ABSTRACT

Most cognitive psychologists ignore the effects of emotion on cognition by trying to ensure their participants are in a neutral emotional state. Two issues are central to cognition and emotion. First, how do cognitive processes influence people emotional experience? Second, how does emotion influence cognitive processes? This chapter discusses the issues relating to emotion regulation. A strategy used in emotion regulation in which the individual disengages attention from emotional processing and focuses on neutral information. The main types of emotion-regulation strategies are attention deployment, cognitive change and response modulation. A distinction is often drawn between emotions and moods. Mood states also influence memory through mood congruity and mood-state-dependent memory. The chapter discusses various cognitive biases associated with anxiety and depression in healthy individuals and clinical patients. These cognitive biases are: attentional bias, interpretive bias, explicit memory bias and implicit memory bias. Most cognitive bias modification techniques are designed to reduce attentional or interpretive bias.