Cognition in Emotion: Always, Sometimes, or Never?

Abstract

Abstract A not uncommon reaction to claims about the role of cognition in emotions is to agree with the proverbial farmer, who, when asked for directions to the city, replied “You can’t get there from here.” Certainly, emotions have many characteristics that seem to justify skepticism about any involvement of cognition in them. For example, the fact that we can be surprised by our own emotions suggests that we sometimes have little insight into them, and the fact that emotions occur automatically suggests that we have little control over them. We cannot, for instance, simply decide to feel an emotion the way we can decide to think about one. Furthermore, it is not unusual for people to report emotional reactions that conflict with cognitive ones. For example, in a vivid account of his struggle with anxiety and depression, one author (Solomon, 1998) recalls lying frozen in bed, crying because he was too frightened to take a shower while at the same time knowing full well that showers are not scary. One of our goals in this chapter is to examine the implications of such observations for the idea that emotions always involve cognitive appraisal processes; we argue that a cognitive account of emotion has implications that are both more fundamental and less restrictive than the skeptical view that emotions do not necessarily involve cognition seems to imply.