These papers may help you to advance a step forward:

Getting ready for an emotion: specific premotor brain activities for self-administered emotional pictures. Perri RL, Berchicci M, Lucci G, Cimmino RL, Bello A, Di Russo F. Front Behav Neurosci. 2014 May 28;8:197.

Study of menopausal symptoms, and perceptions about menopause among women at a rural community in Kerala. Borker SA, Venugopalan PP, Bhat SN. J Midlife Health. 2013 Jul;4(3):182-7.

Context insensitivity during positive and negative emotional expectancy in depression assessed with functional magnetic resonance imaging. Feeser M, et al. Psychiatry Res. 2013 Apr 30;212(1):28-35.

Perceiving threat in the face of safety: excitation and inhibition of conditioned fear in human visual cortex. Miskovic V, Keil A. J Neurosci. 2013 Jan 2;33(1):72-8

Anxiety, Stress & Coping: An International Journal, 19(4), 2006

Expectancy bias for disgust and emotional responding in contamination-related obsessive-compulsive disorder by Bunmi O. Olatunji et al.

Psychophysiology. 1996 May;33(3):218-33.

Emotional expectancy: brain electrical activity associated with an emotional bias in interpreting life events.

Chung G, Tucker DM, West P, Potts GF, Liotti M, Luu P, Hartry AL.

Hi Julian,

The Predictive Coding Framework is beginning to look at the role of attention, emotion and what could be called expectation (but is perhaps more appropriately called prediction). This paper is a good intorduction to the general direction of the theory:

Gilbert, D. T., & Wilson, T. D. (2009). Why the brain talks to itself: Sources of error in emotional prediction. Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, 364(1521), 1335-1341.

Amazing! Thank you both. 

With these in-hand i´ll be able to argue for  the predictive nature of cognition. 

I would also check out the placebo literature and Expectation-Value Theory. The placebo phenomenon has been well documented in affective responses and one of the primary mechanisms are expectancies. 

Expectation-Value Theory, got it! Thank you.

You might also want to look at the attentional bias literature (e.g. work by Colin MacLeod and colleagues) and the interpretation bias and expectancy bias literature.

https://www.socrates.uwa.edu.au/Staff/StaffProfile.aspx?Person=colinmacleod&tab=publications

Article Expectancy Bias in Anxious Samples

I think you would also really enjoy some of the recent papers:

Luiz Pessoa. Précis of The Cognitive-Emotional Brain. Behav. Brain. Sci., June 2014.

Todd S. Braver, ............., Luiz Pessoa, Gregory R. Samanez-Larkin, Leah H. Somerville. Mechanisms of motivation-cognition interaction: challenges and opportunities. Cogn. Affect. Behav. Neurosci., June 2014.

Lucina Q. Uddin, Joshua Kinnison, Luiz Pessoa, and Michael L. Anderson. Beyond the Tripartite Cognition–Emotion–Interoception Model of the Human Insular Cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. 2013 August 12.