Emotions Cognition And Behavior

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.

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)

Originally published in 1986, this book was an effort to integrate thinking and research concerning the role of emotion and cognition in altruistic behaviour. Prior to publication there was a vast body of research and theorizing concerning the development and maintenance of prosocial (including altruistic) behaviour. This book focusses primarily on a specific set of intrapsychic factors involved in prosocial responding, especially emotions and cognitions believed to play a major role in altruistic behaviour. In the final chapters these intrapsychic factors are also discussed in relation to a variety of other relevant factors including socialization and situational influences on altruism.

The role of affect in how people think and behave in social situations has been a source of fascination to laymen and philosophers since time immemorial. Surprisingly, most of what we know about the role of feelings in social thinking and behavior has been discovered only during the last two decades. This book reviews and integrates the most recent research and theories on this exciting topic, and features original contributions from leading researchers active in the area. The book covers fundamental issues, such as the nature, and relationship between affect and cognition, as well as chapters that deal with the cognitive antecedents of emotion, and the consequences of affect for social cognition and behavior. The book offers a highly integrated and comprehensive coverage of the field, and is suitable as a core textbook in advanced courses dealing with the role of affect in cognition and behavior.

The affective connotations of environmental stimuli are evaluated spontaneously and with minimal cognitive processing. The activated evaluations influence subsequent emotional and cognitive processes. Featuring original contributions from leading researchers active in this area, this book reviews and integrates the most recent research and theories on this exciting new topic. Many fundamental issues regarding the nature of and relationship between evaluations, cognition, and emotion are covered. The chapters explore the mechanisms and boundary conditions of automatic evaluative processes, the determinants of valence, indirect measures of individual differences in the evaluation of social stimuli, and the relationship between evaluations and mood, as well as emotion and behavior. Offering a highly integrated and comprehensive coverage of the field, this book is suitable as a core textbook in advanced courses dealing with the role of evaluations in cognition and emotion.

The role of affect in how people think and behave in social situations has been a source of fascination to laymen and philosophers since time immemorial. Surprisingly, most of what we know about the role of feelings in social thinking and behavior has been discovered only during the last two decades. Affect in Social Thinking and Behavior reviews and integrates the most recent research and theories on this exciting topic, and features original contributions reviewing key areas of affect research from leading researchers active in the area. The book covers fundamental issues, such as the nature and relationship between affect and cognition, as well as chapters that deal with the cognitive antecedents of emotion, and the consequences of affect for social cognition and behavior. This volume offers a highly integrated and comprehensive coverage of this field, and is suitable as a core textbook in advanced courses dealing with the role of affect in social cognition and behavior.

A study that goes beyond the debate over functional specialization to describe the ways that emotion and cognition interact and are integrated in the brain. The idea that a specific brain circuit constitutes the emotional brain (and its corollary, that cognition resides elsewhere) shaped thinking about emotion and the brain for many years. Recent behavioral, neuropsychological, neuroanatomy, and neuroimaging research, however, suggests that emotion interacts with cognition in the brain. In this book, Luiz Pessoa moves beyond the debate over functional specialization, describing the many ways that emotion and cognition interact and are integrated in the brain. The amygdala is often viewed as the quintessential emotional region of the brain, but Pessoa reviews findings revealing that many of its functions contribute to attention and decision making, critical components of cognitive functions. He counters the idea of a subcortical pathway to the amygdala for affective visual stimuli with an alternate framework, the multiple waves model. Citing research on reward and motivation, Pessoa also proposes the dual competition model, which explains emotional and motivational processing in terms of their influence on competition processes at both perceptual and executive function levels. He considers the broader issue of structure-function mappings, and examines anatomical features of several regions often associated with emotional processing, highlighting their connectivity properties. As new theoretical frameworks of distributed processing evolve, Pessoa concludes, a truly dynamic network view of the brain will emerge, in which "emotion" and "cognition" may be used as labels in the context of certain behaviors, but will not map cleanly into compartmentalized pieces of the brain.

In this volume, Berkowitz develops the argument that experiential and behavioral components of an emotional state are affected by many processes: some are highly cognitive in nature; others are automatic and involuntary. Cognitive and associative mechanisms theoretically come into play at different times in the emotion-cognition sequence. The model he proposes, therefore, integrates theoretical positions that previously have been artificially segregated in much of the emotion-cognition literature. The breadth of the implications of Berkowitz's theory is also reflected in the diversity of this book's companion chapters. Written by researchers whose work focuses on both social cognition and emotion, these articles provide important insights and possible extensions of the "cognitive-neoassociationistic" conceptualization developed in the target article. Although each chapter is a valuable contribution in its own right, this volume, taken as a whole, is a timely and important contribution both to social cognition and to research and theory on emotion per se.