Emotion in Interactive Technology-Mediated Decision Taking and Negotiation

Emotion in Cognition

One of the drives behind the stronger interest in emotion in the context of interactive technology mediated decision taking and negotiation is ‘the “cognitive revolution” that swept across the social sciences in the 1960s’ (Goodwin & Heritage, 1990: 283), which turned the spotlights on social interaction as a ‘primordial means through which the business of the social world is transacted’ (ibid.). This attention on interaction and human agency opened the way to the study of emotion in interaction, including decision taking and negotiation. At the same time, contemporary neuroscientists reported evidence for the involvement of emotion in rational cognitive processing. Neuroscience observes that emotional feedback is present in lower species, but other cortical cognitive feedback is present only in higher species. In that sense, emotion functions in evolution as a coordinator of other cognitive and non-cognitive functions. Damasio (1994) suggests that the state of the mind is identical to the state of feeling, which is a reflection of the state of the body i.e. that rationality stems from emotions and that emotions stem from bodily senses. Thus, if cognitive science used to concentrate on what it considered to be ‘purely cognitive processes’ such as decision taking, memory, calculation, planning, perception today it includes also emotion, as a constant cognitive process, not just as a specific and/or sudden experience, mood or an attitude.