychological unity, the cortical midline structures (CMSs).

Should emotions play a role in our decisions, even if they are "just feelings" and not necessarily "imbued with reason" or cognitively penetrated? The author shows that such basic feelings as aversion and attraction can be important normative guides by disrupting engrained habits and beliefs, enabling us to reconsider our ways, which is important due to the ever-changing nature of ethical demands on us. Therefore, these feelings should guide our decisions, even if they are not cognitive. This book fi lls (...) a gap in the philosophy of emotions, ethics, and virtue epistemology. (shrink)

Contrary to standard assumptions, reasoning is often an emotional process. Emotions can have good effects, as when a scientist gets excited about a line of research and pursues it successfully despite criticism. But emotions can also distort reasoning, as when a juror ignores evidence of guilt just because the accused seems like a nice guy. In _Hot Thought_, Paul Thagard describes the mental mechanisms -- cognitive, neural, molecular, and social -- that interact to produce different kinds of human thinking, from (...) everyday decision making to legal reasoning, scientific discovery, and religious belief, and he discusses when and how thinking and reasoning should be emotional. Thagard argues that an understanding of emotional thinking needs to integrate the cognitive, neural, molecular, and social levels. Many of the chapters employ computational models of various levels of thinking, including HOTCO models and the more neurologically realistic GAGE model. Thagard uses these models to illuminate thinking in the domains of law, science, and religion, discussing such topics as the role of doubt and reasonable doubt in legal and other contexts, valuable emotional habits for successful scientists, and the emotional content of religious beliefs. Identifying and assessing the impact of emotion, Thagard argues, can suggest ways to improve the process of reasoning. (shrink)

Carpendale & Lewis's (C&L's) interesting and insightful article did not integrate several potentially useful notions from emotion theory and research into their explanatory framework. I propose that emotions are indigenous elements of mind and that children's understanding of them is fundamental to their understanding of the mental life of self and others, understandings critical to the development of social and emotional competence.

Lewis makes a strong case for the interdependence and integration of emotion and cognitive processes. Yet, these processes exhibit considerable independence in early life, as well as in certain psychopathological conditions, suggesting that the capacity for their integration emerges as a function of development. In some circumstances, the concept of highly interactive emotion and cognitive systems seems a viable alternative hypothesis to the idea of systems integration.

This study tested a structural model of cognitive-emotional explanatory variables to explain performance in mathematics. The predictor variables assessed were related to students’ level of development of early mathematical competencies (EMCs), specifically, relational and numerical competencies, predisposition toward mathematics, and the level of logical intelligence in a population of primary school Chilean students (n = 634). This longitudinal study also included the academic performance of the students during a period of four years as a variable. The sampled students were initially (...) assessed by means of an Early Numeracy Test (ENT), and, subsequently, they were administered a Likert-type scale to measure their predisposition toward mathematics (EPMAT) and a basic test of logical intelligence (TILE). The results of these tests were used to analyse the interaction of all the aforementioned variables by means of a structural equations model. This combined interaction model was able to predict 64.3% of the variability of observed performance. Preschool students' performance in EMCs was a strong predictor for achievement in mathematics for students between 8 to 11 years of age. Therefore, this paper highlights the importance of EMCs and the modulating role of predisposition toward mathematics. Also, this paper discusses the educational role of these findings, as well as possible ways to improve negative predispositions toward mathematical tasks in the school domain. (shrink)

Two thing are obvious from the subjective experience of emotional states: (1) emotions have a power of their own in directing and disrupting behavioural options, thinking processes, and bodily states, all the more so if one is immature; (2) our thoughts and appraisals of events can instigate or inhibit feelings to a substantial extent, all the more so as we age and get more experienced. These common introspective observations suggest that there are reciprocal influences between emotions and cognitive processes, the (...) strength of which change as a function of developmental stages. Alternatively, these observations, especially the latter, could suggest that emotions and cognitive processes are orthogonal reflections of the same brain systems. In the preceding article, Gray advocates the siren-song attractions of the latter view-a delusional view, at least for psychobiologists, I would argue. In this commentary (invited by the editor of this special issue of Cognition and Emotion), I will reaffirm the utility of emotiodcognition distinctions in behavioural brain research, and attempt to coax Gray back to a more traditional view from which he now seems to have departed. Although Gray covers many issues with which I agree, in typical hominid fashion I will bluntly proceed to focus more on those matters with which I disagree. I thank the editor for requesting me to share this alternative view. Literature citations are used sparingly, but much of the relevant material can be accessed from the cited reviews from our laboratory. (shrink)

