0.5 How do emotion, attention, thought, and arousal work together  (Page 13/17)

So anxiety can impact your attention, and your ability to shift your attention. It could also impact the thoughts you have and the emotions you are experiencing. Anxiety could cause your attention to shift to more sensory things, and make you less conscious about your thoughts or non-sensory things that you are thinking. People pay attention in different ways, and have different cognitive processes. There are conscious processes and unconscious ones. Unconscious ones can monitor for other thoughts and other emotional states, and the conscious processes are going to be the things you do that are more or less under your control. But the conscious is just a small part of mental functioning. People couldn't do everything and have it be completely conscious - that is why there is a monitoring or unconscious process that keeps track of the other options - the other thoughts and emotions you might experience. Anxiety, attention, emotion, thought, consciousness - all of these things are key factors in mental functioning.

Cognition and emotion

Feelings, values and preferences are going to influence even simple perceptual judgments. Your judgments are thoughts, and your feelings, values and preferences are all highly emotional. This example demonstrates an aspect in the age-old quest to understand the relationship between the rational and the emotional aspects of human nature. Is affect or cognition primary or dominant? From this example it would seem that they are separate, you have values and feelings, and that is separate from when you make decisions and judgments. When you make those judgments, feeling influences the judgment and motivates it, but it is a separate system.

There is a growing recognition that there are different categories of affective phenomena and their role in social cognition is quite distinct. One crucial distinction is between emotions and moods. Both emotions and moods may have an impact on social cognition, but the nature of this influence is quite different. Emotions are usually defined as intense, short-lived, and highly conscious affective states that typically have a salient cause and a great deal of cognitive content, featuring information about typical antecedents, expectations, and behavioral plans. The cognitive consequences of emotions such as fear, disgust, or anger can be highly complex, and depend on the particular prototypical representations activated in specific situations. As distinct from emotions, moods are typically defined as relatively low-intensity, diffuse, and enduring affective states that have no salient antecedent cause and therefore little cognitive content (such as feeling good or feeling bad, or being in a good or bad mood). As moods tend to be less subject to conscious monitoring and control, paradoxically their effects on social thinking, memory, and judgments tend to be potentially more insidious, enduring, and subtle.

Powerful emotions often leave a lingering mood state in their wake, and moods in turn can have an impact on how emotional responses are generated. Emotions are obviously going to be intense and short lived compared to moods, if you consider that a mood is your overall emotional state, it is not specific like emotions are. You feel each emotion, a mood, however, is something that could just hang around for a while. Since emotions and moods are so different, they are each going to have a different impact on your thinking, memory and judgments. It is probably more clear what the impact of a specific emotion is then a mood, which is going to have some sort of subtle impact on what you do. For instance if you are cooking, a bad mood might have some impact, but if you experienced an emotion, say, excitement or sadness, the impact would be more obvious.