Neurobiology of Emotion at a Systems Level

Our understanding of emotion has lagged behind our knowledge of most other domains of cognition, both theoretically and empirically. In large part. this can be attributed to the fact that emotion was not considered part of cognition until very recently. In fact, adherents of both behavimism and cognitivist made it a point to exclude emotion and motivation from the study of the mind. Ironically, it was work in computer intelligence that perhaps first pointed to the impossibility of cognition without emotion. The problem is that information processing, devoid of emotion and motivation, is without any intrinsic value. Given a constrained task, or a specific piece of information to process, a system without emotion can be designed to perform the task or to process the information (as modern “expert systems” do). But how, in the real world, would such a system ever decide what to do? Attention, memory, and decision-making all require selectivity; the system must be able to distinguish between inputs and outputs that are important and those that are irrelevant out of the vast multitude of stimuli and of behaviours available. Emotion provides such guidance and is indispensable for the adaptive functioning of higher organisms.