Cognitive Perspectives on Emotion and Motivation

This book presents the contributions of the members of an Advanced Research Workshop on Cogni ti ve Science Perspectives on Emotion, Motivation and Cognition. The Workshop, funded mainly by the NATO Scientific Affairs Division, together with a contribution from the (British) Economic and Social Research Council, was conducted at II Ciocco, Tuscany, Italy, 21-27 June 1987. The venue for our discussions was ideal: a quiet holiday hotel, 500m high in the Apennine mountain range, approached by a mile of perilously steep, winding narrow road. The isolation was conducive to concentrated discussions on the topics of the Workshop. The reason for the Workshop was a felt need for researchers from disparate but related approaches to cognition, emotion, and motivation to communicate their perspectives and arguments to one another. To take just one example, the framework of information processing and the metaphor of mind as a computer has wrought a major revolution in psychological theories of cogni tion. That framework has radically altered the way psychologists conceptualize perception, memory, language, thought, and action. Those advances have formed the intellectual substrate for the "cognitive science" perspective on mental life.

Inhalt

I Motivation and Goal-Setting.- 1. Motivation and Emotion from a Biological Perspective.- 2. Self-Regulation of Motivation and Action through Goal Systems.- 3. A Motivational Approach to Volition: Activation and De-activation of Memory Representations Related to Uncompleted Intentions.- II Antecedents of Emotion.- 4. Criteria for Emotion-Antecedent Appraisal: A Review.- 5. Preattentive Processes in the Generation of Emotions.- 6. A State-Based Approach to the Role of Effort in Experience of Emotions.- 7. What are the Data of Emotion?.- III Cognitive Effects of Emotion And Motivation.- 8. Emotional and Motivational Determinants of Attention and Memory.- 9. The Instrumental Effects of Emotional Behavior - Consequences for the Physiological State.- 10. Emotion and Argumentation in Expressions of Opinion.- 11. Anxiety and the Processing of Threatening Information.- IV AI Models of Emotions.- 12. Artificial Intelligence Models of Emotion.- 13. Subjective Importance and Computational Models of Emotions.- 14. Plans and the Communicative Function of Emotions: A Cognitive Theory.- V Culture and Language of Emotion.- 15. The Semantics of the Affective Lexicon.- 16. Ethnographic Perspectives on the Emotion Lexicon.- VI Exercise in Synthesis.- 17. A Unifying Information Processing System: Affect and Motivation as Problem-Solving Processes.