Emotion is a psychological construct consisting of cognitive appraisal or

evaluation of stimuli and situations; physiological component of activation or

arousal; motor expression; motivational component including behaviour,

intentions or behavioural readiness; and the component of subjective feeling

state, (see Catherine L. Wang, Emotion: the missing part of systems methodologies, Kybernetes, Vol. 32 No. 9/10, 2003).

Leda Cosmides and John Tooby say in their ‘Evolutionary Psychology and the Emotions’ that: ”It may strike some as odd to speak about love or jealousy or disgust in computational terms. "Cognition" and "computation" have affectless, flavorless connotations. In everyday language, the term "cognition" is often used to refer to a particular subset of information-processing - roughly, the effortful, conscious, voluntary, deliberative kind of thinking one does when solving a mathematics problem or playing chess: what is sometimes called "cold cognition". This use of "cognition" falls out of the folk psychological classification of thinking as distinct from feeling and emotion, and it appears in a few subfields of psychology as well. As a result, one sometimes sees articles in the psychological literature on how emotion, affect, or mood influence "cognition". (Ref: Leda Cosmides and John Tooby, Evolutionary Psychology and the Emotions, Handbook of Emotions, M. Lewis & J. M. Haviland-Jones, Editors. NY: Guilford, 2nd Edition).

Empathy has all the intensity of a feeling, is not a form of intellectual knowledge, although it possesses a "cognitive" value very special, that consisted in "realizing" the existence of the ‘other’, i.e. in a primary understanding that is to know not to be self-sufficient, but limited and open to something else.

Zajonc has challenged the belief that we usually deal with life as good scientists, examining the evidence before deciding what feelings we experience. Sometimes, when sensations come for the first, we act as true romantics, letting thoughts fall where they may.

For Zajonc, it is reasonable to conclude that the subjective feelings and cognitive assessments are, at least in part, independent. In his view, the sensations can occur before, after or simultaneously with the cognitive processes. In addition, feelings sometimes provide energy to emotional behavior, regardless of whether they are or not reinforced by thought. According to Zajonc, "It is not based on a detailed cognitive analysis of the pros and cons of their actions that people give up freedom."

According to Zajonc: emotion comes first

In 1980, Robert Zajonc has published a provocative article entitled "Feeling and Thinking: Inferences need no preference." Zajonc’s article cites the verses of the poet EE Cummings saying with the utmost simplicity that "first is the feeling." Agreeing with this statement, Zajonc disputes the hypothesis advanced by cognitive psychology that, for a feeling of an event, the first thing to do is to interpret or evaluate the event itself. According to him, the subjective emotions are sometimes the very first response that a person gives to an event; emotional reactions, moreover, are not necessarily accompanied by thoughts and not appear faster than cognitive assessments. Sometimes, for example, we feel an instant liking to someone across a room or an aversion to someone else, for the way they answer the phone.

In these cases, it comes to emotional reactions that occur before we have enough information to evaluate a person on a rational basis.

The dispute is currently centered on what comes first, if the cognitive assessment or subjective feelings.

It may help to take account of the thought by Antonio Damasio, a Portuguese neuroscientist, who in his essay of 1995, "Descartes' Error", turns the cultural tradition that has always devalued emotions because they disrupt the serenity of reason and shows how, on the contrary, they are fundamental for the good functioning of the mind: if man loses the emotional ability is not able to be reasonable. Denying the Cartesian view of the mind-body dualism, two elements necessarily separable, he highlights the interplay of body and brain, which form a single and inseparable organism. Therefore, reason could not function properly without the emotions, that is, without the close link with the body, which constantly offers the basic material with which the brain constructs the images from which thought originates. In this way Damasio restores dignity to emotions that considers cognitive dimensions.

Evolutionary psychology today requires a change of perspective to the study of the mind: opposed to top-down approach it opens the door to a construction from the bottom (bottom-up) of cognitive processes. In this change of perspective emotions come to assume a central role. More precisely, in a perspective of this kind is the evaluative role of emotions to take on new importance: placed within the framework of the basic relationship between organism and environment, the emotions are the classification scheme of things and events as "good" or "bad 'for survival.

The evolutionary approach that characterizes the most advanced contemporary cognitive science helps us to understand the logical and temporal primacy of emotion on cognition.

There may also be emotion without cognitive processing, Zajonc cites a research by William Wilson (1979). In an experiment planned in order to verify if sympathy (subjective sensation) may occur in the absence of recognition (cognitive evaluation), Wilson used a test based on listening, making listen to a short story by one of the two ear headphones. The subjects were asked to proofread the story of a typewritten sheet, identifying errors. Through the headset that Wilson did hear some music by repeating them five times.

These data agree with the premise made by Zajonc, according to which the attraction that is a subjective sensation, is manifested before recognition, which is a cognitive evaluation.

Lazarus (1984) and Zajonc (1984) continued to argue in the pages of the American Psychologist. Again Zajonc reiterated the thesis that first come the feelings, which are formed without being necessarily preceded by cognitive processes. For Zajonc, also the explanation of Lazarus is circular or tautological.

Since Lazarus has already defined emotion as the psychological state that results from a process of assessment, his conclusion - that every time you look at an emotion must have been an assessment - is true only by definition.

Zajonc has insisted that it must be possible to measure the cognitive processes regardless of the emotions in order to verify if thought is always the precursor of a sensation. When Wilson (1975) evaluated the cognitive processes, by checking whether people are able to recognize objects that claim to feel attraction, he found that in fact they cannot.

Ref: Robert Zajonc ,"Feeling and Thinking: preference need no Inferences". American Psychologist, 1980, 35, 151-175. 

As a way of a limited agenda for research, I found interesting the following fields:

-          Ability to use emotion to facilitate cognitive activities like thinking and problem solving (e.g., knowing how to capitalize on a happy mood swing to engage in a creative task).

-          Identifying the type of mood that would facilitate a certain cognitive activity (ability to use emotions).

-          Generally, any given mood state (negative or positive) seems to influence cognitive processing so that what we think and remember matches (or is congruent with) that mood state.

-          A cognitive perspective that holds that our experience of emotion is based on conscious evaluations we make about psychological sensations in particular social settings and that the social setting determines the type of emotion experience; the psychological response determines the strength of the reaction.