Abstract

Although emotion and cognition have sometimes been viewed as two distinct components of human psychology (Zajonc, 1980; Zajonc & KunstWilson, 1980), findings from animals and humans strongly support a modified view, in which emotion is an integral attribute of cognition. In fact, there is now good evidence that emotion modulates information processing in domains ranging from memory to reasoning to decision making. Not only does emotion modulate other aspects of cognition, but is also in fact properly considered cognitive in its own right, insofar as it constitutes computations over representations: namely, representations of the organism's body state.