Embodied Approach To Cognitive Theory Of Emotion

From the Ancient Greece, philosophers paid attention to the influence of cognition on emotion, but philosopher’s thoughts about this problem rested on speculative stage. Until Cognitive Neuroscience’s experiments proved that "emotional brain" and "cognitive brain" could not be separated. The influence of cognition on emotion was not only inhibitory but also beneficial, the generation of emotion, the changing of emotion and the development of emotion depended on cognition. The paper reviewed the influence of cognition on emotion from the perspective of Philosophy of Cognitive Science, reinforced the theoretical basis of dependence mainly from three aspects:cognition how made the emotion’s relationship of body and mind become coordinating; cognition how made the emotion’s expression become normally; cognition how made the emotion’s structure become orderly.In the first chapter, the paper recalled the developmental history of cognitive theory of emotion from the perspective of History, analyzed the contradictory between the physiological theory of emotion and the cognitive theory of emotion, and indicated that two research tradition of emotion:phenomenology and cognitivism. The development of cognitive theory of emotion went through the three stages:germination, declining and reviving, accordingly the relationship between emotion and cognition went through caused, governed and depended. The theme of embodied cognition revised the "disembodied" dilemma and the trend of conceptualization of cognitive theory of emotion based on phenomenology, integrated and explained the emotion’s physiological response. Emotion became the most representative of the theme of embodied cognition.In the second chapter, the paper moderated the controversy of the nature of body-mind of emotion from four aspects:embodied intention of emotion, embodied judgment of emotion, embodied evaluation of emotion, embodied property of the representation of emotion. People’s belief driven attention to direct at the object of emotion, simultaneously body directed at the same object. Embodied state represented people’s body response to body-environment relationship. Embodied state not only influenced that people directed at object of emotion but also ran through the generation of emotion. After people directed object, people would to judge and evaluate the object, but judgment and evaluation of emotion were neither abstractly judged nor evaluated in the traditional significance, were embodied judged and embodied evaluated. People completed coding, storing and reappearing of emotion through the interaction of mental representation and feeling of body. From the perspective of neurophysiology, emotion was assembly of the sensorimotor representation and the mental representation. From the perspective of theory of interaction of body and mind, emotion was the result of the interaction of the body representation and the mental representation.In the third chapter, the paper explored cognition constrained and optimized emotion from the respective of normativity. The paper based on linguistic research, criticized naturalized, apriori emotional category’s biological tendency under the naturalism, built normative emotion in the boundary of language and based on cognition. Cognition regulated the emotion according to social regulation and cultural rule, constructed emotional category within the scope of language. With the development of cognition, paradigm of emotion transformed from the naturalized body phenomenon to the social acquired response. Society-culture shaped the external expression of emotion and regulated the inner experience of emotion based on cognition, and social-cultural rule internalized as parts of emotion based on cognition. Social tendency’s emotional expression and self-release’s emotional experience contradictorily coexisted in emotion at the same time. Standing on the ground of cognitivism, this was a path that cognition constructed emotional schema. Cognition not only balanced contradiction of emotion; made natural expression and social expression coexist in emotion, but also integrated the feeling of body and the social-cultural rule as result of schema stored in memory. In embodied interaction of people’s emotion and other’s emotion, both of people’s body resonance and comprehension of situation were in the form of shared representation influenced their emotion.In the fourth chapter, the paper explored cognitive precondition of emotion and cognitive organization of emotional structure. The paper based on Schacht and Singer’s experiments of cognitive attribution of emotion, refuted that emotion was natural phenomenon, and proposed that emotion was the product of cognitive construction. Generation of emotion depended on interaction of situation-body-cognition, cognition not only named the body-situation relationship but also assimilated, integrated and reconstructed of emotion with schema. Emotion and schema have a circulation, people explored new situation, shaped new object, and constructed new emotional response with schema. According to the way of permutation and combination of schema, emotion embedded in cognitive structure. If schema didn’t assimilate emotional response, emotion entered into cognitive structure in the way of dissimilation. Cognitive structure has a positive leading schema, cognition constructed emotion according to"maximized happiness, minimized sadness"criterion. When cognition deconstructed emotion and explained emotion again, cognition reserved and integrated emotion which was good for the development of self-concept, cognition decreased and transformed the emotion which was bad for the development of self-concept. But cognition didn’t absolutely reconstructed emotion only in semantic level; activation of "situated cognition" was the key of reconstruction of emotion. Only people embodied appropriate social-cultural situation, people cognized and experienced new emotion, and covered old emotional schema. With the development of cognition, emotional schema were spread, reorganized and inhibited in the memory system. Emotion’s historical consistency and gradually development depended on approved of cognition, cognition made the emotion naturally transition from an equilibrium state to another equilibrium state, so emotion attached to development of cognition.The conclusion summarized that emotion was that people embodied social-cultural situation, the product of cognitive construction of relationship of body-environment. Cognition connected, balanced and composited body level, mind level and society level of emotion, constructed emotion which conforming to schema structure. The paper would expect deeply explore the influence of cognition on emotion in the field of unconscious in the future, and improved the cognitive theory of emotion.