As Luiz Pessoa (Reference Pessoa2013) acknowledges in the preface of his insightful book, The Cognitive-Emotional Brain, the modeling of function-structure mappings for cognition and emotion has received very little attention in the literature, particularly when compared with the abundance of empirical findings confirming the interaction between cognition and emotion. Pessoa devotes an entire chapter to the problem of function-structure mappings and emphasizes its importance throughout the book with admirable clarity. His efforts to close this theoretical gap constitute a signal contribution to the literature. Because of the crucial role that function-structure mappings will play in future debates on emotion and cognition, this review focuses on Pessoa's proposals on how to model their integration.
An overview of the current state of the literature concerning models for cognition and emotion demonstrates the pressing need for developing theoretical approaches that systematize current findings. Pessoa forcefully argues that the “network perspective” he favors is particularly helpful in fulfilling this task. More specifically, the dual competition model (or DCM) that Pessoa offers receives substantial support from a vast array of findings in neuroscience, across species, which Pessoa documents in great detail. These findings strongly suggest that emotion and cognition are not isolated and, more important, that they are not discretely instantiated in neatly localized regions of the brain. Indeed, in many cases cognition interacts with emotion producing no systematically located activations. Pessoa's impressive analysis of these findings concerns attention-filtering processes in which emotion plays a decisive role in modulating cognitive processing. He thereby illuminates the larger issue of how emotion shapes cognition and vice versa, a topic that has been of central importance in neuroscience (e.g., LeDoux Reference LeDoux1996).
Precisely because of the strong support that the DCM receives from the empirical findings, it is essential to analyze its theoretical underpinnings. A central tenet of Pessoa's integrative approach is that although“emotion” and “cognition” may be useful terms to characterize behaviors, they do not neatly map onto brain regions. To know if those conceptualize a unified network in the brain, one needs to know how the activations of this network instantiate the guiding characteristics and semantic contents underlying emotional and cognitive behaviors. Even if the DCM adequately models this network, and even if the function and structure of the emotion cognition interface is best understood in terms of integrated networks (rather than brain regions), one still needs to explain how emotion and cognition map to each other in processes of perceptual attention and conscious awareness.
Here, one confronts two questions: (a) what is the role of attention and consciousness (including self-awareness) in the integration of cognition and emotion? and (b) what degree of complexity of the semantic information is required for the integration of cognition and emotion? Any answer to these questions – to create a satisfactory model for the integration of cognition and emotion –must involve evolution and language. With respect to evolution: How to identify automatic and unintended processes, as opposed to more recent forms of cognitive or emotional responses that require self-awareness? With respect to language, which Pessoa scarcely mentions: Can there be cognitive and emotional responses that are fundamentally dependent on the language capacity? These two questions are obviously related, and the potential implications of answering these questions with respect to the independence of emotion from cognition are not explicitly addressed by Pessoa's model, opening the possibility of a form of dissociation between emotion and cognition that may challenge his model.
These questions must be answered in order to define the fundamental aspects regarding the mapping between cognition and emotion. For example, although many forms of emotion seem to be quite basic or “dumb” as Pessoa argues (p. 247), cognition seems at least implicitly to require inferential and conceptual capacities. Presumably, many of those capacities are associated with the language capacity in humans. Complex cognitive and inferentially based reasoning appear to be a recent development in the evolution of the emotion and cognition network. Their recent development suggests at least some degree of independence between emotion and cognition in instances of conscious inference and perceptual attention because some emotional processes may occur unconsciously or independently from interactions with inferentially and semantically based cognition. Thus, considerations about evolution question the plausibility of a highly integrated network for emotion and cognition, in the sense that the automatic system may not map neatly to any of the more consciously effortful and inferentially mediated system.
The DCM hypothesizes that emotional and motivational signals are systematically integrated with perception and cognition. In order to distinguish between automatic and voluntary processes, however, it is fundamental first to specify how “emotion” and “cognition” are being understood. Pessoa (Reference Pessoa2005) correctly remarks that recent findings have challenged the view that emotion happens automatically and independently of attention and awareness. He proposes that current research should focus on how attention and awareness modulate emotion in perception. Yet, there are many forms of attention (including effortful, effortless, and unconscious attention). What is more, there may be more than one form of conscious awareness as argued in Montemayor and Haladjian (Reference Montemayor and Haladjian2015). The distinction between awareness and self-awareness is of particular relevance. For example, it has been argued that self-awareness is fundamental for many forms of emotional behavior and for conscious forms of cognition (Damasio Reference Damasio2010).
