In the past two decades, neuropsychology has made great progress in enabling us to understand
emotions such as happiness and fear as neural processes. Mental representations are multimodal not
only in including the various kinds of sensory ones described in chapter 4, but also in including
aspects of emotional value. 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. In addition, we need to manage our emotions in positive directions, in ways
described in chapter 8.
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.
The neuropsychological account of emotions provided in this chapter is pivotal for what follows. If
my account is correct, emotions are not just supplemental to thinking but an integral part of all kinds
of evaluative thinking. They play a crucial role in decision making and action, the topic of the next
chapter, which explores the neural mechanisms underlying human choices. In chapter 9 I will
describe the contributions that these mechanisms make to moral thinking, enabling us to care about
others and make ethical decisions about them.
Emotional thinking is also integral to wisdom, which I described as knowing what matters, why it
matters, and how to achieve it. The way that things matter to us is via our emotions, including both the
positive things we want and the negative things we don't. In chapter 7 I will describe how three major
realms of human life—love, work, and play—make life worth living. Like mattering, perceptions of
worth are inherently emotional, and I will show how neural mechanisms make possible the kinds of
enjoyment (and sometimes distress) that arise from social relationships, productive activity, and
amusements. Pursuits such as marriage, employment, sports, and the arts are all heavily dependent on
the kinds of emotional experiences that this chapter has described.
I argued in chapter 2 that thinking should be evidence based, but it should now be clear that it is
inevitably emotion based as well. One of the central problems of rationality is how to combine these
two essential facets of human thought. Shakespeare asked in The Merchant of Venice: “Tell me
where is fancy bred, Or in the heart or in the head?” My answer is that thinking needs to integrate
cognition and emotion to be fully effective, and we have the brain mechanisms that perform such
integration well, at least much of the time. Let us now see how such integration occurs when people
make decisions.