Learning, Cognition, and Emotion

Abstract

This entry reviews the key tenets of learning and cognitive models of emotion and provides a summary of the empirical evidence to support the roles of direct and indirect learning pathways and biases in attention, evaluation, and memory in the development of internalizing and externalizing emotional problems in children. The evidence suggests that enhanced acquisition and generalization of directly and indirectly conditioned fear as well as biases in attending to, evaluating, and retaining memories about stimuli associated with threat underpin children's anxiety symptoms. In contrast, children's depression may be characterized by reduced reactivity to conditioned threats, suggestive of withdrawal from salient environmental cues that should elicit reactivity, and biases in attention, evaluation, and overgeneralized memory for negative information. Conversely, failure to acquire inhibitory fear associations, reduced sensitivity to reward, and biases in attending to and evaluating stimuli associated with hostility, aggression, and injustice, and potentially an absence of memory biases for such stimuli, appear to underpin children's externalizing problems. These findings highlight common and distinct processes underlying the development and expression of children's emotions and underscore the importance of considering learning and cognitive processes in the conceptualization of internalizing and externalizing psychopathology in children.

The influence of pride emotion on executive function: Evidence from ERP

“…Previous studies have extensively evaluated the relationship between positive emotions and executive function, and concluded that processing of positive emotions affects executive functions, such as information processing, social judgment, attention, decision‐making, problem solving, and behavior control (Fielding et al., 2020 ; Pessoa, 2019 ; Shimoni et al., 2019 ). To date, however, no consensus has been reached regarding this relationship.…”