How does cognition influence emotion?  (Page 10/13)

How can intellect in the brain be categorized?

Just like how different types of sensory information can be stimulating to someone, different types of intellectual information are probably also stimulating to various degrees. School can be academically (or intellectually) rigorous, but what pieces of information from academic material are more rigorous? The same information probably is just as rigorous outside of a school environment. Can I separate out information that is accompanied or 'forced' into someone by other emotional stress like if someone was under pressure at school to do well, or under pressure to figure out a solution otherwise?

Different types of information must be associated with different emotional architectures - i.e., when I think about this I feel this way. Some types of information are going to be more or less emotional or related to your personal identity. That is different from if the information uses more unconscious emotional processes. Information could use emotion to help to think about it (like my historical fact example), or the information could be emotional to the person or not as well.

Subjectivity and emotion

(Vaknin, Sam) Proposes that emotions are either sensory or internal:

• Actions are sense data and motivations are internal data, which together form a new chunk of emotional data.
• If more sense data (than internal data) are involved and the component of internal data is weak in comparison (it is never absent) – we are likely to experience Transitive Emotions. The latter are emotions, which involve observation and revolve around objects. In short: these are "out-going" emotions, that motivate us to act to change our environment.
• Yet, if the emotional cycle is set in motion by Emotional Data, which are composed mainly of internal, spontaneously generated data – we will end up with Reflexive Emotions. These are emotions that involve reflection and revolve around the self (for instance, autoerotic emotions). It is here that the source of psychopathologies should be sought: in this imbalance between external, objective, sense data and the echoes of our mind.

So obviously emotions are going to be generated by either one or both inputs - internal and external. If you feel like (or are) responding to your internal motivations and feelings, then you are responding more internally. If someones environment is putting pressure on them (people in the environment, or other sensory inputs), then they would by definition be responding more externally.

What makes an emotion subjective? People feel emotions all the time, its just how they are - "Thats just how I feel" someone might try to communicate. It is too hard to assess where the emotion came from, if it was a logical one that made sense or an emotion that was subjective. What would an example of a 'subjective' emotion be vs. a 'logical' emotion?