People are ingesting various information from different sense organs all the time to complete different cognitive tasks. The brain integrates and regulates this information. The two significant sensory channels for receiving external information are sight and hearing that have received extensive attention. This paper mainly studies the effect of music and visual-auditory stimulation on electroencephalogram of happy emotion recognition based on a complex system. In the experiment, the presentation was used to prepare the experimental stimulation program, and the cognitive (...) neuroscience experimental paradigm of EEG evoked by happy emotion pictures was established. Using 93 videos as natural stimuli, fMRI data were collected. Finally, the collected EEG signals were removed with the eye artifact and baseline drift, and the t-test was used to analyze the significant differences of different lead EEG data. Experimental data shows that, by adjusting the parameters of the convolutional neural network, the highest accuracy of the two-classification algorithm can reach 98.8%, and the average accuracy can reach 83.45%. The results show that the brain source under the combined visual and auditory stimulus is not a simple superposition of the brain source of the single visual and auditory stimulation, but a new interactive source is generated. (shrink)

BackgroundThe neural activity and functional networks of emotion-based cognitive reappraisal have been widely investigated using electroencephalography and functional magnetic resonance imaging. However, single-mode neuroimaging techniques are limited in exploring the regulation process with high temporal and spatial resolution.ObjectivesWe proposed a source localization method with multimodal integration of EEG and fMRI and tested it in the source-level functional network analysis of emotion cognitive reappraisal.MethodsEEG and fMRI data were simultaneously recorded when 15 subjects were performing the emotional cognitive reappraisal task. (...) Fused priori weighted minimum norm estimation with sliding windows was proposed to trace the dynamics of EEG source activities, and the phase lag index was used to construct the functional brain network associated with the process of downregulating negative affect using the reappraisal strategy.ResultsThe functional networks were constructed with the measure of PLI, in which the important regions were indicated. In the gamma band source-level network analysis, the cuneus, the lateral orbitofrontal cortex, the superior parietal cortex, the postcentral gyrus, and the pars opercularis were identified as important regions in reappraisal with high betweenness centrality.ConclusionThe proposed multimodal integration method for source localization identified the key cortices involved in emotion regulation, and the network analysis demonstrated the important brain regions involved in the cognitive control of reappraisal. It shows promise in the utility in the clinical setting for affective disorders. (shrink)

Moral judgment has typically been characterized as a conflict between emotion and reason. In recent years, a central concern has been determining which process is the chief contributor to moral behavior. While classic moral theorists claimed that moral evaluations stem from consciously controlled cognitive processes, recent research indicates that affective processes may be driving moral behavior. Here, we propose a new way of thinking about emotion within the context of moral judgment, one in which affect is generated and (...) transformed by both automatic and controlled processes, and moral evaluations are shifted accordingly. We begin with a review of how existing theories in psychology and neuroscience address the interaction between emotion and cognition, and how these theories may inform the study of moral judgment. We then describe how brain regions involved in both affective processing and moral judgment overlap and may make distinct contributions to the moral evaluation process. Finally, we discuss how this way of thinking about emotion can be reconciled with current theories in moral psychology before mapping out future directions in the study of moral behavior. (shrink)

This article clarifies my current and seemingly ever-changing position on issues relating to emotions. The position derives from my differential emotions theory and it changes with new empirical findings and with insights from my own and others’ thinking and writing. The theory distinguishes between first-order emotions and emotion schemas. For example, it proposes that first-order negative emotions are attributable mainly to infants and young children in distress and to older individuals in emergency or highly challenging situations. Emotion schemas (...) are defined as emotion feelings interacting with cognition in motivating the decision making and actions of everyday life. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: Emotions in the service of cognition Cognitive emotions.

