Emotion and Cognition: Recent Developments and Therapeutic Practice

As is widely known, the last twenty-five years have seen an acceleration in the development of theories of emotion. Perhaps less well-known is that the last three years have seen an extended defense of a predominant, although not universally accepted, framework for the understanding of emotion in philosophy and psychology. The central claim of this framework is that emotions are a form of evaluative response to their intentional objects, centrally involving cognition or something akin to cognition, in which the evaluation of the object relates to the concerns, interests, or well-being of the subject. I aim to summarize and review the work of five authors on three of the central themes of this framework, and to note some implications for the understanding of emotion in different psychotherapeutic approaches.