ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the effects of mood state on cognitive processes such as perception, attention, interpretation, learning, memory, judgement, decision-making, and reasoning. The effects of emotion on long-term memory depend on several brain regions. However, the brain area most involved is the amygdala. The amygdala is buried in the front part of the temporal lobe and is associated with several emotions. Shiota et al. made use of behavioural and neuroscience evidence to identify nine different positive emotions: pride, sexual desire, nurturant love, contentment, awe, amusement, attachment love, gratitude, and liking/pleasure. In spite of such evidence that there are several positive emotions, there is a puzzling difference between research on negative and on positive affect. Current emotions directly influence the evaluation of the outcomes (e.g. whether heuristic or analytic process is used; which motivational goals are active). They also indirectly influence decision-making by changing the predicted emotional reactions to different potential decision choices.
