The Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion: edited by R. Lane and L. Nadel, New York:  Oxford University Press

This is a mostly excellent compilation of articles covering some of the critically important territory of cognition-emotion interactions. This is territory of intrinsic interest to readers of this journal for several reasons: (1) deep, fundamental cognition-emotion interactions are the basic fabric of human life, once past very early infancy, defining much of the content of consciousness; (2) psychoanalysis has been from its inception closely focused on the influence that emotion has on cognitive processes, especially the separation between what is reportable as part of the conscious stream versus what is not; (3) the study of cognition has been until recently deeply constricted by assumptions (not shared by all cognitive scientists) that cognitive processes are “value neutral” information processing; (4) the study of emotion involving various disciplines has been undergoing a real renaissance, particularly in the past 15 years; (5) in the context of that renaissance, rapprochement with dominant paradigms in cognitive neuroscience is important.

The few weaknesses in the volume are mostly what I would call “ideological,” sitting predominantly in the first chapter, which attempts an overview framework, and some minor content weaknesses, not likely to be noticed by many readers, that are derivative of those assumptions. The basic framework offered in the first chapter unfortunately betrays certain biases; fortunately they do not color all the articles. Biases center around the potential reversal of evolutionary principles hinted at in the title of the book itself—the cognitive (neuro)science assumption that emotion is best approached as just another domain within cognitive science (vs. its prior near-total neglect). Although this kind of cognitivist attention toward emotion is certainly better than neglect, one might argue that such an “annexing” of emotion by cognitive science is in some sense upside down from an evolutionary standpoint. What I find problematic here is