Cognitions-Emotions Relationships: Analysis of Modern Theories and Approaches - Essay Example

There are now few doubts that cognitions and emotions together constitute the core of personality, its set, and in fact make “what a human is” (Kelly, 1969). The value of emotions and cognitions for personality could hardly be underestimated. Already Aristotle admitted the value of emotions in people’s lives (Kafetsios and LaRock, 2003). In the early XVIII century, J. Berkeley was one of the first to distinguish emotions and cognitions. J. Berkeley concluded that people’s reactions to the stimuli ­­­­– the so-called “ideas”, are combinations of cognitions (the acts of people’s minds) and emotions (the acts of people’s soul and fantasy). According to Thomists’ ideas, emotions and cognitions are the major characteristics that differentiate human beings from non-humans (Lyons, 1999).

Regardless of the visible simplicity of the issue, both the nature of emotions and cognitions and their relationships remain discussable and contestable amidst psychologists and physiologists. There is a lot of approaches and theories that tend to go into two extremes. One of these extremes insists on poor or even no relationship between cognitions and emotions. This extreme reflects a metaphysical attitude to effects understood as the antitheses of rationality.

Another approach named “biological” or “physiological” theory of emotions summarizes the findings of Ch. Darwin (psychoevolutionary theory), W. James and C. Lange (organic theory), and W. Cannon (psycho-organic theory) generally explained emotions as the functions of the mind and believed that emotions are unrelated to cognitions. Also, this statement is less supported by contemporary psychologists, until now the biological approach has several partisans.

Modern reinterpretations of this approach still assume that cognitions and emotions are completely different in nature. While cognitions are extremely structured and “personalized”, emotions are less individual and, in fact, “depersonalized”, as most people share the same emotions reacting to the same events (Danes, 1991).
The common critique to this point of view usually implies the following statement: if people’s emotions are unrelated to their thinking, then our emotional reactions should always be the same and stable regardless of the stimuli. However, our emotional reactions, in fact, lie on a certain continuum, where such emotion as “attraction” may range from a “slight interest” to “passion” depending on our rational evaluation of an object. This statement implies psychological relatedness between emotional and rational (cognitive) processes which participate in the rational procession of data.

Another extreme, widely known as the “cognitive approach”, implies that emotions and cognition can not be analyzed and understood separately as they both constitute the joint process of reacting. According to cognitivism, emotions accompany the process of rational thinking and may either be the derivatives of cognitions or precede them (Dalkvist, 1989; Izard, 1977, 1984).