Cognition and emotion: on paradigms and metaphors

ABSTRACT

The field of cognition and emotion is characterised as the cognitive psychology of evaluative and affective processes. The most important development in this field is the fruitful adoption of cognitive psychology paradigms to study automatic evaluation processes, for example. This has led to a plethora of findings and theories. Two points are emphasised: First, the (often metaphorical) theoretical way of thinking has changed over the decades. Theorising with symbolic models (e.g. semantic networks), which was prevalent in earlier years, has been replaced more recently by subsymbolic models (i.e. PDP models). It is argued that – despite their still metaphorical character – the latter are better suited to capturing characteristics of emotional processes. Second, the field has adopted the methods of experimental cognitive psychology to develop and refine paradigms as “windows to the mind”.

KEYWORDS:

• Cognition
• emotion
• automatic evaluation
• parallel distributed processing

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

ORCID

Dirk Wentura http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9907-498X

Notes

1 See Moors and De Houwer (2006) for an extensive discussion of the complexities of the term “automatic”.

2 In a gloss, Treichel (2018), aged 65, wrote about visiting a concert of the sixties band Procol Harum, accompanied by a friend and her 13 years old grandson, all along waiting for the famous song “A whiter shade of pale”, which was eventually given as an encore. While Treichel describes (with a bit of self-irony) the impact of hearing the song as: “I am more than touched. My life passed by, the fulfilled, but even more the unfulfilled”, the bored boy already left the hall.

3 Interestingly, French participants with high proficiency in German showed both priming effects in both languages. The difference between the two samples was that the study took place in Germany; thus, the French participants were deeply immersed in German life at the time of recruitment which did not hold at this point of time for the German participants and their immersion in French culture.