Cognitive Perspectives on Emotion and Motivation

Book excerpt: This book presents the contributions of the members of an Advanced Research Workshop on Cogni ti ve Science Perspectives on Emotion, Motivation and Cognition. The Workshop, funded mainly by the NATO Scientific Affairs Division, together with a contribution from the (British) Economic and Social Research Council, was conducted at II Ciocco, Tuscany, Italy, 21-27 June 1987. The venue for our discussions was ideal: a quiet holiday hotel, 500m high in the Apennine mountain range, approached by a mile of perilously steep, winding narrow road. The isolation was conducive to concentrated discussions on the topics of the Workshop. The reason for the Workshop was a felt need for researchers from disparate but related approaches to cognition, emotion, and motivation to communicate their perspectives and arguments to one another. To take just one example, the framework of information processing and the metaphor of mind as a computer has wrought a major revolution in psychological theories of cogni tion. That framework has radically altered the way psychologists conceptualize perception, memory, language, thought, and action. Those advances have formed the intellectual substrate for the "cognitive science" perspective on mental life.