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This chapter focuses on how emotional processing in the amygdala and related limbic regions interact with frontoparietal attentional control systems and the visual processing stream. Such effects have been elucidated by studying neurologic patients with brain damage, as well as by functional brain imaging methods in healthy individuals. A systematic treatment of attentional biases in affective disorders is beyond the scope of this chapter, although it mentions some studies that investigate how anxiety as a trait marker moderates emotion-attention interactions. It also considers the time course of emotional influences on visual processing that have been revealed by event-related potential (ERP) studies in humans.

The authors challenge the traditional view that emotion directly causes behavior, as represented in the claim that someone did something “because he was angry.” Essentially, this is the view that “the impetus for the behavior is contained in the emotion,” a premise that still leaves a miraculous gap between feeling the emotion and enacting the behavior. As an alternative, the authors advance the view that “conscious emotion tends to come after behavior and operates as a kind of inner feedback system.” The authors bolster their argument against the traditional view with evidence that emotions are not specific enough to serve as impetus for specific behaviors, that emotions seem to have more impact on cognition than on behavior, and that emotional influences on behavior tend to disappear unless people believe that their actions will affect their emotional state.

There is accumulating evidence suggesting that emotions can have a strong impact on social decision-making. However, the neural mechanisms of emotional influences on choice are less well understood to date. This chapter integrates recent results from two independent but related research streams in social neuroeconomics and social neuroscience, which together identify the neural mechanisms involved in the influences of emotions on social choice. Specifically, research in social neuroeconomics has shown that social decisions, such as trust-taking, involve commonly ignored emotional considerations in addition to economic considerations related to payouts. These results are paralleled by recent findings in social neuroscience that underline the role of emotions in social interactions. Because anticipatory emotions associated with social approval and rejection can have important, but often ignored, influences on social choices the integration of emotions into theories of social decision-making is necessary.