With respect to attention modulation and emotion, both selective attention and basic emotional reactions appear to be early evolutionary adaptations that require neither linguistic capacities nor self-awareness. By contrast, consciously aware emotion may necessitate capacities for identifying the mental states of conspecifics (or having a theory of mind) and language (see Carruthers Reference Carruthers2000; Dennett Reference Dennett1969; Reference Dennett2005). Language may itself be a spandrel and a uniquely human capacity (Fitch et al. Reference Fitch, Hauser and Chomsky2005), which strongly suggests its recent evolution. If conscious awareness is required for higher forms of attention that depend on semantic and conceptual content, then it becomes more difficult to maintain an integration model for emotion and cognition: the independence of many kinds of emotional processes from cognitive ones would have to be a central feature of any model of their interaction.
Furthermore, conceptual content seems to be deeply associated with language capacity because of its compositional and generative characteristics (Fodor Reference Fodor1998). Conceptual content is also associated with the more complex activities of imagination and metaphorical reasoning (Lakoff & Johnson Reference Lakoff and Johnson1980). All theories of conceptual content relate it to either the language capacity or the capacity to form the beliefs that support inferential reasoning. For these reasons, conceptual attention seems to be a recent, perhaps uniquely human, phenomenon (assuming that language and inferential reasoning are recent phenomena in the evolution of our species). Emotional reactions seem to be less dependent on imagination and metaphor. Still, it is very likely that at least some of the consciously aware emotional reactions are less automatic than others, for which there may be numerous explanations, including the autonomy of the “old” emotional system. Crucially, emotion and cognition could really be independent from one another in humans, even if they interact systematically. Culture and social cues could be a further complication (Tomasello Reference Tomasello1999), in the sense that the semantic and inferential enrichments of emotional responses that characterize human emotional behavior may not only be independent from cognitive processing, but also fundamentally dependent on social cues and interactions.
Considerations regarding the necessity of a linguistic format for motivation, conceptualized in terms of the first-person perspective in humans, complicate the interaction between emotion and cognition even more. Some theorists argue that language is required for structuring self-consciousness (Baker Reference Baker2013; Dewart Reference Dewart1989; Neuman & Nave Reference Neuman and Nave2010). As mentioned, language is scarcely mentioned by Pessoa, but it may be fundamental to understand the DCM, because some format must be responsible for the mapping between cognition and emotion, and language is ideally suited to perform this role. A model that explicitly addresses the role of language in relation to emotion and cognition is desirable and perhaps necessary, because of the probable linguistic underpinnings of self-awareness.
It is undoubtedly true that the dichotomization of concepts such as “emotion” and “cognition” can be simiplistic. Pessoa's model proposes that “emotion” and “cognition” do not exclude each other, but how exactly? It could be the case that the brain dynamics of oscillations are such that signals for emotion and cognition are indeed systematically coupled and always interacting, but this is compatible with their dissociation at the level of cognitive integration. At that level, they may play systematically distinct roles and never be integrated. For example, working memory and the kind of attention that is broadcasted cross-modally may systematically correlate with certain unified signals, but this need not be the case for automatic forms of emotion and cognition.
Finally, regarding the structure and function of cognitive and emotional processing, it is important to emphasize that there are patent discrepancies between their normative or behavior guiding role. The intensity and moral or aesthetic aspects of a set of emotions do not seem to depend on the integration of fact-based or perceptual aspects of stimuli. In particular, emotional intensity does not seem to depend on the conjunction of perceptual features. Rather, it appears dependent on a much more integrative process that generates a unique conscious experience, which is strongly unified and independent of any specific set of perceptual features. Emotional intensity also seems to be independent of the accuracy or inaccuracy of cognitive information, such as the epistemic consequences of an argument or the knowledge of features related to attention in perceptual processes. The structure and normative function of emotional and cognitive behavior may, therefore, be different. Likewise, measures for the intensity and structure of emotions may shed no light on the cognitive functions that interact with them and vice versa. The incommensurability between these different functions suggests that there is a deep kind of dissociation between emotion and cognition (a normative kind of dissociation).
For these reasons, one of Pessoa's central arguments, which infers integration from the interaction of cognitive and emotional signals, is problematic. The problem is reminiscent of arguments that invalidly infer causal explanation from systematic correlation. The book as a whole, however, demonstrates that new and more integrative approaches to the study of emotion and cognition are justified and urgently needed, and this is an aspect of the book that deserves praise and notice. Pessoa's book is certainly an important step in the right direction – toward a conclusive and rigorous model for the interaction between emotion and cognition.
