Essay On Emotion And Cognition

Emotion and Cognition: A New Perspective

I. Introduction - Emotion and Cognition: are they separable?

Emotion and cognition are intricately intertwined and hard to tell which is influencing us in our everyday lives. While the former are sometimes referred to as feelings and affects (this term would be used interchangeably with emotion in this article) or “hot cognition”, the latter is often thought as our reasoning, or “cold cognition” (Zajonc, 1980). However, it is quite evident from our day-to-day account of events that it’s always the emotional parts of life that catch our attention - especially the bad ones. For one thing, as a general phenomenon, bad news is considered more newsworthy and can easily attract more reader attention (Baumeister,

In his influential paper “Feeling and Thinking. Preferences need no Inferences” (Zajonc, 1980), he argued for the idea that affect is “precedent to the intellective qualities and elements of experience” (para. 1), and in line with this he put forward several hypothesis to exhibit the supremacy of affect in information processing - in its independence, primacy and automaticity - over cognition. He collected and presented a host of empirical findings to support his argument. Among those, the mere-exposure effect - the experimental evidence for subject’s preferences, or liking, by merely being exposed to certain stimuli without the subjects’ conscious (and thus assumedly cognitive) processing of them, was cited as the supporting evidence for preferential processing of affect before cognition (or “feeling without knowing” as described by Zajonc) (Zajonc, 1980). He also based his argument on the biological assumption that distinctive brain area, specifically the locus coeruleus, was responsible for the processing of affective information, and thus to complete his argument for the independence of the emotion apart from

3). By drawing on more advanced biological knowledge of the brain’s activities in different areas, Storbeck and Clore (2007) concluded that the visual cortex could actually identify subliminal stimuli (which is regarded as a kind of cognitive activities) without its being consciously aware of by the subject. The only difference between a conscious and unconscious cognitive processing, they argued, was the strength of firing of the neurons which determined whether such information entered the subject’s consciousness, and leading to a more confident identification of the stimuli. Hence an unconscious processing doesn’t rule out cognitive activities and implies a preferential processing of affective components. Furthermore, they argued that amygdala was not the essential part in the mere exposure effect by citing the case of a patient GY whose amygdala has been severed from his visual cortex (Greve & Bauer, 1990) yet who was still shown to have the mere exposure effect. Therefore, they concluded that emotion and cognition should be treated as interdependent faculties functioning alongside with each other. This advocate was supported by a later meta-analytical review of the brain basis of emotion (Lindquist, Wager, Kober, Bliss-Moreau, & Barrett,