In chapter 5, the brain integrates bodily perceptions with cognitive appraisals to experience a wide range of emotions that are crucial for action, and that also heavily influence what inferences we make and how we make them, for good and ill.
The good emotional influences are the values that emotions attach to what we know and what we want to know, enabling us to acquire beliefs that can be relevant to our goals, rather than the unlimited number of boring and irrelevant beliefs that we might acquire by observation and inference.
Unfortunately, emotions can also lead us to neglect good principles of evidence and to acquire beliefs primarily because they fit with our personal goals and prejudices. To overcome such afflictions as motivated inference, we need to be aware of how good canons of reasoning such as inference to the best explanation can be undermined by emotional distortions.
Neuropsychology is beginning to provide explanations of the most puzzling aspect of emotional and other kinds of thinking, conscious experience. A brain model such as EMOCON uses neural mechanisms to explain how emotional experiences are integrated with cognitions, have positive and negative valuations, vary in intensity, have broad diversity, and begin and end.
A full account of emotions needs to pay attention not only to neural mechanisms involving interactions of brain areas and other bodily processes, but also to mechanisms that operate at complementary levels of explanation. Neural processes are increasingly coming to be understood at the biochemical level that includes genes and molecules operating within and between neurons.
The psychological level of explanation in terms of mental representations such as goals, concepts, and beliefs remains useful for describing the aggregate effects of neural processes. The causes of emotions are often social, heavily influenced by our interactions with other people. Claiming that emotions are brain processes does not neglect the value of intertwined social, psychological, and molecular levels of explanation for accounting for emotional behavior.