Are Emotions Cognitive?

  • Thread starter Thread starter levinas12
  • Start date Start date
Status
Not open for further replies.
L

levinas12

Guest
What is the role of emotions (if functioning properly) in “disclosing” the truth about particular situations?

For example, “fear” discloses what is immediately threatening.

What “disclosures” might be associated with other emotions?
 
They are not cognitive. They are automatic reactions ‘designed’ to maximise your chance of propogating your genetic material.

They aren’t necessarily a correct indication of reality. You can feel fear without there being actual danger.

How you react to them is a cognitive process. You can’t control your emotions but you can control your response to them.
 
I think those of us that take the view that there is a Creator would see the material world as being created with us in mind so that we come to know the truth about reality which we call God.

Because of this, emotions have been seen as a connection to transcendent spiritual truth and have therefore played a large role in Christians pursuit of God and self examination of oneself with respect to this transcendent truth.

To some extent our emotions and our reasoning is who we are and we analyse and pursue a higher standard for ourselves that we believe take us closer to God.

I believe this striving has been what has driven human cultural advancement over the milllenia and the awareness of emotions has played an important part.

Regards.
 
What is the role of emotions (if functioning properly) in “disclosing” the truth about particular situations?

For example, “fear” discloses what is immediately threatening.

What “disclosures” might be associated with other emotions?
Psychologists certainly believe that emotions are linked to cognitions. Similarly, both cognitions and emotions are connected to motivations. In the modern cognitive school of psychology, it is thought that cognitions come first and lead to emotions. There are, however, alternative views, including the primacy of emotions. In the Gestalt school of psychology during the early 1900’s, it was believed that every cognition has at its core an emotion; the cognitions are, in other words, “affectively-tinged.”
 
Bradski has it correct; emotions are a movement of appetite, of which desire, love, hate, sorrow, anger, etc., are several of the movements, tending toward establishing union with what is perceived as good to be united to, or tending to avoiding what is apprehended as bad to be united to.

Cognition is in reference to thinking about what your senses apprehend, in order to understand what you are experiencing.

Cognition, or reasoning about what you are experiencing can end up with a “judgement” that “this is BAD news to be near this thing I am approaching”, upon which the appetite automatically moves a movement of fear, an escape tendency (or perhaps a fight tendency).

But this movement can be moderated or reversed by the Will and intellect, as a voluntary movement of the Will, which can temper the appetite with its passions (emotions).
 
They are not cognitive. They are automatic reactions ‘designed’ to maximise your chance of propogating your genetic material.
Granted that emotions do not always match reality.

For example, the emotion of fear may not always signal a real threat.

But it is through fear that we first become aware of a real threat. And, to that extent, fear is disclosive. In fact, one could argue that, without fear, we could not perceive a threat at all.
 
What is the role of emotions (if functioning properly) in “disclosing” the truth about particular situations?

For example, “fear” discloses what is immediately threatening.

What “disclosures” might be associated with other emotions?
Emotion strengthens cognition. Once instincts are separated out from emotions, I see that cognition precedes emotion. Thereafter, there is a constant interplay of each one influencing the other. With cognition ultimately gaining more control over time.
 
Bradski has it correct; emotions are a movement of appetite, of which desire, love, hate, sorrow, anger, etc., are several of the movements, tending toward establishing union with what is perceived as good to be united to, or tending to avoiding what is apprehended as bad to be united to.

Cognition is in reference to thinking about what your senses apprehend, in order to understand what you are experiencing.

Cognition, or reasoning about what you are experiencing can end up with a “judgement” that “this is BAD news to be near this thing I am approaching”, upon which the appetite automatically moves a movement of fear, an escape tendency (or perhaps a fight tendency).

But this movement can be moderated or reversed by the Will and intellect, as a voluntary movement of the Will, which can temper the appetite with its passions (emotions).
Not all disclosure is the result of a chain of reasoning. For example, we do not have to submit every perception to methodical doubt (pace Descartes).

