How does cognition influence emotion?

A related article

Chris Fields (2010) wrote an article explaining about 'hyper-systemizers' - "Hyper-systemizers are individuals displaying an unusually strong bias toward systemizing, i.e. toward explaining events and solving problems by appeal to mechanisms that do not involve intentions or agency.". And how they are different from their opposites 'mentalizers'. That relates to this article because I described how some information is more emotional than other information. It seems that some people process more emotional information, and other people process information more subjectively or are just less sensitive to emotional cues:

• Scientists, technologists, engineers and mathematicians rely heavily on a problem-solving and explanatory strategy or orientation, termed “systemizing” by Baron-Cohen (2002, 2008), that ischaracterized by appeals to natural laws, physical mechanisms, algorithms, formal inference rules, or other concepts of causation that do not involve autonomous agency or intentions. Systemizing or“mechanizing” (Crespi and Badcock, 2008) solutions and explanations are explicitly distinguished from “empathizing” or “mentalizing” solutions and explanations, which do appeal to intentional,2 autonomous agency and to actions guided by beliefs, desires, goals, fears, worries and other “folkpsychological” attributes associated with agency by a theory of mind (ToM) system (Frith and Frith, 1999; 2003).

Fields describes the proposition of his paper:

• Based on a review and synthesis of relevant literatures, the present paper proposes that pre-existing personality andcognitive demands interact to progressively sensitize the attentional and motivational systems of some individuals toward systemizing and away from mentalizing, resulting in hyper-systemizers who are notdeficit in mentalizing capability, but rather relatively insensitive to cues that ordinarily induce mentalizing.

So some people are more driven by emotional processes - and their thoughts are influenced by emotion - but with other people this is less the case. I mean if your actions are being guided by beliefs, fears, goals, worries, etc. then it would seem to me that the person would be more emotional. That isn't necessarily the case, however. Someone could have their thoughts be driven by those things, but not be an emotional person. Would that person be thinking with more unconscious emotional processes, but not actually be more emotional? Emotion can be present in thought and used to assist thought, but might not actually make the person more emotional than someone whose thinking is more objective. Maybe they are emotional for a different reason.

Theory of mind

Theory of mind (often abbreviated "ToM") is the ability to attribute mental states—beliefs, intents, desires, pretending, knowledge, etc.—to oneself and others and to understand that others have beliefs, desires, and intentions that are different from one's own. (Premack, D. G.; Woodruff, G. (1978)).

In my view, ToM relates significantly to how emotional people and their thoughts are. If someone's actions are being guided by beliefs and desires (a 'mentalizer'), then it makes sense that their understanding and assessments of other people and themselves are going to be influenced by beliefs and desires. If someone has greater desires when making assessments (so the emotion would be related to their thoughts) would they be a more emotional person? Someone might be capable of thinking non-emotionally, even if they have greater desires and beliefs, though I would think that in general someone with more emotional thoughts would be a more emotional person. It probably depends what they are more emotional about, etc.