ABSTRACT
Research reported and summarized in this volume represents a continuing, collective effort to correct a tendency of the cognitive revolution toward an exclusive focus on cognition, leaving emotion and motivation (or affective and conative processes) to obscurity (Hilgard, 1980). In the broader historical scheme of things, it is a reaction to a philosophical and psychological tradition of treating the mind as a disembodied existence, from Descartes’ notion of thinking as having its own ontological independence regardless of bodily experiences to Ebbinghaus’s disembodied studies of memory capacity (e.g., Damasio, 1994). Integrating emotion and motivation back into cognition is based on an increasing realization that, unlike a rule-based symbol manipulation system, human cognition is adaptive; for better or for worse, emotion and motivation play an important regulatory role in determining how the cognitive system functions (Dai & Sternberg, 2004). Indeed, current efforts in robotics also try to build functions of emotion and motivation into the robots that serve important adaptive and self-directing purposes (see Morgavi et al., Chapter 8). The integration starts with infusing models, in which cognitive processes and functions are seen one way or another regulated by some emotional and motivational states (Bower, 1992), but gradually fully integrative systems of person–environment transactions are developed to account for real-world complex phenomena, such as social cognition (Forgas, 1995), religion practices (Russell et al., Chapter 9), or problem solving. As we move the scale of human behavior to “the foothills of rationality” where much real behavior takes place, according to Newell (1988, p. 428), there is an increasing need for a broad framework to organize integration efforts.