Social cognition researchers have become increasingly interested in the ways that behavioral, physiological, and neural coupling facilitate social interaction and interpersonal understanding. We distinguish two ways of conceptualizing the role of such coupling processes in social cognition: strong and moderate interactionism. According to strong interactionism (SI), low-level coupling processes are alternatives to higher-level individual cognitive processes; the former at least sometimes render the latter superfluous. Moderate interactionism (MI) on the other hand, is an integrative approach. Its guiding assumption (...) is that higher-level cognitive processes are likely to have been shaped by the need to coordinate, modulate, and extract information from low-level coupling processes. In this paper, we present a case study on Möbius Syndrome (MS) in order to contrast SI and MI. We show how MS—a form of congenital bilateral facial paralysis—can be a fruitful source of insight for research exploring the relation between high-level cognition and low-level coupling. Lacking a capacity for facial expression, individuals with MS are deprived of a primary channel for gestural coupling. According to SI, they lack an essential enabling feature for social interaction and interpersonal understanding more generally and thus ought to exhibit severe deficits in these areas. We challenge SI’s prediction and show how MS cases offer compelling reasons for instead adopting MI’s pluralistic model of social interaction and interpersonal understanding. We conclude that investigations of coupling processes within social interaction should inform rather than marginalize or eliminate investigation of higher-level individual cognition. (shrink)

Given the bond between emotion and cognition underlying the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions, positive and negative emotions have critical roles in cognitive skills. The aim of this review was to probe into the triarchic relationship between L2 learners’ cognition, emotion, and language performance, reflected in the bond between self-efficacy, foreign language anxiety, and speaking skill, in light of the main emerging theories in the field of SLA underpinning this relationship. Moreover, the theoretical foundations, such as (...) learners’ cognitive performances, Bandura’s self-efficacy theory, control-value theory, and positive psychology theory, were explicated in order to justify the relationship between self-efficacy and oral communication skill. Furthermore, the underlying theories such as attentional control theory, complex dynamic system theory, affective filter theory, and cultural schema theory, which relate foreign language anxiety to speaking skill were scrutinized in this review. The review also expounded on the implications and future directions for EFL teachers, material designers, teacher educators, educational policy-makers, and advisors. The ideas can improve their awareness of learner self-efficacy, foreign language anxiety, and oral communication skill in educational contexts. (shrink)

Experiences—visual, emotional, or otherwise—play a role in providing us with justification to believe claims about the world. Some accounts of how experiences provide justification emphasize the role of the experiences’ distinctive phenomenology, i.e. ‘what it is like’ to have the experience. Other accounts emphasize the justificatory role to the experiences’ etiology. A number of authors have used cases of cognitively penetrated visual experience to raise an epistemic challenge for theories of perceptual justification that emphasize the justificatory role of phenomenology rather (...) than etiology. Proponents of the challenge argue that cognitively penetrated visual experiences can fail to provide the usual justification because they have improper etiologies. However, extant arguments for the challenge’s key claims are subject to formidable objections. In this paper, I present the challenge’s key claims, raise objections to previous attempts to establish them, and then offer a novel argument in support of the challenge. My argument relies on an analogy between cognitively penetrated visual and emotional experiences. I argue that some emotional experiences fail to provide the relevant justification because of their improper etiologies and conclude that analogous cognitively penetrated visual experiences fail to provide the relevant justification because of their etiologies, as well. (shrink)

We examined whether positive and negative affect motivates verbal and spatial working memory processes, respectively, which have implications for the expenditure of mental effort. We argue that when emotion promotes cognitive tendencies that are goal incompatible with task demands, greater cognitive effort is required to perform well. We sought to investigate whether this increase in cognitive effort impairs behavioural control over a broad domain of self-control tasks. Moreover, we predicted that individuals with higher behavioural inhibition system (BIS) sensitivities would (...) report more negative affect within the goal incompatible conditions because such individuals report higher negative affect during cognitive challenge. Positive or negative affective states were induced followed by completing a verbal or spatial 2-back working memory task. All participants then completed one of three self-control tasks. Overall, we observed that conditions of emotion and working memory incompatibility (positive/spatial and negative/verbal) performed worse on the self-control tasks, and within the incompatible conditions individuals with higher BIS sensitivities reported more negative affect at the end of the study. The combination of findings suggests that emotion and working memory compatibility reduces cognitive effort and impairs behavioural control. (shrink)

Neuroscience investigations of emotional influences on social cognition have been dominated by the somatic marker hypothesis and dual-process theories. Taken together, these lines of inquiry have not provided strong evidence that emotional influences on social cognition rely on neural systems which code for bodily signals of arousal nor distinguish emotional reasoning from other modes of reasoning. Recent findings raise the possibility that emotionally influenced social cognition relies on two stages of neural changes: once when emotion is (...) elicited and a different set of changes at the time of social cognitive judgment. These findings suggest that affect infusion models may be a fruitful framework for bridging neuroscience and psychological understanding of the role of emotion in social cognition. (shrink)

