Cooperative versus competitive influences of emotion and cognition on decision making: A primer for psychiatry research

Abstract

Clinical research across the developmental spectrum increasingly reveals the nuanced ways in which emotion and cognition can work to either support or derail rational (i.e., healthy or goal-consistent) decision making. However, psychological theories offer discrepant views on how these processes interact, and on whether emotion is helpful or harmful to rational decision making. In order to translate theoretical predictions from basic psychology to clinical research, an understanding of theoretical perspectives on emotion and cognition, as informed by experimental psychology, is needed. Here, I review the ways in which dual-process theories have incorporated emotion into the process of decision making, discussing how they account for both positive and negative influences. I first describe seven theoretical perspectives that make explicit assumptions and predictions about the interaction between emotion and cognition: affect as information, the affect heuristic, risk as feelings, hot versus cool cognition, the somatic parker hypothesis, prospect theory, and fuzzy-trace theory. I then discuss the conditions under which each theoretical perspective conceptualizes emotion as beneficial or harmful to decision making, providing examples from research on psychiatric disorders.