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As Luiz Pessoa (Reference Pessoa2013) acknowledges in the preface of his insightful book, The Cognitive-Emotional Brain, the modeling of function-structure mappings for cognition and emotion has received very little attention in the literature, particularly when compared with the abundance of empirical findings confirming the interaction between cognition and emotion. Pessoa devotes an entire chapter to the problem of function-structure mappings and emphasizes its importance throughout the book with admirable clarity. His efforts to close this theoretical gap constitute a signal contribution to the literature. Because of the crucial role that function-structure mappings will play in future debates on emotion and cognition, this review focuses on Pessoa's proposals on how to model their integration.
An overview of the current state of the literature concerning models for cognition and emotion demonstrates the pressing need for developing theoretical approaches that systematize current findings. Pessoa forcefully argues that the “network perspective” he favors is particularly helpful in fulfilling this task. More specifically, the dual competition model (or DCM) that Pessoa offers receives substantial support from a vast array of findings in neuroscience, across species, which Pessoa documents in great detail. These findings strongly suggest that emotion and cognition are not isolated and, more important, that they are not discretely instantiated in neatly localized regions of the brain. Indeed, in many cases cognition interacts with emotion producing no systematically located activations. Pessoa's impressive analysis of these findings concerns attention-filtering processes in which emotion plays a decisive role in modulating cognitive processing. He thereby illuminates the larger issue of how emotion shapes cognition and vice versa, a topic that has been of central importance in neuroscience (e.g., LeDoux Reference LeDoux1996).
Precisely because of the strong support that the DCM receives from the empirical findings, it is essential to analyze its theoretical underpinnings. A central tenet of Pessoa's integrative approach is that although“emotion” and “cognition” may be useful terms to characterize behaviors, they do not neatly map onto brain regions. To know if those conceptualize a unified network in the brain, one needs to know how the activations of this network instantiate the guiding characteristics and semantic contents underlying emotional and cognitive behaviors. Even if the DCM adequately models this network, and even if the function and structure of the emotion cognition interface is best understood in terms of integrated networks (rather than brain regions), one still needs to explain how emotion and cognition map to each other in processes of perceptual attention and conscious awareness.
Here, one confronts two questions: (a) what is the role of attention and consciousness (including self-awareness) in the integration of cognition and emotion? and (b) what degree of complexity of the semantic information is required for the integration of cognition and emotion? Any answer to these questions – to create a satisfactory model for the integration of cognition and emotion –must involve evolution and language. With respect to evolution: How to identify automatic and unintended processes, as opposed to more recent forms of cognitive or emotional responses that require self-awareness? With respect to language, which Pessoa scarcely mentions: Can there be cognitive and emotional responses that are fundamentally dependent on the language capacity? These two questions are obviously related, and the potential implications of answering these questions with respect to the independence of emotion from cognition are not explicitly addressed by Pessoa's model, opening the possibility of a form of dissociation between emotion and cognition that may challenge his model.
These questions must be answered in order to define the fundamental aspects regarding the mapping between cognition and emotion. For example, although many forms of emotion seem to be quite basic or “dumb” as Pessoa argues (p. 247), cognition seems at least implicitly to require inferential and conceptual capacities. Presumably, many of those capacities are associated with the language capacity in humans. Complex cognitive and inferentially based reasoning appear to be a recent development in the evolution of the emotion and cognition network. Their recent development suggests at least some degree of independence between emotion and cognition in instances of conscious inference and perceptual attention because some emotional processes may occur unconsciously or independently from interactions with inferentially and semantically based cognition. Thus, considerations about evolution question the plausibility of a highly integrated network for emotion and cognition, in the sense that the automatic system may not map neatly to any of the more consciously effortful and inferentially mediated system.
The DCM hypothesizes that emotional and motivational signals are systematically integrated with perception and cognition. In order to distinguish between automatic and voluntary processes, however, it is fundamental first to specify how “emotion” and “cognition” are being understood. Pessoa (Reference Pessoa2005) correctly remarks that recent findings have challenged the view that emotion happens automatically and independently of attention and awareness. He proposes that current research should focus on how attention and awareness modulate emotion in perception. Yet, there are many forms of attention (including effortful, effortless, and unconscious attention). What is more, there may be more than one form of conscious awareness as argued in Montemayor and Haladjian (Reference Montemayor and Haladjian2015). The distinction between awareness and self-awareness is of particular relevance. For example, it has been argued that self-awareness is fundamental for many forms of emotional behavior and for conscious forms of cognition (Damasio Reference Damasio2010).
