Response

I appreciate very much the comments by Drs. Lane and Nadel on the book review of Cognitive Neuroscience of Emotion published in Neuro-Psychoanalysis in 2001. However, after considering their comments, I am not entirely sure that we have clarified the issues that we might agree, or disagree, on. It is always a challenge to represent the views of colleagues accurately, and I certainly would not want to distort their views in any critique, and thus “‘knock down a straw man’.” I appreciate several of their clarifications, and perhaps in the end it is a matter of emphasis rather than profound conceptual differences. However, I still feel that there is a fundamentally different emphasis between us, in terms of advocacy for the notion that virtually all of the core, and particularly the more primitive, components of emotion can be classed as cognitive. Are valence, the intrinsically pleasurable or unpleasurable nature of emotion, motivational drive, and the global CNS arousal associated with strong emotion all fundamentally cognitive? If they are, then it seems to me that one has basically expanded the notion of cognition to annex everything that has traditionally been considered core to emotion. If so, then what is left? And if this is the basic set of definitions and assumptions, isn't this a radically expanded notion of cognition?

The problem of making cognition and emotion virtually completely equivalent (as the Editors in the reviewed volume appeared, in many places, to do) is that it goes against any assumption of evolutionary

progression or phylogenetic extension—in which cognitive processing comes to differentially modulate, activate, and inhibit emotion, while emotion directs, gates, and motivates all cognitive processing. Fully analogously, emotion anticipates potential homeostatic demand and challenge. However, this does not mean that homeostasis can be considered “the same as emotion.”

I worry that the cognitive neuroscience of emotion, if it believes that it can