ABSTRACT
The objective of this chapter is to describe the interrelationship of emotion and cognition. This task would be simple if the words referred to specific entities: They do not. Rather, they refer to two sets of phenomena (experiences and overt behaviors) that are products of complex underlying processes. To relate emotion to cognition means, therefore, that one must describe and then link the processes that generate them. The first step in this task is to describe the basic assumptions and the framework guiding my approach. Following this background material, I present a perceptual-motor model of the processes assumed to underlie emotion. The model is compared to other theories of emotion, and a limited number of supportive empirical findings are presented. The next section deals with the link between emotion and cognition in a substantive area: that of illness cognition. In that final section of the chapter I develop a number of ideas about the workings of an emotion-cognition system.
