ABSTRACT
There is no question that emotion plays a major role in influencing many of our everyday cognitive and behavioral functions, including memory and decision making. The importance of emotion in human affairs is obvious. Disorders of emotion plague patients with many neurological and psychiatric conditions. Despite the fundamental role that emotion plays in many cognitive, neurological, and psychiatric disorders, scientific study of the neural correlates of emotion and its influence on thought and cognition has been largely ignored. Indeed, the study of emotion by cognitive science, neuroscience, and artificial intelligence has lagged behind the study of nearly all other major aspects of mind and brain. There is a popular notion, which most of us learn from early on in life, that logical, rational calculation forms the basis of sound decisions. Many people say, “emotion has no IQ”; emotion can only cloud the mind and interfere with good judgment. But what if these notions were wrong and had no scientific basis? What if sound, rational decision making in fact depended on prior accurate emotional processing? The studies of decision making in neurological patients who can no longer process emotional information normally suggest just that. Given the importance of emotion in the understanding of human suffering, its value in the management of disease, its role in social interactions, and its relevance to fundamental neuroscience and cognitive science, a comprehensive understanding of human cognition requires far greater knowledge of the neurobiology of emotion. In this chapter, we outline recent progress in understanding the role of emotion in cognition. Specifically, we will outline experiments supporting the argument that: (1) decision making is a process critically dependent on neural systems important for the processing of emotions; (2) conscious knowledge alone is not sufficient for making advantageous decisions; and (3) emotion is not always beneficial to decision making: Sometimes it can be disruptive.
