<< Chapter < Page Chapter >> Page >

However, that means that certain ideas or thoughts can have a tangible presence and influence the feelings of other ideas and thoughts. They can also be grouped into categories - for instance a humans delusional or emotional thoughts could be exerting feelings while their logical or non-emotional and intellectual thoughts are producing conflicting feelings with the more intelligent thoughts at the same time. Such an interaction would be an example of cognition interaction with emotion - a humans cognitive or more intellectual thoughts could be exerting a certain type of feeling while their less intelligent or emotional thoughts could be producing a different type of feeling.

Cognition and emotion are always in balance - just like the left brain is theorized to be more logical and right brain is theorized to be more emotional and those two brains are always in balance - so tp emotion is always in balance with intellect or cognition.

WHy would a thought balance an emotion? If more intellectual thoughts are more conscious - and more emotional thoughts are less conscious - than that makes sense because thoughts are single points of information while emotions would probably take a longer time to experience than a thought - so say someone is experiencing an emotion - they could suddenly stop experiencing that emotion and think certain thoughts or even just initiate a period of more intellectual thinking which could stop the emotion, assist the emotion or hinder the emotion.

So certain types of thoughts are going to be more emotional and possibly assist emotion more than other thoughts that people can think. If the thoughts are delusional that might make the person more emotional than thoughts that make sense and are logical. There are also ideas and thoughts that can be grouped together - if someone thinks something through more clearly then maybe they can make the idea or thought structure more intellectual and less emotional. If it is more intellectual it could interfere more with emotional processes because thinking too much stops emotion or feeling.

It is obvious how thinking or thoughts could interfere with emotions = if someone is feeling good about something and they then think - 'I hate that thing' then it could stop the feeling good about the emotion completely. If someone continues the good emotion with thoughts that assist the positive emotion then the intellect or thoughts would be encouraging the emotion. However, if they think too much then they might become less emotional about it because they would be interfering the emotional process.

So someones emotions could be feeling one thing (that would be like a thought or group of ideas - but they would being conveyed by the persons emotions) and their intellect (which is more conscious) could be thinking about or conveying something completely different. The emotional is unconscious - so unconsciously someones emotions could be making the person feel stupid and telling them that they are emotional and stupid while their intellect could be trying to override their emotions and make them think clearer.

The persons emotions could be telling them one idea unconsciously while they could be trying to communicate or enforce a different idea to their mind consciously.

Ideas can be cognitive or emotional

Ideas that people have can be conscious ideas or not conscious ideas - they can come from the conscious mind or they can be more unconscious. If they are conscious they it is probable that the person thought about them more consciously to themselves then an idea that came from their unconscious mind. How could a thought even stem from the unconscious anyway? Some ideas people simply absorb or learn from their environment and the person doesn't necessarily need to think about as consciously.

If the person doesn't think about the idea as consciously then it could still be understood consciously - they just might not be able to verbalize it as clearly. That makes sense - it depends on what the ideas and concepts are basically. Some ideas could be very conscious while others could be very unconscious - that brings up the point of how someone would define a 'conscious' idea versus an 'unconscious' idea or concept.

Other than the fact that the unconscious concept the person wouldn't be described as being as consciously aware of anyway - some concepts a person could be aware of in a different way yet could still be described as being conscious of. Some concepts don't need that much conscious thinking about either - if someone is hungry they don't really need to think that much about that in order to understand that they are hungry - their body is communicating the information about how hungry they are and they become aware of that because they are in touch with their physical senses - that is all that is required to be aware of that in that circumstance - a slight physical awareness.

Other things that people might be aware of could require large amounts of intellect, however. All animals know when they need to eat and when they are hungry - so that isn't a very complicated desire. What about social cues - those might be hard for a person to process consciously and could be unconscious for a long period of time before they become more absorbed consciously. All of a persons emotions could be unconscious to different degrees and further thought could influence how much they 'absorb' or understand those emotions.

Get Jobilize Job Search Mobile App in your pocket Now!

Get it on Google Play Download on the App Store Now




Source:  OpenStax, Consciousness, emotion and cognition. OpenStax CNX. Jul 11, 2016 Download for free at http://legacy.cnx.org/content/col11886/1.5
Google Play and the Google Play logo are trademarks of Google Inc.

Notification Switch

Would you like to follow the 'Consciousness, emotion and cognition' conversation and receive update notifications?

Ask