Hot Cognition: Emotions and Writing Behavior.

Although contemporary psychologists generally acknowl edge the significance of affect in human experience, few attempts have been made to understand its role in cognitive processes (Zajonc, 1980). Important books on cognition (Anderson, 1976; Estes, 1975-1978; Neisser, 1967) barely mention the subject of emotion, feeling, or sentiment. Unlike the strictly cognitive and physiological psycholo gists, social psychologists are deeply concerned with affect. These psychologists contend that to consider people dispassionate, informa tion processing systems is a poor if not badly inaccurate model of the human being (Izard, 1971; Plutchik & Kellerman, 1980; Tomkins, 1981). A positivistic psychology has been too "cold" to carry the entire motivational burden. What is needed is some way to heat up cogni tion?a theory that unites the cognitively blind but arousing system of affect with the subtle cognitive apparatus. In an otherwise cold blooded tradition of cognitive science and flow chart intelligence, the idea of hot cognition (Abelson, 1963) became a major humanizing counterstatement during the mid 1960s and early 1970s. Essentially what hot cognition means is cognition colored by feeling. To these theorists, practically all human experience impli cates affect in some way. The meaning of events is governed by what we feel and the options available to us for its expression. Our language continually projects information about our opinions, preferences, and evaluations. Matters of life and death are not left to the slower

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