Cognition And Emotion

This cutting-edge, yet accessible book provides a complete and integrated assessment of the role of emotions in a wide variety of cognitive functions. Including both empirical and theoretical works and debates, this book presents the results of research aimed at understanding how our emotions influence cognitive performance in diverse areas such as attention, memory, judgment, decision-making or reasoning, and emotional regulation. Drawing on years of research that has enabled psychologists to know when emotions have beneficial versus deleterious effects on cognition, the book explores the mechanisms responsible for these effects. Each chapter focuses on a specific cognitive function and is mirrored by a chapter examining the individual differences in the role of emotions on this aspect of cognition, and how this role changes during aging and in patients with mood disorders. Emotions play a central role in the life of every human being as they crucially guide our actions, thoughts, and relationships, helping us detect and identify what is important, as well as what to memorize, understand, and decide. As such, Emotion and Cognition is a valuable source for all undergraduate and graduate students in the disciplines of cognitive and affective sciences, as well as for experts in the field.

The relationship between thinking and feeling has puzzled philosophers for centuries, but more recently has become a dominant focus in psychology and in the brain sciences. This second edition of the highly praised Cognition and Emotion examines everything from past philosophical to current psychological perspectives in order to offer a novel understanding of both normal emotional experience and the emotional disorders. The authors integrate work on normal emotions with work on the emotional disorders. Although there are many influential theories of normal emotions within the cognition and emotion literature, these theories rarely address the issue of disordered emotions. Similarly, there are numerous theories that seek to explain one or more emotional disorders (e.g., depression, post-traumatic stress disorder, and phobias), but which rarely discuss normal emotions. The present book draws these separate strands together and introduces a theoretical framework that can be applied to both normal and disordered emotions. It also provides a core cognition and emotion textbook through the inclusion of a comprehensive review of the basic literature. The book includes chapters on the historical background and philosophy of emotion, reviews the main theories of normal emotions and of emotional disorders, and includes separate chapters organised around the five basic emotions of fear, sadness, anger, disgust, and happiness. Cognition and Emotion: From Order to Disorder provides both an advanced textbook for undergraduate and postgraduate courses in addition to a novel approach with a range of implications for clinical practice for work with the emotional disorders.

Emotional Cognition gives the reader an up to date overview of the current state of emotion and cognition research that is striving for computationally explicit accounts of the relationship between these two domains. Many different areas are covered by some of the leading theorists and researchers in this area and the book crosses a range of domains, from the neurosciences through cognition and formal models to philosophy. Specific chapters consider, amongst other things, the role of emotion in decision-making, the representation and evaluation of emotive events, the relationship of affect on working memory and goal regulation. The emergence of such an integrative, computational, approach in emotion and cognition research is a unique and exciting development, one that will be of interest to established scholars as much as graduate students feeling their way in this area, and applicable to research in applied as well as purely theoretical domains. (Series B)

Recent years have witnessed a revival of research in the interplay between cognition and emotion. The reasons for this renaissance are many and varied. In the first place, emotion theorists have come to recognize the pivotal role of cognitive factors in virtually all aspects of the emotion process, and to rely on basic cognitive factors and insight in creating new models of affective space. Also, the successful application of cognitive therapies to affective disorders has prompted clinical psychologists to work towards a clearer understanding of the connections between cognitive processes and emotional problems. And whereas the cognitive revolutionaries of the 1960s regarded emotions with suspicion, viewing them as nagging sources of "hot" noise in an otherwise cool, rational, and computer-like system of information processing, cognitive researchers of the 1990s regard emotions with respect, owing to their potent and predictable effects on tasks as diverse as object perception, episodic recall, and risk assessment. These intersecting lines of interest have made cognition and emotion one of the most active and rapidly developing areas within psychological science. Written in debate format, this book covers developing fields such as social cognition, as well as classic areas such as memory, learning, perception and categorization. The links between emotion and memory, learning, perception, categorization, social judgements, and behavior are addressed. Contributors come from the U.S., Canada, Australia, and France.

Edited by leading figures in the field, this handbook gives an overview of the current status of cognition and emotion research by giving the historical background to the debate and the philosophical arguments before moving on to outline the general aspects of the various research traditions. This handbook reflects the latest work being carried out by the key people in the field.

The seventeen contributions to this volume demonstrate the enormous progress that has been achieved recently in our understanding of emotions. Current cognitive formulations and information-processing models are challenged by new theory and by a solid body of empirical research presented by the distinguished authors. Addressing the problem of the relationship between developmental, social and clinical psychology, and psychophysiology, all agree that emotion concepts can be operationally defined and investigated as both independent and dependent variables. Cognitive and affective processes can no longer be studied in isolation; taken together, the chapters provide a useful map of an increasingly important and active boundary.

Emotions are complex and multifaceted phenomena. Although they have been examined from a variety of perspectives, the study of the interaction between cognition and emotion has always occupied a unique position within emotion research. Many philosophers and psychologists have been fascinated by the relationship between thinking and feeling. During the past 30 years, research on the relationship between cognition and emotion has boomed and so many studies on this topic have been published that it is difficult to keep track of the evidence. This book fulfils the need for a review of the existing evidence on particular aspects of the interplay between cognition and emotion. The book assembles a collection of state-of-the-art reviews of the most important topics in cognition and emotion research: emotion theories, feeling and thinking, the perception of emotion, the expression of emotion, emotion regulation, emotion and memory, and emotion and attention. By bringing these reviews together, this book presents a unique overview of the knowledge that has been generated in the past decades about the many and complex ways in which cognition and emotion interact. As such, it provides a useful tool for both students and researchers alike, in the fields of social, clinical and cognitive psychology.

The papers in this special issue on culture and emotion outline a new approach to the relationship between culture and emotion which extends beyond the universalism-relativism debate.