Emotion and Cognition

An Introduction

Patrick Lemaire

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9781032138381
• eBook ISBN: 9781000521016
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Emotions in Psychology
• Index: Psychology

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.

Chapter 1 Emotion and cognition: Introduction

DOI: 10.4324/9781003231028-1

Emotions play a central role in the life of every human being. They shape our actions, our thoughts, and our relationships. They help us to detect, identify, and understand what is important to form memories and to make decisions. They guide our everyday actions. Because they are so central to our lives, emotions have been studied by researchers in disciplines across the cognitive and affective sciences (psychology, linguistics, philosophy, sociology, anthropology, computer science, psychiatry, and neuropsychology).

The psychology of emotions is a vast research area, which has made a great deal of progress over the past 30 years (see Barrett, 2018; Barrett et al., 2016; Luminet et al., 2013; Niedenthal & Ric, 2017; Sander & Scherer, 2019, for general overviews). At both the theoretical and empirical levels, research in this area is increasingly abundant and technically sophisticated. Psychologists have explored many questions about emotions (see Table 1.1 for some examples). As researchers have sought to answer these questions, they have made significant progress on determining what emotions are (their components), when and under what conditions we experience them (their causes and determinants), why we have them (their functions), how universal they are (cultural, inter- and intra-individual, and developmental differences), and their impact on psychological functions such as cognition. This book focuses on the last of these questions. It surveys research on how emotions and cognition are linked. This opening chapter presents the questions about emotion-cognition relations that researchers have tried to answer thus far, and the methods they have used to do so. It begins with a general definition of emotions. It then presents the major research questions on emotion-cognition relations, and what makes these questions interesting and important. Finally, it presents the cognitive functions covered in this book. These are functions that psychologists have already accumulated enough data about to allow us to understand how emotions affect them.

Table 1.1 A Few Examples of Questions That Psychologists Studying Emotions Have Tried to Answer

SOME GENERAL QUESTIONS ABOUT EMOTIONS---------------- What is an emotion? How can we know if someone is experiencing an emotion? How can we know what specific emotion a person is experiencing? How many basic emotions are there? What are they? How can we distinguish between different emotions? What makes an emotion strong (or intense) or weak? Are emotions universal and innate (i.e., present in all cultures), or do they vary from culture to culture? Do the triggers and expressions of emotion vary between cultures and environments? Are women more emotional than men? Do young people have more intense and varied emotions than older people? Do our emotions change as we age? Are some people more emotional than others? How can we know? Do animals have emotions? Are our emotions different when we experience an emotional event while we are alone than when we are with others? How do we formulate our emotional judgments (discrimination, determination, identification)? What are emotions for? Could we live without emotion? Do emotions influence our cognitive performance, and if so, how?

1.1 What is an emotion?

Many definitions of emotions have been proposed. While they differ on some points, these definitions have in common that they take emotions to be internal states that may be (but need not always be) observable through expressions (facial, verbal, and more) and behavior. In most cases, emotions are accompanied by physiological reactions (e.g., changes in heart rate, electrodermal responses, skin conductivity, muscular activity). To take one example, Keltner and Gross (1999) defined emotions as “episodic, relatively short-term, biologically based patterns of perception, experience, physiology, action, and communication that occur in response to specific physical and social challenges and opportunities” (p. 468). An emotion is thus a set of (psychological and/or physiological) responses of variable intensity, duration, and complexity. These responses can be more or less public or private, and more or less synchronized. Note, finally, that an emotion occurs when we find ourselves in a situation that we evaluate in some way (as dangerous or safe, pleasant or disagreeable).

There are several types of emotions, and scientists are still discussing what the best taxonomy of emotions is (e.g., Keltner, 2019; Keltner et al., 2019). While many psychologists believe that it is important to distinguish between the so-called basic emotions (joy, anger, sadness, disgust, fear) and self-conscious emotions (jealousy, envy, shame, guilt, embarrassment, pride), two dimensions characterize all emotions: valence (positive or negative emotion) and arousal (weak or strong emotion). These dimensions vary continuously, so that a situation or stimulus can have a more or less positive or negative emotional valence, and involve more or less emotional arousal (e.g., Plutchik, 1991; Russell, 1980; Watson & Tellegen, 1985).

Each emotion has its own general profile of psychological, behavioral, and physiological expressions, although this profile may vary between individuals and, in the same individual, between situations. Joy, for example, often results from the achievement of an important goal or the satisfaction of a need. It is expressed by smiling, an increase in the fundamental frequency, dynamic range, and intensity of the voice, as well as increased heart rate and body temperature. Anger is often triggered by an unexpected event intentionally caused by another person, which we perceive as an obstacle to achieving an important goal and/or meeting a need. It is expressed by a hard, tense face, and is accompanied by an increase in the voice’s fundamental frequency, intensity, and energy at high frequencies, as well as an accelerated heart rate, increased muscle tension, and changes in breathing. Sadness is often the result of an event or situation that prevents us from satisfying a need for a prolonged period, and that is perceived as difficult or even impossible to control. It is accompanied by a feeling of helplessness, drooping eyelids, a lowering of the voice, the rate of speech, and muscle tension, as well as the urge to cry. As a final example, fear is caused by a sudden event that we perceive as threatening our survival or our physical or mental integrity. It is accompanied by a terrorized facial expression and increases in the fundamental frequency and pitch of the voice, as well as the rate of speech. The heart rate also quickens, breathing and body temperature change, and the throat tightens. The diversity of the psychological, behavioral and physiological responses associated with each emotion is interesting for psychologists who are trying to understand the links between emotion and cognition. For example, to check that a participant is in fact in a certain emotional state while performing a cognitive task, experimenters can collect a set of measurements that, taken together, provide a reliable and valid indicator of that emotional state.

