0.5 How do emotion, attention, thought, and arousal work together  (Page 9/17)

For instance, when you are simply interacting with someone, you are probably bringing up lots of old memories. You are certainly using the experience you gained from studying those memories or thinking about them. If the conversation involves thinking about certain memories, then you may also bring up previous conversations or other subtle, little things from memory. If you think about it in terms of just experience, if you use experience all of the time, then there is going to be a lot of memories associated with that experience that may come up or are used unconsciously.

Wegner Wegner, D. M. (1994). Ironic processes of mental control. Psychological Review, 101, 34-52. has argued that cognitive control requires two mental processes: An intentional operating process, that searches for and implements a mental content consistent with the preferred cognitive state, and a monitoring process to search for mental content not consistent with the intended state. Wegner argues that the monitoring process is always active and constantly searching for material that conflicts with our intentions and goals. Botvinick and colleagues Botvinick, M., Braver, T., Barch, D. Carter, C. + Cohen, J. (2001). Conflict monitoring and cognitive control. Psychological Review, 108 (3), 624-652 , on the other hand, believe the monitoring system becomes activated only when conflict arises. However, the basic goal of both system is similar: to reduce conflict and help achieve goal-oriented behavior. For Wegner that also includes an additional process: the operating process.

That basically means that whatever it is you are doing or want to do, your mind is going to support you doing that, at the same time, your mind is going to monitor what else it is that you are doing and see if it in line with the intended state. That makes sense, people have cognitive capacity, when someone does something, it is much more complicated than them doing one single simple thing - there are mental processes involved. These mental processes distract attention, use mental resources (such as attention and focus), and cause complex emotional and cognitive phenomena. It makes sense that the "monitoring system" focuses on other aspects than your conscious "operating system". I don't know when it operates most, when you are doing a conscious task with the operating system, or when conflict arises, such as Botvinick and colleagues suggested.

Under particular circumstances, this two process system may not function properly; we may not be able to think positively, inhibit certain thoughts, or focus our attention on particular items. We may, in fact, perform the exact opposite of our intentions. Wegner refers to this as counterintentional error, where, in given situations, instead of performing an appropriate behavior or response, we behave or think in an opposite manner. For example, when we need to receive a good night sleep for an important day, yet the more we want to fall asleep the more we fail to fall asleep. There seems to be an interaction, in these situations, between how much we think about something and the increasing amount of failure of that action occurring.