0.2 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.

A major development in affect-cognition research in the 1980s was the realization that in addition to influencing the content of cognition - informational effects - affect may also influence the process of cognition; that is, how people think about social information. It was initially thought that people in a positive mood tend to think more rapidly and perhaps superficially; reach decisions more quickly; use less information; avoid demanding and systematic processing; and are more confident about their decisions. Negative affect, in turn, was assumed to trigger a more systematic, analytic, and vigilant processing style. Clark, M. S., + Isen, A. M. (1982). Towards understanding the relationship between feeling states and social behavior. In A. H. Hastorf + A. M. Isen (Eds.), Handbook of social cognition (2nd ed.), New Jersey: Erlbaum. Isen, A. M. (1984). Towards understanding the role of affect in cognition. In R. S. Wyer + T. K. Srull (Eds.) Handbook of Social Cognition (Vol 3. pp. 179-236). Hillsdale, Nj: Erlbaum. Isen, A. M. (1987). Positive affect, cognitive processes and social behavior. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.), Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 20, pp. 203-253). New York: Academic Press. Schwarz, N. (1990). Feelings as information: Informational and motivation functions of affective states. In E. T. Higgins + R. Sorrentino (Eds.), Handbook of motivation and cognition: Foundations of social behavior (Vol. 2, pp. 527-561). New York: Guilford Press. More recent work showed that positive affect can also produce distinct processing advantages, as people are more likely to adopt more creative, open, constructive, and inclusive thinking styles. Bless, H. (2000). The interplay of affect and cognition: The mediating role of general knowledge structures. In J.P. Forgas (Ed.). Feeling and Thinking: The role of affect in social cognition. New York: Cambridge University Press. Fiedler, K. (2000). Towards an integrative account of affect and cognition phenomena using the BIAS computer algorithm. In J. P. Forgas (Ed.) Feeling and thinking: The role of affect in social cognition New York: Cambridge University Press. It now appears that positive affect promotes a more schema-based, top-down, and generative processing style, whereas negative affect produces a more bottom-up and externally focused processing strategy. This processing dichotomy has close links with the fundamental distinction between promotion-oriented vs prevention-oriented processing developed by Tory Higgins, a distinction that has deep roots in evolutionary theorizing as well as classic conditioning accounts.