Emotions differ from both moods (which do not necessarily have a specific object and can be more diffuse and longer-lasting) and sentiments or feelings. Emotions differ from sentiments in terms of a number of characteristics, such as their intensity, duration, objects, expression, and manifestations (public or private). Not all researchers agree on the criteria, but they generally concur that emotions and sentiments are different, although the two may be related (e.g., certain sentiments or feelings may be based on certain emotions; Damasio, 2010).

Finally, to understand emotions, researchers try to determine not only what they are, when they occur, how they are triggered, and their effects on other psychological dimensions but also their functions (see Scherer & Ekman, 1984, for a discussion). For example, emotions may orient our tastes, make life richer and more interesting, help us to avoid or escape from danger, facilitate (or hinder) communication between individuals and groups, support the pursuit of a goal, prepare us for action, and serve or help us to evaluate various elements of our world—people, animals, objects, situations—in order to adjust our behavior (e.g., to flee in case of danger) and ensure our survival and safety. It is no wonder, then, that they influence our cognitive functions.

1.2 Emotion–cognition relations: Research questions and significance

1.2.1 Research questions

Psychologists working on emotion-cognition relations pose a fundamental question: how and under what conditions do emotions influence our cognitive performance, if they do so at all? This question can be broken down into multiple subquestions. Some of these are general, others more specific; some are concrete and close to our intuitive questions, while others are more formal and abstract. Table 1.2 lists a few of these questions.

Table 1.2 Examples of Questions Asked by Psychologists Studying Emotion–Cognition Relations

Some intuitive questions Do sad people reason or think better than happy people? Do we reason better, and make better decisions, when we are calm than when we are angry? Do more people who are more anxious in general perceive a higher risk of negative events than those who are less anxious? Does anxiety about an exam before taking it correlate with exam performance? On days when we are sad, do we see the world as a darker place than it really is? When we are anxious, does the world seem more dangerous to us? When we are joyful, do we take an unrealistically positive or optimistic view of the world? Do we take more risks in an unknown situation when we are afraid? Is the cognitive performance of someone who has a good understanding of their emotions less influenced by them? Do emotions influence our performance in a domain in the same way if we are experts in that domain? Do more intense emotions influence our cognitive performance more than less intense emotions? Some less intuitive questions When and how do our emotions affect our cognitive performance? Do emotions influence cognition, or is it the other way around? What is the value/importance of studying the role of emotions in cognition? Do incidental and integral emotions affect our cognitive performance in the same way? How do the influences of incidental (exogenous) and integral (endogenous) emotions on cognition combine? Do emotions affect a given person in the same way in different cognitive domains (or tasks), or are these effects specific to each domain (or task)? Does a person’s level of expertise in a cognitive domain modulate the effect of emotions on their performance in that domain? Does a person’s degree of awareness of an emotional experience modulate the impact of that emotion on their cognition? In the domain of episodic memory, do emotions have the same effect on the mechanisms involved in a recognition task as on those involved in a free recall task? Do emotions influence the mechanisms involved in the attentional blink? Does the level of emotional control exercised during a cognitive task modulate the effect of emotions on performance on that task? What general characteristics of cognitive mechanisms are most sensitive to the effects of emotions?

As we will see, for each cognitive function, psychologists ask the same general questions, along with specific questions. Do emotions affect our cognitive performance? If so, under what conditions, to what extent, and through what mechanisms? Psychologists try to uncover how emotion affects our attentional abilities, memory performance, reasoning, judgment, and decision-making. They also explore how, in all of these domains, we try to regulate our emotions to decrease or amplify these effects of emotion on our cognitive performance.

1.2.2 Significance

Understanding whether and how emotions influence our cognitive performance is important for a wide variety of reasons. First of all, empirically speaking, it helps to improve our understanding of the determinants of cognitive performance. Cognitive psychologists have long focused on the effects of different parameters on cognitive performance. These parameters can relate to the characteristics of stimuli (e.g., concrete vs. abstract words), tasks (e.g., free vs. cued recall), situations (e.g., under time pressure vs. with no time limit), and participants (e.g., experts vs. non-experts). Relatively little attention has been paid to the role of emotions, most likely more because methodologies were either lacking or insufficiently sophisticated and validated than because of a belief (either implicit or explicit) that c...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1 Emotion and cognition: Introduction
• 2 Emotion and attention
• 3 Emotion and attention: Individual differences, aging, and psychopathology
• 4 Emotion and memory
• 5 Emotion and memory: Individual differences, aging, and psychopathology
• 6 Emotion, judgment, decision-making, and reasoning
• 7 Emotion, judgment, decision-making, and reasoning: Individual differences, aging, and psychopathology
• 8 Emotion regulation
• 9 Emotion regulation: Aging, individual differences, and psychopathology
• 10 Emotion and cognition: Conclusion and perspectives
• References