Cognitive neuroscience needs affective neuroscience (and vice versa).

We are continuously being bombarded by a myriad of diverse sensory stimuli. Recollections from our past and reflections upon our future add to this cacophony and we need to select among the vast array of stimuli to which we are exposed and approach what is useful to meet our appetitive needs and withdraw from what is harmful so we avoid situations of threat or danger. The successful negotiation of these life challenges requires an intact cognitive and affective system. The purpose of this brief essay is to underscore the importance of affect to various components of cognition and hint at some of the major advances that have been made in its neuroscientific study. In its beginning, the cognitive revolution did not include feelings within its scientific purview. There was a clear sense among the leading scientists of this era that the major problems of cognition would yield to an experimental and/or computational analysis that did not require emotion. The most striking evidence of this is simply the absence of very many references to emotion in the classic works of cognitive science and cognitive neuroscience that helped to define the field (e.g., Neisser, 1967). This feelingless stance, however, is now yielding to a more balanced analysis and a renewed appreciation for the role that affect might play in the basic mechanisms of cognition. And one of the most powerful sources of this new evidence is derived from affective neuroscience (Davidson & Irwin, 1999; Davidson & Sutton, 1995). One reason for the inescapable conclusion regarding the necessity of considering both cognition and emotion in our efforts to understand the brain bases of complex mental processes is that the circuitry of emotion and the circuitry of cognition at least partially overlap. These anatomical facts begin to provide the mechanistic substrates by which two-way interactions between affect and cognition are likely to occur.