Ongoing Discussion: Douglas F. Watt's Book Review of Lane & Nadel, Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion

A review of Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion (Lane & Nadel, 2000) was published in this journal several years ago. The review, though generally favorable, criticized our first chapter and the title of the book. These argued that emotion can profitably be studied within the domain of cognitive neuroscience and that a separate field of affective neuroscience is unnecessary. Since the current target article is an expression of this new approach to emotion and is an elaboration of one of the chapters in the book (chapter 15), it seemed important to address comments from the review and, where possible, correct any misconceptions that the review may have generated.

A central thesis of the book is that purely psychological approaches can be transformed when integrated with neuroscientific knowledge. The field of neuro-psychoanalysis, for example, has been created based on the belief that understanding neural processes will inform and refine the practice of psychoanalysis. In a related manner, we believe that neurobiological understanding calls into question the traditional distinction between cognition and emotion, which became entrenched with Descartes. In recent years there has been a growing appreciation of the adaptive usefulness of emotion that emanates from the tradition of Darwin. The seminal work of Damasio and colleagues on ventromedial prefrontal cortex has affirmed that strict distinctions between emotion and cognition may no longer be valid (Damasio, 1994).

With the discovery of implicit cognitive functions, cognition can no longer be equated with conscious thought, and the boundary used to define what is and what is not cognitive has become obscure. As we describe in the first chapter of the book, cognition can now be more broadly defined as information processing. As such, emotion is also cognitive in the sense that its various components involve information processing. Traditional distinctions between emotion and cognition therefore break down when it is cons