The Role of Emotion in Cognition: Why Feelings Aren’t a Distraction from Thinking

For centuries, reason and emotion have been cast as rivals. From Plato’s charioteer trying to control wild horses of passion to the Enlightenment ideal of the rational thinker, Western culture has long celebrated logic as superior to feeling. Yet neuroscience tells a very different story. Far from clouding our judgment, emotions are essential for making sense of the world, shaping memory, guiding decisions, and sustaining motivation.

Emotion as the Architect of Thought

Antonio Damasio’s groundbreaking work in the 1990s transformed our understanding of how emotions and cognition interact. His “somatic marker hypothesis” proposed that emotions act as bodily signals that tag certain choices or ideas as good or bad based on prior experiences. In his studies of patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, an area involved in integrating emotion with reasoning, Damasio found that while their IQ and logic remained intact, their decision-making collapsed. Without emotion, they could reason endlessly yet fail to act.

In other words, emotion is not the enemy of reason but its compass. It prioritises information, helping us decide what matters. A purely rational mind would be paralysed by infinite options.

How Emotion Shapes Memory and Learning

Emotion also plays a central role in memory formation. When something matters to us, when it excites, frightens, or delights us, the amygdala flags it for deeper encoding in the hippocampus. This is why emotionally charged experiences are easier to recall than neutral ones. In educational settings, this principle is critical: curiosity, surprise, and even mild frustration can act as cognitive enhancers, strengthening neural pathways and aiding retention.

This aligns with Bjork’s concept of “desirable difficulties,” which suggests that learning sticks best when it involves a certain degree of emotional challenge. Students who feel emotionally invested in what they learn are more likely to process information meaningfully rather than mechanically.

Emotion and Executive Function

Emotion does not just influence what we remember, it also regulates how we think. The prefrontal cortex, responsible for planning, attention, and inhibition, is deeply interconnected with emotional circuits. Positive emotions can broaden cognitive flexibility, as Barbara Fredrickson’s “Broaden-and-Build Theory” describes. When people feel joy or interest, their brain literally opens up, expanding creative thinking and problem-solving capacity.

Negative emotions, meanwhile, narrow focus. Anxiety, for example, can heighten vigilance but reduce cognitive flexibility. This can be useful in moments of threat but unhelpful in a classroom or workplace. Recognising this dynamic allows educators and leaders to design environments that balance emotional safety with healthy challenge.

Decision-Making: The Emotional Core of Rational Choice

Behavioural economics has shown that decisions are rarely made through logic alone. Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky demonstrated that human reasoning is riddled with biases, heuristics, and shortcuts, all influenced by emotion. We are moved by stories, not statistics. We feel losses more keenly than gains. We anchor our judgments on emotional impressions before rationally adjusting them.

But this does not mean we are irrational. It means that emotion is part of our rational system, a fast, embodied data stream evolved to help us survive. In practice, our “gut feelings” are pattern-recognition shortcuts informed by emotional memory. The key is not to eliminate them but to understand when they help and when they mislead.

Educating the Emotional Thinker

In education, emotion is often treated as something to manage or control rather than harness. Yet if emotion drives attention, motivation, and meaning, then emotional literacy is central to cognitive development. Helping students name, regulate, and reflect on their emotions enhances metacognition, the awareness of one’s own thinking.

When teachers encourage curiosity rather than compliance, and empathy rather than competition, they build emotional conditions for deeper learning. This is particularly vital for neurodivergent learners, who may experience heightened emotional sensitivity or difficulty with emotional regulation. A coaching-informed approach that integrates self-awareness, reflection, and compassion can help all students build the emotional scaffolding that supports higher-order thinking.

The Mind as an Emotional Ecosystem

Thinking and feeling are two sides of the same neural coin. Emotion gives thought its colour, direction, and urgency; cognition gives emotion its structure and meaning. Together they form an adaptive feedback loop that enables us to learn, grow, and connect.

The challenge, then, is not to quiet our emotions but to listen to them intelligently. Emotion is not a distraction from thinking; it is the very medium through which thought becomes human.

References

Bjork, R. A. (1994). Memory and metamemory considerations in the training of human beings. In Metacognition: Knowing about knowing (pp. 185–205). MIT Press.

Damasio, A. R. (1994). Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. New York: Avon Books.

Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The Broaden-and-Build Theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56(3), 218–226.

Kahneman, D. (2011). Thinking, Fast and Slow. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgment under uncertainty: Heuristics and biases. Science, 185(4157), 1124–1131.

Immordino-Yang, M. H., & Damasio, A. (2007). We feel, therefore we learn: The relevance of affective and social neuroscience to education. Mind, Brain, and Education, 1(1), 3–10.