When emotion meets cognition. Emotion-cognition interaction in healthy controls and patients with schizophrenia

Human mental processes are a continuous interplay between sensations derived from the outer world, internal states such as beliefs and intentions, conscious and unconscious memories from earlier experiences and affective evaluation of all these parts. During everyday life, no one wonders about which of these processes would be called cognitive and which emotional, because for most individuals mental processes are experienced as direct and unified. Only reflecting on mental processes by the individual or an external observer leads to a distinction between the processes mentioned above. Almost everyone would say that there is one basic distinction: cognitive versus emotional processes. As the soul, psyche, was mainly the domain of philosophical interest until the midst of the 19th century, it is not surprising that ancient Greek philosophy already tried to develop concepts that explain the different functions of the psyche. At that time, terms as cognition and emotion were not used. Plato in ‘Politeia’ suggested that the soul is divided in three parts: reason, spirit and appetite. While reason aims to reach wisdom and is characterized by its ability to search for what is good for the soul, spirit aims to gather honour and appetite aims to receive satisfaction for bodily needs. As Plato wanted to develop a theory of the ideal state, the consequence is that reason has to dominate spirit and appetite in order to reach virtue [1]. Based on this model Plato explained how “intra-psychic” conflicts could occur when for example appetite seeks satisfaction but reason defends the virtue of wisdom.

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