What are consciousness and emotion?
Consciousness hard to explain – it’s private, intrinsic, directly apprehended, indescribable
- Perceiving the environment
- Social communication and action
- Controlling actions
- Planning and reasoning
- Integration of information
Emotion – brief affective (emotional) experience
- Affect – specifically refers to an emotion displayed but has come to mean almost anything related to emotion
- Mood – more chronic and pervasive state
Are they the same sorts of things as cognition?
Emotion is a factor which may be important but whose inclusion at this point would unnecessarily complicate the cognitive-scientific enterprise (Gardner, 1985) Cognition is:
- Perception
- Attention
- Memory
- Learning
- Thinking
- Etc
Main Approaches
- Philosophical, introspective, rational
- Cognitive, experimental
- Survey/correlational
- Neural correlates, neurocases Appraisal theories:
– Affective Primacy – cognition and emotion are separate but they may interact How does emotion relate to cognition?
- Role of cognition in emotion
- Regulation of emotion – usually by deliberate cognitive efforts
- Influence of emotion on cognitions – mood influences decision making much more strongly than judgement
- Biases – cognitive processes that support (negative emotions) and emotional states that promote maladaptive cognitions
- Phenomena:
- Mood congruity effects – recall of information congruent with current mood (stronger for positive mood)
- Mood/state-dependent memory (Kenealy, 1997)
- Though congruity
How does consciousness relate to cognition?
2 hemispheres, 2 consciousnesses?
- Left hemisphere – language and logic
- Right hemisphere – wholistic and spatial tasks
Split-brain patients