ABSTRACT
To guide studies of cognition and emotion, a model is proposed that conceptualizes cognition as a mobile set of mental and sensorimotor actions. These actions coordinate the responses required by the context and task stimuli with which a person is dealing and by the person's fantasies and affect that interpret the same context and stimuli. The model subscribes to one of Piaget's (1981) hypotheses: that, in reality situations, cognitive and affective aspects of behavior always are present simultaneously, and one aspect does not result from or cause the other. But the model also departs from Piaget's second hypothesis (functional parallelism of intellectual structures and emotions) because this hypothesis, it seems, leads to one set of concepts and methods for cognition and to another for affect, thereby segregating the two domains and opposing the first hypothesis.
