Cognitive-Emotional Interactions: Listen to the Brain

Abstract Through the ages, cognition and emotion have been viewed as separate but equal aspects of the mind. The goal of a theory of mind was traditionally to understand how cognition, emotion, and other mental processes contribute to and interact in the maldng of the mind. But around the middle of the twentieth century, an intellectual hegemony, now called cognitive science, began that ultimately led to an approach to the mind that intentionally left the study of emotion out (see LeDoux, 1996). Recently, there have been a number of attempts to reunite emotion and cognition in the mind, usually by inserting emotion into the cognitive view of the mind (see Ekman & Davidson, 1994). These have not succeeded, as there is still more confusion than consensus about the relation between emotion and cognition and the place of these two concepts in a theory of mind.