10

Emotions and Cognition

CONTENTS

Passion and Reason

Emotions Prioritize Thoughts, Goals, and Actions

Three Perspectives on Emotions in Cognitive Functioning

Emotion Congruence

Feelings as Information

Styles of Processing

Effects of Moods and Emotions on Cognitive Functioning

Perceptual Effects

Attentional Effects

Effects on Remembering

Eyewitness Testimony

Persuasion

Moral Judgment

Emotions and the Law

Rules of Morality, Rules of Obligation

Dispassionate Judgments?

Summary

To Think About and Discuss

Further Reading

images

FIGURE 10.0 Reason, advised by Divine Grace, holds the Passions, Feare, Despaire, Choler, and others in chains. The caption starts: “Passions araing'd by Reason here you see/As she's Advis'd by Grace Divine. … ” From Senault (1671).

The heart has its reasons of which reason knows nothing.

Blaise Pascal, pensées, iv

On July 2, 1860, Eadweard Muybridge, a founding figure in photography, boarded a stagecoach for St. Louis, where he was to catch a train and make his way to Europe to buy rare books for his San Francisco bookstore. In northeastern Texas the driver of the stagecoach lost control of the horses, and the coach careened down a mountainside. In the crash, Muybridge was thrown headfirst into a tree. Miraculously he survived and, although he suffered serious brain damage, he made the trip to England, where he spent six vague years recuperating.

Muybridge returned ...

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