It is widely acknowledged that emotions can be regulated in an astonishing variety of ways. Most research to date has focused on explicit (effortful) forms of emotion regulation. However, there is growing research interest in implicit (automatic) forms of emotion regulation. To organise emerging findings, we present a dual-process framework that integrates explicit and implicit forms of emotion regulation, and argue that both forms of regulation are necessary for well-being. In the first section of this review, we (...) provide a broad overview of the construct of emotion regulation, with an emphasis on explicit and implicit processes. In the second section, we focus on explicit emotion regulation, considering both neural mechanisms that are associated with these processes and their experiential and physiological consequences. In the third section, we turn to several forms of implicit emotion regulation, and integrate the burgeoning literature in this area. We conclude by outlining open questions and areas for future research. (shrink)

The tendency for emotions to be predictable over time, labelled emotional inertia, has been linked to low well-being and is thought to reflect impaired emotion regulation. However, almost no studies have examined how emotion regulation relates to emotional inertia. We examined the effects of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression on the inertia of behavioural, subjective and physiological measures of emotion. In Study 1 (N = 111), trait suppression was associated with higher inertia of negative behaviours. We replicated (...) this finding experimentally in Study 2 (N = 186). Furthermore, in Study 2, instructed suppressors and reappraisers both showed higher inertia of positive behaviours, and reappraisers displayed higher inertia of heart rate. Neither suppression nor reappraisal were associated with the inertia of subjective feelings in either study. Thus, the effects of suppression and reappraisal on the temporal dynamics of emotions depend on the valence and emotional response component in question. (shrink)

Includes bibliographical references (p. [271]-285) and index.

Although numerous studies have explored the factors influencing entrepreneurial activity, there is a lack of a theoretical basis for linking these factors to entrepreneurship behavioral intention. The current study uses the theory of self-regulating attitude to construct a theoretical model of examining the relationship among cognitive bias, entrepreneurial emotion, and entrepreneurship intention. A total of 312 valid samples were collected from college students at a Chinese university. The bootstrapping method was used to test the multi-mediation hypotheses. Our research found (...) that positive entrepreneurial emotion plays a mediating role in the relationship between optimism and entrepreneurship intention, whereas negative entrepreneurial emotion plays a mediating role in the relationship between overconfidence and entrepreneurship intention. These findings underline the importance of a correct understanding of cognitive bias and entrepreneurial emotion in the process of entrepreneurship. (shrink)

By emphasizing nonlinear dynamics between appraisal and emotions, Lewis's model provides a valuable platform for integrating psychological and neural perspectives on the emotion-cognition interface. In this commentary, I discuss the role of neuroscience in shaping new conceptualizations of emotion and the putative role of theta oscillation within frontocingulate pathways in depression, a syndrome in which emotion-cognition relations are dysfunctional.

Emotions can have both enhancing and impairing effects on various cognitive processes, from lower (e.g., perceptual) to higher level (e.g., mnemonic and executive) processes. The present article discusses emerging brain imaging evidence linking these opposing effects of emotion, which points to overlapping and dissociable neural systems involving both bottom-up and top-down mechanisms. The link between the enhancing and impairing effects is also discussed in a clinical context, with a focus on posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), where these opposing effects tend (...) to co-occur, are exacerbated, and are detrimental. Overall, the present review highlights the need to consider together enhancing and impairing effects of emotion on cognition in studies investigating emotion–cognition interactions. (shrink)

We tested the hypothesis that “good feelings”—the central element of subjective well-being—are associated with interdependence and interpersonal engagement of the self in Japan, but with independence and interpersonal disengagement of the self in the United States. Japanese and American college students (total N = 913) reported how frequently they experienced various emotional states in daily life. In support of the hypothesis, the reported frequency of general positive emotions (e.g. calm, elated) was most closely associated with the reported frequency of interpersonally (...) engaged positive emotions (e.g. friendly feelings) in Japan, but with the reported frequency of interpersonally disengaged positive emotions (e.g. pride) in the United States. Further, for Americans the reported frequency of experience was considerably higher for positive emotions than for negative emotions, but for Japanese it was higher for engaged emotions than for disengaged emotions. Implications for cultural constructions of emotion in general and subjective well-being in particular are discussed. (shrink)