Cognition and Emotion ─ Reviews of Current Research and Theories

Emotions are complex and multifaceted phenomena. Although they have been examined from a variety of perspectives, the study of the interaction between cognition and emotion has always occupied a unique position within emotion research. Many philosophers and psychologists have been fascinated by the relationship between thinking and feeling.

During the past 30 years, research on the relationship between cognition and emotion has boomed and so many studies on this topic have been published that it is difficult to keep track of the evidence. This book fulfils the need for a review of the existing evidence on particular aspects of the interplay between cognition and emotion.

The book assembles a collection of state-of-the-art reviews of the most important topics in cognition and emotion research: emotion theories, feeling and thinking, the perception of emotion, the expression of emotion, emotion regulation, emotion and memory, and emotion and attention. By bringing these reviews together, this book presents a unique overview of the knowledge that has been generated in the past decades about the many and complex ways in which cognition and emotion interact. As such, it provides a useful tool for both students and researchers alike, in the fields of social, clinical and cognitive psychology.

Jan De Houwer is professor of psychology at Ghent University, Belgium. His research concerns the manner in which spontaneous (automatic) preferences are learned and can be measured.

Dirk Hermans is professor of psychology at University of Leuven, Belgium and is director of the Center for Learning Psychology and Experimental Psychopathology His work focuses on associative learning and fear, autobiographical memory specificity and depression/trauma, and the study of the (automatic) affective processing of stimuli.