Emotion-Cognition Interactions

Western scholarship has traditionally portrayed human emotions as problematic. Emotions are subjective, this view contends, and therefore inappropriate guides to social behavior, perception, and decision-making, particularly when juxtaposed to seemingly more sophisticated, principled forms of reasoning (Calhoun & Solomon, 1984; Nussbaum, 2001). Moreover, emotions frequently appear irrational, even dangerous, as they arise out of faulty or exaggerated perceptions of reality and can give rise to rash, impassioned behavior. Given that this view of emotions has prevailed in large strands of scholarship, from classical Greek writings onward, many contemporary emotion scholars have claimed that emotions subvert rational judgments concerning morality, blame, causality and the good life, and thus ought to be minimized when perceiving the world or making decisions (Nussbaum, 1996; Oatley, 2004). For example, Immanuel Kant, in writing about judgments related to justice, suggested that emotions like “sympathy ” be considered unreliable because such emotions reduce humans to “tender-hearted idlers ” (Kant, 1960). The rare exception was the 18th century moral philosopher David Hume, who contended that "Reason is and ought to be the slave of passion." This dualistic perspective on emotion and reason presupposes that the relationship between emotion and cognition is necessarily one of antagonism. Emotions and rational thought fight one another, it is assumed, for control over behavior, beliefs and interpretations of the social world. Yet twenty-five years of empirical research on the interplay of emotion and cognition, reviewed in this chapter, converges on an alternative point of view (Clore, 1994; Clor