Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In Ancient Greek philosophy, emotion is considered the opposite of cognition: cognition is rational while emotion is irrational; cognition is cold while emotion is hot. Such thinking has influenced the tradition in the field of cognitive science, where emotion is often described as what contaminates or irrationalizes our judgments and decision-making. Thus, while the ways in which humans express, recognize, and experience emotion have been studied extensively in other subfields of psychology (e.g., affective science), rigorous attempts to understand the role of emotion in thinking, learning, and reasoning have been surprisingly sparse in contemporary cognitive science. As a quick example, a keyword search in the Cognitive Science Proceedings for "Affect" or "Emotion" shows that only 2% of published proceedings over the past three years (55 out of 2454 between 2018 and 2020) have titles including one of these key words.