The seventeen contributions to this volume demonstrate the enormous progress that has been achieved recently in our understanding of emotions. Current cognitive formulations and information-processing models are challenged by new theory and by a solid body of empirical research presented by the distinguished authors. Addressing the problem of the relationship between developmental, social and clinical psychology, and psychophysiology, all agree that emotion concepts can be operationally defined and investigated as both independent and dependent variables. Cognitive and affective processes can no longer be studied in isolation; taken together, the chapters provide a useful map of an increasingly important and active boundary.

Emotional Cognition gives the reader an up to date overview of the current state of emotion and cognition research that is striving for computationally explicit accounts of the relationship between these two domains. Many different areas are covered by some of the leading theorists and researchers in this area and the book crosses a range of domains, from the neurosciences through cognition and formal models to philosophy. Specific chapters consider, amongst other things, the role of emotion in decision-making, the representation and evaluation of emotive events, the relationship of affect on working memory and goal regulation. The emergence of such an integrative, computational, approach in emotion and cognition research is a unique and exciting development, one that will be of interest to established scholars as much as graduate students feeling their way in this area, and applicable to research in applied as well as purely theoretical domains. (Series B)

A study that goes beyond the debate over functional specialization to describe the ways that emotion and cognition interact and are integrated in the brain. The idea that a specific brain circuit constitutes the emotional brain (and its corollary, that cognition resides elsewhere) shaped thinking about emotion and the brain for many years. Recent behavioral, neuropsychological, neuroanatomy, and neuroimaging research, however, suggests that emotion interacts with cognition in the brain. In this book, Luiz Pessoa moves beyond the debate over functional specialization, describing the many ways that emotion and cognition interact and are integrated in the brain. The amygdala is often viewed as the quintessential emotional region of the brain, but Pessoa reviews findings revealing that many of its functions contribute to attention and decision making, critical components of cognitive functions. He counters the idea of a subcortical pathway to the amygdala for affective visual stimuli with an alternate framework, the multiple waves model. Citing research on reward and motivation, Pessoa also proposes the dual competition model, which explains emotional and motivational processing in terms of their influence on competition processes at both perceptual and executive function levels. He considers the broader issue of structure-function mappings, and examines anatomical features of several regions often associated with emotional processing, highlighting their connectivity properties. As new theoretical frameworks of distributed processing evolve, Pessoa concludes, a truly dynamic network view of the brain will emerge, in which "emotion" and "cognition" may be used as labels in the context of certain behaviors, but will not map cleanly into compartmentalized pieces of the brain.

Originally published in 1986, this book was an effort to integrate thinking and research concerning the role of emotion and cognition in altruistic behaviour. Prior to publication there was a vast body of research and theorizing concerning the development and maintenance of prosocial (including altruistic) behaviour. This book focusses primarily on a specific set of intrapsychic factors involved in prosocial responding, especially emotions and cognitions believed to play a major role in altruistic behaviour. In the final chapters these intrapsychic factors are also discussed in relation to a variety of other relevant factors including socialization and situational influences on altruism.

Working actively with emotion has been empirically shown to be of central importance in psychotherapy, yet has been underemphasized in much of the writing on cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT). This state-of-the-art volume brings together leading authorities to describe ways to work with emotion to enrich therapy and achieve more robust outcomes that go beyond symptom reduction. Highlighting experiential techniques that are grounded in evidence, the book demonstrates clinical applications with vivid case material. Coverage includes mindfulness- and acceptance-based strategies, compassion-focused techniques, new variations on exposure-based interventions, the use of imagery to rework underlying schemas, and methods for addressing emotional aspects of the therapeutic relationship.

Emotion can impact various aspects of our cognition and behavior, by enhancing or impairing them (e.g., enhanced attention to and memory for emotional events, or increased distraction produced by goal-irrelevant emotional information). On the other hand, emotion processing is also susceptible to cognitive influences, typically exerted in the form of cognitive control of motion, or emotion regulation. Despite important recent progress in understanding emotion- cognition interactions, a number of aspects remain unclear. The present book comprises a collection of manuscripts discussing emerging evidence regarding the mechanisms underlying emotion- cognition interactions in healthy functioning and alterations associated with clinical conditions, in which such interactions are dysfunctional. Initiated with a more restricted focus, targeting (1) identification and in depth analysis of the circumstances in which emotion enhances or impairs cognition and (2)identification of the role of individual differences in these effects, our book has emerged into a comprehensive collection of outstanding contributions investigating emotion-cognition interactions, based on approaches spanning from behavioral and lesion to pharmacological and brain imaging, and including empirical, theoretical, and review papers alike. Co-hosted by the Frontiers in Neuroscience - Integrative Neuroscience and Frontiers in Psychology - Emotion Science, the contributions comprising our book and the associated research topic are grouped around the following seven main themes, distributed across the two hosting journals: I. Emotion and Selectivity in Attention and Memory; II. The Impact of Emotional Distraction; Linking Enhancing and Impairing Effects of Emotion; III. What Really is the Role of the Amygdala?; IV. Age Differences in Emotion Processing; The Role of Emotional Valence; V. Affective Face Processing, Social Cognition, and Personality Neuroscience; VI. Stress, Mood, Emotion, and the Prefrontal Cortex; The Role of Control in the Stress Response; VII. Emotion-Cognition Interactions in Clinical Conditions. As illustrated by the present collection of contributions, emotion-cognition interactions can be identified at different levels of processing, from perception and attention to long- term memory, decision making processes, and social cognition and behavior. Notably, these effects are subject to individual differences that may affect the way we perceive, experience, and remember emotional experiences, or cope with emotionally challenging situations. Moreover, these opposing effects tend to co-occur in affective disorders, such as depression and PTSD, where uncontrolled recollection of and rumination on distressing memories also lead to impaired cognition due to emotional distraction. Understanding the nature and neural mechanisms of these effects is critical, as their exacerbation and co-occurrence in clinical conditions lead to devastating effects and debilitation. Hence, bringing together such diverse contributions has allowed not only an integrative understanding of the current extant evidence but also identification of emerging directions and concrete venues for future investigations.

In this volume, Berkowitz develops the argument that experiential and behavioral components of an emotional state are affected by many processes: some are highly cognitive in nature; others are automatic and involuntary. Cognitive and associative mechanisms theoretically come into play at different times in the emotion-cognition sequence. The model he proposes, therefore, integrates theoretical positions that previously have been artificially segregated in much of the emotion-cognition literature. The breadth of the implications of Berkowitz's theory is also reflected in the diversity of this book's companion chapters. Written by researchers whose work focuses on both social cognition and emotion, these articles provide important insights and possible extensions of the "cognitive-neoassociationistic" conceptualization developed in the target article. Although each chapter is a valuable contribution in its own right, this volume, taken as a whole, is a timely and important contribution both to social cognition and to research and theory on emotion per se.