Cognitive Biases in Emotional Disorders: Information Processing and Social-Cognitive Perspectives

Abstract

Abstract In the past several decades emotion and psychopathology researchers have devoted a great deal of attention to the study of emotions such as anxiety and depression as they are experienced in the normal range, as well as to their more extreme manifestations, seen in clinically significant emotional disorders such as anxiety and mood disorders. During this time research and theory from various perspectives have been converging on a consensus that views emotion and cognition as closely intertwined. The complex interplay between the two is still being unraveled and explored. Nonetheless, the field has reached a clear appreciation of a number of factors that play a part in this emotion-cognition interface—both for “normal” levels of these emotions and for maladaptive forms of these emotions seen in emotionally disordered individuals. These factors include the evolutionary forces that shaped the architecture of emotion systems at the species level, as well as the basic and social-cognitive learning processes that affect the ontogenesis and functioning of these emotion systems at the individual level. Plutchik (1984) argued from a psychoevolutionary perspective that “cognitions have largely evolved in the service of emotions” (p. 209). According to Plutchik, the interaction of cognition with emotion allows our emotional behaviors to be adaptive responses to biologically significant events. In addition, Gray (1990) has also argued for a “genuine interweaving of emotional and cognitive processes in the workings of the brain” (p. 271). This related argument is that over the course of human evolution, human beings were selected for their ability to learn information about reinforcing events (predators, food, mates). Further, because reinforcers elicit primary emotions, cognitions (appraisals of reinforcing events) are linked to the experience of emotion. Finally, Gray (1990) also cites research which implicates the same neuroanatomical structures and systems in the brain as being involved in important emotionand cognition-related functions (e.g., hippocampus and amygdala). Recently, Cosmides and Tooby (2000) summarized the evolutionary view by noting that emotions serve as “superordinate programs,” or modules of the mind, which are responsible for setting priorities. According to this model, when an emotion is elicited, it activates some subordinate mechanisms (e.g., attention, heuristic processing, or action-readiness programs) and deactivates others (e.g., higher level goals, systematic processing, digestion). In contrast to most other adaptations or modules (cf. Barkow, Cosmides, & Tooby, 1992), emotions are a “mode of operation for the entire psychological architecture”: They are, in a sense, primary.

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