Abstract
One of the several ways in which affect may influence cognition is when people use affect as a source of information about external events. Emotional reasoning, ex-consequentia reasoning, and affect-as-information are terms referring to the mechanism that can lead people to take their emotions as information about the external world, even when the emotion is not generated by the situation to be evaluated. Pre-existing emotions may thus bias evaluative judgments of unrelated events or topics. From this perspective, the more people experience a particular kind of affect, the more they may rely on it as a source of valid information. Indeed, in several studies, it was found that adult patients suffering from psychological disorders tend to use negative affect to estimate the negative event as more severe and more likely and to negatively evaluate preventive performance. The findings on this topic have contributed to the debate that theorizes the use of emotional reasoning as responsible for the maintenance of dysfunctional beliefs and the pathological disorders based on these beliefs. The purpose of this paper is to explore this topic by reviewing and discussing the main studies in this area, leading to a deeper understanding of this phenomenon.
Highlights
What maintains dysfunctional beliefs and psychological disorders as well as their resistance to change is a topical question for clinical and cognitive scientists
Previous studies found that elevated levels of emotional reasoning were associated with an anxiety disorder [3,29]; the results of this study suggest that this may not be the case for depression
Why does is affective state used as a reliable source of information only in some individuals, often feeding vicious circles that reinforce the beliefs at the base of the affective state itself? The answer comes from some of the studies mentioned above [8,27,52], which have explicitly investigated the role of emotion experienced chronically in the use of state-emotion, instead of emotions experienced temporarily, for judgments and evaluations
Summary
What maintains dysfunctional beliefs and psychological disorders as well as their resistance to change is a topical question for clinical and cognitive scientists The explanation of these phenomena is especially fundamental to any theory of pathological suffering and is fundamental to clinical cognitivism. We will try to answer these crucial questions, examining the influence of emotions on some cognitive processes and how this can strengthen the beliefs at the basis of the emotional experience itself. In this perspective, we will refer to the appraisal theories of emotions.
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