Cognition: the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through experience, the senses, and thinking
In a section for a book to be published in the coming weeks, The Nature of Emotion: Fundamental Questions (2nd edition). New York: Oxford University Press, Hadas Okon‐Singer (HOS) and colleagues address the question of how emotion and cognition interact. Their paper, The Interplay of Emotion and Cognition ( pdf), describes current thinking about emotion’s role in perceiving the world and information, thinking about it and understanding it. The implications of current research for both the clinical medicine of psychological disorders are profound. Although HOS does not focus in it, the same implications hold for politics.
This short paper illustrates how quickly understanding of matters that until recently were the domain of philosophers is expanding. Modern neuroscience, and psychological and clinical research is making rapid inroads into understanding emotion. HOS comments: “Until the 20th century, the study of emotion and cognition was largely a philosophical matter. Although contemporary theoretical perspectives on the mind and its disorders remain heavily influenced by the introspective measures that defined this earlier era of scholarship, the last several decades have witnessed the emergence of powerful new tools for objectively assaying emotion and brain function, which have yielded new insights into the interplay of emotion and cognition.”
The basic interpretation of from existing data that HOS draws is simple but profound: “Emotion—including emotional cues, emotional states, and emotional traits—can profoundly influence key elements of cognition in both adaptive and maladaptive ways.” Until recently, dominant scientific belief was that emotion was a reality and logic distorting influence, and thus it was generally maladaptive or detrimental for rational cognition (seeing and thinking). HOS makes clear that emotion can be helpful. Other researchers have come to the same conclusion. For example, Philip Tetlock, a researcher who analyzes the quality of expert judgment in politics and related topics such as national security and economics, believes that, among other things, consciously controlled emotion is an essential part of accurate expert judgment. (see discussion here)
HOS comments that since the world is far more complex than the human mind can deal with, emotion is a mechanism the mind relies on to help focus attention on what’s important. Citing other researchers, HOS observes that “attention is necessary because . . . . the environment presents far more perceptual information than can be effectively processed, one’s memory contains more competing traces than can be recalled, and the available choices, tasks, or motor responses are far greater than one can handle” Things like angry faces, erotica (sex!) and snakes are far more attention-grabbing than non-emotional inputs. HOS summarizes this point: “Emotional stimuli are associated with enhanced processing in sensory regions of the brain and amplified processing is associated with faster and more accurate performance.” Clearly, emotion can be adaptive or helpful.
Anxiety: Regarding anxiety disordersm HOS observes that “Individuals show marked differences in the amount of attention they allocate to emotionally salient information. Such attentional biases are intimately related to emotional traits and disorders. Hypervigilance for threat is a core component of both dispositional and pathological anxiety. . . . Anxious individuals are more likely to initially orient their gaze towards threat in free‐viewing tasks; they are quicker to fixate threat‐related targets in visual search tasks; and they show difficulty disengaging from threat‐related distractors . . . . There is compelling evidence that attentional biases to threat causally contribute to the development and maintenance of extreme anxiety.”
Working memory, the mind’s blackboard: Working memory actively recalls, maintains and manipulates (thinks about) information for short periods of time when one is consciously focused on something or a mental task. The amount of such information is very limited. HOS comments that “information transiently held in working memory is a key determinant of our momentary thoughts, feelings, and behavior. Recent work by our group indicates that emotionally salient information enjoys privileged access to working memory. . . . anxious individuals allocate excess storage capacity to threat, even when it is completely irrelevant to the task at hand and no longer present in the external world.”
In other words, emotion is a powerful influence on perceptions of reality and thinking about what is perceived.
Emotional control strategies: Research now shows that some emotion control techniques can effectively tamp down emotional responses. The basis for this is increasingly well understood. HOS points out that “. . . the neurobiological underpinnings of this core human capacity [to control emotion] indicates that circuits involved in attention and working memory play a crucial role in the regulation of emotion and other, closely related aspects of motivated behavior, such as temptation and craving.” The biology of such traits is coming into focus.
One effective strategy is to simply divert attention from emotional or distressing sources or inputs such as disturbing videos, photos or speech. Effects of doing this are observable in brain structures, e.g., the amygdala, that regulate emotional states or feelings. Another emotion-damping technique is to consciously reframe[1] or reassess emotional inputs. As discussed previously, another emotion control mechanism is to think in third person terms instead of first person terms.
HOS concludes by observing that “the last decade has witnessed an explosion of interest in the interplay of emotion and cognition and greater attention to key methodological and inferential pitfalls.” Intrusion of philosophers into neuroscience has no doubt raised concern for pitfalls in both experimental methods and in how the resulting data can be interpreted.
Footnote:
1. Framing effects refer to a powerful innate cognitive bias ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Framing_effect_(psychology) ). It leads the mind to perceive, think about and then make judgements about a situation or an issue that comes to one’s attention depending on how information is framed. Careful framing leads to judgments that vary in often or usually predictable ways. People thus tend to make judgments based on the framework in which information or a situation is presented. In politics, framing ideas, issues and people is also called spinning.
B&B orig: 11/5/17
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