Current Research And Emerging Directions In Emotion Cognition Interactions

Emotion can impact various aspects of our cognition and behavior, by enhancing or impairing them (e.g., enhanced attention to and memory for emotional events, or increased distraction produced by goal-irrelevant emotional information). On the other hand, emotion processing is also susceptible to cognitive influences, typically exerted in the form of cognitive control of motion, or emotion regulation. Despite important recent progress in understanding emotion- cognition interactions, a number of aspects remain unclear. The present book comprises a collection of manuscripts discussing emerging evidence regarding the mechanisms underlying emotion- cognition interactions in healthy functioning and alterations associated with clinical conditions, in which such interactions are dysfunctional. Initiated with a more restricted focus, targeting (1) identification and in depth analysis of the circumstances in which emotion enhances or impairs cognition and (2)identification of the role of individual differences in these effects, our book has emerged into a comprehensive collection of outstanding contributions investigating emotion-cognition interactions, based on approaches spanning from behavioral and lesion to pharmacological and brain imaging, and including empirical, theoretical, and review papers alike. Co-hosted by the Frontiers in Neuroscience - Integrative Neuroscience and Frontiers in Psychology - Emotion Science, the contributions comprising our book and the associated research topic are grouped around the following seven main themes, distributed across the two hosting journals: I. Emotion and Selectivity in Attention and Memory; II. The Impact of Emotional Distraction; Linking Enhancing and Impairing Effects of Emotion; III. What Really is the Role of the Amygdala?; IV. Age Differences in Emotion Processing; The Role of Emotional Valence; V. Affective Face Processing, Social Cognition, and Personality Neuroscience; VI. Stress, Mood, Emotion, and the Prefrontal Cortex; The Role of Control in the Stress Response; VII. Emotion-Cognition Interactions in Clinical Conditions. As illustrated by the present collection of contributions, emotion-cognition interactions can be identified at different levels of processing, from perception and attention to long- term memory, decision making processes, and social cognition and behavior. Notably, these effects are subject to individual differences that may affect the way we perceive, experience, and remember emotional experiences, or cope with emotionally challenging situations. Moreover, these opposing effects tend to co-occur in affective disorders, such as depression and PTSD, where uncontrolled recollection of and rumination on distressing memories also lead to impaired cognition due to emotional distraction. Understanding the nature and neural mechanisms of these effects is critical, as their exacerbation and co-occurrence in clinical conditions lead to devastating effects and debilitation. Hence, bringing together such diverse contributions has allowed not only an integrative understanding of the current extant evidence but also identification of emerging directions and concrete venues for future investigations.

There is increasing interest in understanding the interplay of emotional and cognitive processes. The objective of the Research Topic was to provide an interdisciplinary survey of cutting-edge neuroscientific research on the interaction and integration of emotion and cognition in the brain. The following original empirical reports, commentaries and theoretical reviews provide a comprehensive survey on recent advances in understanding how emotional and cognitive processes interact, how they are integrated in the brain, and what their implications for understanding the mind and its disorders are. These works encompasses a broad spectrum of populations and showcases a wide variety of paradigms, measures, analytic strategies, and conceptual approaches. The aim of the Topic was to begin to address several key questions about the interplay of cognitive and emotional processes in the brain, including: what is the impact of emotional states, anxiety and stress on various cognitive functions? How are emotion and cognition integrated in the brain? Do individual differences in affective dimensions of temperament and personality alter cognitive performance, and how is this realized in the brain? Are there individual differences that increase vulnerability to the impact of affect on cognition—who is vulnerable, and who resilient? How plastic is the interplay of cognition and emotion? Taken together, these works demonstrate that emotion and cognition are deeply interwoven in the fabric of the brain, suggesting that widely held beliefs about the key constituents of ‘the emotional brain’ and ‘the cognitive brain’ are fundamentally flawed. Developing a deeper understanding of the emotional-cognitive brain is important, not just for understanding the mind but also for elucidating the root causes of its many debilitating disorders.

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.

This volume examines emotions and emotional well-being from a rich variety of theological, philosophical and scientific and therapeutic perspectives. To experience emotion is a part of being human; but what are emotions? How can theology, philosophy and the natural sciences unpack the nature and content of emotions? This volume is based on contributions to the 15th European Conference on Science and Theology held in Assisi, Italy. It brings together contributions from scholars of various academic backgrounds from around the world, whose individual insights are made all the richer by their juxtaposition with those from experts in other fields, leading to a unique exchange of ideas.

Despite their opposite emotional effects, humor and horror are highly similar phenomena. They both can be traced back to (the detection, resolution, and emotional elaboration of) incongruities, understood as semantic violations through unexpected combinations of oppositional information. However, theoretical and experimental comparisons between humor and resolvable incongruities that elicit other emotions than exhilaration have been lacking so far. To gain more insights into the linguistic differences between humor and horror and the cognitive real-time processing of both, a main concern of this book is to discuss the transferability of linguistic humor theories to a systematic horror investigation and directly compare self-paced reading times (SPR), facial actions (FACS), and event-related brain potentials (ERP) of normed minimal quadruplets with frightening and humorous incongruities as well as (in)coherent stimuli. The results suggest that humor and horror share cognitive resources to detect and resolve incongruities. To better distinguish humor from neighboring phenomena, this book refines current humor theories by incorporating humor and horror in a cognitive incongruity processing model.

This book covers recent advances in the understanding of brain structure, function and disorders based on the fundamental principles of physics. It covers a broad range of physical phenomena occurring in the brain circuits for perception, cognition, emotion and action, representing the building blocks of the mind. It provides novel insights into the devastating brain disorders of the mind such as schizophrenia, dementia, autism, aging or addictions, as well as into the new devices for brain repair. The book is aimed at basic researchers in the fields of neuroscience, physics, biophysics and clinicians in the fields of neurology, neurosurgery, psychology, psychiatry.

The Handbook of Communication Science and Biology charts the state of the art in the field, describing relevant areas of communication studies where a biological approach has been successfully applied. The book synthesizes theoretical and empirical development in this area thus far and proposes a roadmap for future research. As the biological approach to understanding communication has grown, one challenge has been the separate evolution of research focused on media use and effects and research focused on interpersonal and organizational communication, often with little intellectual conversation between the two areas. The Handbook of Communication Science and Biology is the only book to bridge the gap between media studies and human communication, spurring new work in both areas of focus. With contributions from the field’s foremost scholars around the globe, this unique book serves as a seminal resource for the training of the current and next generation of communication scientists, and will be of particular interest to media and psychology scholars as well.

Emotion and Cognition, Volume 246, consists of 16 chapters on recent scientific advances in emotion and cognition research. The chapters include theoretical, review, and empirical chapters presenting original data on interactions between emotion and cognition. Chapters touch on a variety of topics, including Common and different mechanisms underlying the processing of extrinsic and intrinsic emotion, Looming fear stimuli broadens attention in a local-global letter task, Reading thoughts and feelings in other people – how age shapes empathic accuracy, How does aging influence emotion-cognition links?, and The Motivational Dimensional Model of affect: A review of the past 10 years, and more. Presents the latest research on the interaction between emotion and cognition Uniquely focuses on how these supposedly different aspects interact Contains contributions from world-renowned experts on emotion and cognition research