Likewise with emotions. We see a bear and simultaneously experience fear. Fear “reveals” the threatening nature of the bear and motivates us to take evasive action. We do not stop and engage in a chain of reasoning to validate the perception or the “fear”.
 
Emotion strengthens cognition. Once instincts are separated out from emotions, I see that cognition precedes emotion. Thereafter, there is a constant interplay of each one influencing the other. With cognition ultimately gaining more control over time.
What do you mean by cognition? Disclosure of what’s really happening out there in the world? If so, emotion can be cognitive. For example, without fear, we can’t be aware of the “threatening” nature of a situation.
 
I think those of us that take the view that there is a Creator would see the material world as being created with us in mind so that we come to know the truth about reality which we call God.

Because of this, emotions have been seen as a connection to transcendent spiritual truth and have therefore played a large role in Christians pursuit of God and self examination of oneself with respect to this transcendent truth.

To some extent our emotions and our reasoning is who we are and we analyse and pursue a higher standard for ourselves that we believe take us closer to God.

I believe this striving has been what has driven human cultural advancement over the milllenia and the awareness of emotions has played an important part.

Regards.
How else was Dante possible?
 
I think the use of quotes indicates that you don’t need to take “design” literally.

ICXC NIKA
Yet, if emotions are not in some sense “veridical”, how can they maximize anything?
 
I’ve never heard of emotions described as cognitive. Though I have heard of both emotions and thoughts described as “mental states” but I don’t think they’re the same thing. I assume by ‘cognition’ you mean a thought. A thought can be expressed as a sentence, whereas an emotion cannot. Even the sentence “I am angry” expresses a thought, not the emotion anger.
 
Yet, if emotions are not in some sense “veridical”, how can they maximize anything?
Emotions are true in the sense that they are real. If you experience fear it is a true emotional state whether it is justified (a bear) or not (a butterfly). They are generally in-built, such as the fear of heights or can be a learned reaction following a traumatic emotional episode.

I think that you seem to be expecting them to be more than they actually are: simple, basic and entirely automatic states of mind which have been selected to help us pass on our genes.
 
Yet, if emotions are not in some sense “veridical”, how can they maximize anything?
Because our human mind is not a paper philosophy-generator, but rather resides in a living anatomical head. And the functions of that head are directed, to a great extent, by the cascade of neurotransmitters mediated by the body’s emotional system.

ICXC NIKA
 
Are Emotions Cognitive?
"The relationship between cognition and emotion has fascinated important thinkers within the Western intellectual tradition. Historically, emotion and cognition have been viewed as largely separate. In the past two decades, however, a growing body of work has pointed to the interdependence between the two. …]

A key conclusion from this review and from other current discussions of the relationship between cognition and emotion is that it is probably counterproductive to try to separate them. Instead, current thinking emphasizes their interdependence in ways that challenge a simple division of labor into separate cognitive and emotional domains." - scholarpedia.org/article/Cognition_and_emotion
 
Not all disclosure is the result of a chain of reasoning. For example, we do not have to submit every perception to methodical doubt (pace Descartes).

Likewise with emotions. We see a bear and simultaneously experience fear. Fear “reveals” the threatening nature of the bear and motivates us to take evasive action. We do not stop and engage in a chain of reasoning to validate the perception or the “fear”.
In the order of precedence, the eye experiences color (blacks and greens and browns, etc.)
The sensitive “cognition” gives a kind of understanding to the colors, knows objects where the eye only “knows” colors.
Cognition also knows the beings of the objects, living or non-living, bear or tree or flower or butterfly.
And memory with imagination propose images of good or bad or indifference in the proximity of these objects.
These images are at “light speed”, not requiring conscious contemplation, unless you have never seen a bear before and must take time to ask “what is this?, and is it good or is it bad?”
Emotion is the “after the fact” movements that happen in bodily “reflexes”, movements of appetite. Even a reflex movement of cognition is moved by appetite after the cognition of “recognition” has “triggered appetite”, and there is then consciousness of fear.

It all seems simultaneous, because we are wonderfully made.
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top