n 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 usto 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