Effects of Emotion on Cognition

Recent research using behavioral, brain imaging and lesion methods emphasizes the intimate relationship between emo-tion and cognition, and shows that emotions can have complex influences on various cognitive processes. Specifically, emo-tions may affect both lower level (e.g., perceptual) and higher level (e.g., mnemonic and executive) cognitive processes, and the effects could be either beneficial/enhancing or detrimental/ impairing. On the one hand, emotional stimuli/events can ben-efit from enhanced perceptual processing due to their ability to “capture attention, ” and hence through prioritized processing they can be better encoded and remembered. On the other hand, task-irrelevant emotional information may lead to increased distraction and impaired performance in ongoing cognitive tasks. Moreover, these effects of emotion on cogni-tion could be immediate and long-lasting and involve both automatic/bottom-up and controlled/top-up mechanisms. The emphasis of this review article is on investigations examining the neural mechanisms of enhancing and impairing effects of emotion and linking them in both healthy and clinical popula-tions. The first two sections summarize evidence from studies separately examining the enhancing and impairing effects. The third and fourth sections discuss emerging evidence from studies linking enhancing and impairing effects, both in healthy and clinical groups, respectively. The review ends with concluding remarks and a brief presentation of open issues and future directions