Feelings and Phenomenal Experiences

Following an initial emphasis on " cold " cognitive processes, which could be conceptualized within the computer metaphor of the information processing paradigm, social cognition researchers rediscovered " hot " cognition in the 1980's. Two decades later, their interest in the interplay of feeling and thinking is shared by researchers in decision making, cognitive psychology, and related fields. This chapter reviews what has been learned; it focuses on basic theoretical principles and empirical regularities, rather than complete coverage of the literature. We first introduce three broad approaches to the interface of feeling and thinking and subsequently evaluate them in light of empirical findings in three key domains, namely, human judgment, strategies of information processing, and memory. Throughout, we emphasize the influence of feelings on cognitive processes; the reverse influence of cognition on emotion is Three general approaches to the role of feelings in human cognition focus on the experiential, cognitive, and somatic components of feelings, respectively. The first approach emphasizes the experiential quality of feelings and addresses their informational functions. A second approach emphasizes the thoughts that accompany feelings, whereas a third approach emphasizes hard-wired processes, focusing on the somatic components of affective states. Central to the experiential approach is the assumption that feelings can serve as a source of information in their own right. This assumption is consistent with traditional theorizing on emotions and has been fruitfully extended to other subjective experiences. Social psychologists often subsume moods and emotions under the generic term affect. This term, however, can also refer simply to valence-the positive and negative aspect of things. All emotions are affective, but not all affective things are emotions. Emotions arise in response to ongoing, implicit appraisals of situations with respect to positive or negative implications for one's goals and concerns (e. have an identifiable referent (what the emotion is "about"), a sharp rise time, limited duration, and often high intensity. Emotion researchers commonly assume that "emotions exist for the Feelings-2 sake of signaling states of the world that have to be responded to, or that no longer need response and action" (Frijda, 1988, p. 354). What exactly emotions signal can be derived from their underlying appraisal patterns. Sadness, for example, signals a loss or lack of reward that is not attributed to the causal action of another agent; when it is attributed to the causal action of another agent, it gives rise to anger. Accordingly, sadness and …