Abstract
Cognition and emotion interact in important ways. In this chapter, we explore the link between intense emotional experiences and reasoning as well as higher level cognitive function more generally. We examine how exposure to potentially traumatic events and post-traumatic stress disorder relate to reasoning, particularly analytic thinking. We based this on studies examining the cognitive correlates of intense emotional experiences such as sexual abuse, the 1994 genocide in Rwanda, terrorist attacks, and natural disasters. We propose that the impact of trauma on reasoning can be explained by precursor effects on working memory and attention. We also examine how analytic thinking, indexed by intelligence or education, impacts the encoding of emotional experiences. We highlight how these studies provide novel insights into the interaction between emotion and cognition more broadly, including the effect of milder everyday emotional experiences. We sketch the outline of a theoretical model of the influence of emotional experiences on higher level cognitive function.
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