With respect to attention modulation and emotion, both selective attention and basic emotional reactions appear to be early evolutionary adaptations that require neither linguistic capacities nor self-awareness. By contrast, consciously aware emotion may necessitate capacities for identifying the mental states of conspecifics (or having a theory of mind) and language (see Carruthers Reference Carruthers2000; Dennett Reference Dennett1969; Reference Dennett2005). Language may itself be a spandrel and a uniquely human capacity (Fitch et al. Reference Fitch, Hauser and Chomsky2005), which strongly suggests its recent evolution. If conscious awareness is required for higher forms of attention that depend on semantic and conceptual content, then it becomes more difficult to maintain an integration model for emotion and cognition: the independence of many kinds of emotional processes from cognitive ones would have to be a central feature of any model of their interaction.
Furthermore, conceptual content seems to be deeply associated with language capacity because of its compositional and generative characteristics (Fodor Reference Fodor1998). Conceptual content is also associated with the more complex activities of imagination and metaphorical reasoning (Lakoff & Johnson Reference Lakoff and Johnson1980). All theories of conceptual content relate it to either the language capacity or the capacity to form the beliefs that support inferential reasoning. For these reasons, conceptual attention seems to be a recent, perhaps uniquely human, phenomenon (assuming that language and inferential reasoning are recent phenomena in the evolution of our species). Emotional reactions seem to be less dependent on imagination and metaphor. Still, it is very likely that at least some of the consciously aware emotional reactions are less automatic than others, for which there may be numerous explanations, including the autonomy of the “old” emotional system. Crucially, emotion and cognition could really be independent from one another in humans, even if they interact systematically. Culture and social cues could be a further complication (Tomasello Reference Tomasello1999), in the sense that the semantic and inferential enrichments of emotional responses that characterize human emotional behavior may not only be independent from cognitive processing, but also fundamentally dependent on social cues and interactions.
Considerations regarding the necessity of a linguistic format for motivation, conceptualized in terms of the first-person perspective in humans, complicate the interaction between emotion and cognition even more. Some theorists argue that language is required for structuring self-consciousness (Baker Reference Baker2013; Dewart Reference Dewart1989; Neuman & Nave Reference Neuman and Nave2010). As mentioned, language is scarcely mentioned by Pessoa, but it may be fundamental to understand the DCM, because some format must be responsible for the mapping between cognition and emotion, and language is ideally suited to perform this role. A model that explicitly addresses the role of language in relation to emotion and cognition is desirable and perhaps necessary, because of the probable linguistic underpinnings of self-awareness.
It is undoubtedly true that the dichotomization of concepts such as “emotion” and “cognition” can be simiplistic. Pessoa's model proposes that “emotion” and “cognition” do not exclude each other, but how exactly? It could be the case that the brain dynamics of oscillations are such that signals for emotion and cognition are indeed systematically coupled and always interacting, but this is compatible with their dissociation at the level of cognitive integration. At that level, they may play systematically distinct roles and never be integrated. For example, working memory and the kind of attention that is broadcasted cross-modally may systematically correlate with certain unified signals, but this need not be the case for automatic forms of emotion and cognition.
Finally, regarding the structure and function of cognitive and emotional processing, it is important to emphasize that there are patent discrepancies between their normative or behavior guiding role. The intensity and moral or aesthetic aspects of a set of emotions do not seem to depend on the integration of fact-based or perceptual aspects of stimuli. In particular, emotional intensity does not seem to depend on the conjunction of perceptual features. Rather, it appears dependent on a much more integrative process that generates a unique conscious experience, which is strongly unified and independent of any specific set of perceptual features. Emotional intensity also seems to be independent of the accuracy or inaccuracy of cognitive information, such as the epistemic consequences of an argument or the knowledge of features related to attention in perceptual processes. The structure and normative function of emotional and cognitive behavior may, therefore, be different. Likewise, measures for the intensity and structure of emotions may shed no light on the cognitive functions that interact with them and vice versa. The incommensurability between these different functions suggests that there is a deep kind of dissociation between emotion and cognition (a normative kind of dissociation).
For these reasons, one of Pessoa's central arguments, which infers integration from the interaction of cognitive and emotional signals, is problematic. The problem is reminiscent of arguments that invalidly infer causal explanation from systematic correlation. The book as a whole, however, demonstrates that new and more integrative approaches to the study of emotion and cognition are justified and urgently needed, and this is an aspect of the book that deserves praise and notice. Pessoa's book is certainly an important step in the right direction – toward a conclusive and rigorous model for the interaction between emotion and cognition.