Cognitive emotions – aligning impressions and reason

I call cognitive emotions the cognitive and emotional alignment for our values or judgments.

Why care about cognitive emotions

“I understand what evil I am about to do, but my fury is stronger than my deliberations.”

Medea – Euripides

In this famous quote, Medea is reflecting on the fact she intends to kill her own children as vengeance over her husband, who left her despite her sacrifices for him. It's an astonishing piece of Greek drama from 431 BCE.

Much like Medea, we struggle. While you're typically dealing with lower stakes conflicts, much like Medea, your emotions will sometimes point one way while your cognition points in another.

I call cognitive emotion the alignment (or lack thereof) between our cognition and emotions for our actions. This abstraction is just a concept, but it will help you reflect on whether you have aligned or misaligned deliberations and impressions.

Let's start by defining cognition and emotion.

What do we mean by cognition and emotion

[5] So make a practice at once of saying to every strong impression: ‘An impression is all you are, not the source of the impression.’

Epictetus. Discourses and Selected Writings (Penguin Classics) (p. 260). (Function). Kindle Edition.

I'm not trying to be overly precise today, but rather overly practical – philosophy you live, rather than philosophy you think about.

In Stoicism, we typically use the translation "impressions" for emotions: the fear when you see a snake, the anger when someone insults you, the desire for a piece of cake.

These emotions are critical drivers for your actions. You feel first, and then you act.

That's at least one of the purposes of emotions: to propel us to specific actions. If you're angry, you act one way. If you're afraid, you act another way. Anxious, happy, sad, depressed? You act accordingly.

Emotions guide our actions through life, tuned through billions of years of evolutionary pressure.

Cognition, in turn, is your capacity for deliberate thought. Your collection of data, of facts, of tying them together through your logic or reason abilities. Your understanding that the world isn't flat, that data is transmitted from your computer through Wi-Fi, that coffee has the caffeine in it, and that caffeine is a stimulant.

Your cognition is responsible for much of your understanding of the world around you. You tie concepts together into a network of meaning to make sense of what's happening around you.

Armed with this knowledge about the world, you act. You decide it's important to study, and so ensure your kids do. You understand it's healthy to exercise, and so you enroll at the gym.

Note I'm not talking about an actual neuroscientific division between emotions and cognition in the brain, but rather only about its practical concepts. Neuroscience is a young field, but it has many interesting learnings that put this separation between cognition and emotions into question, such as people without frontal cortexes unable to plan their day (and who can't stop cursing!), or those with damage to their limbic system unable to make any decisions, cognitive or otherwise. We'll put that aside.

Instead, I'm talking about our typical drivers of action and how they conflict when they're of these two general categories I'm calling emotion and cognition.

But is our cognition always right? Or are our emotions right sometimes despite our understanding?

And when I say which one is "right", what do I mean?

Accept we don't know what's truly right

They cannot be guided by your views, only their own; so if their views are wrong, they are the ones who suffer insofar as they are misguided. [..] With this in mind you will treat your critic with more compassion. Say to yourself each time, ‘He did what he believed was right.’

Epictetus. Discourses and Selected Writings (Penguin Classics) (pp. 278-279). (Function). Kindle Edition.

As of this writing, it's been 2,500 years, give or take, that we've tried to find irrefutable evidence or consensus over what's truly right – and failed. I'm not holding my breath.

If you're looking for your emotions, or your cognition, to easily tell you what's "truly right," whatever you mean by that – chances are that you won't find it.

Our emotions are full of what some today call maladaptations: we feel anxious because our emotions didn't evolve for social media, we crave ice cream because our dopamine food response didn't evolve for fat + sugar in the same food, feel afraid watching the terror movie, etc.

Our cognition is also full of flaws: we lack data, are subject to misinformation, have flawed reasoning abilities, lack skill, are unknowledgeable, and are subject to over 100 currently known cognitive biases.

These flawed mechanisms are basically the tools you have at your disposal to decide how to act. And, to make matters worse – they often disagree!

When emotions and cognition disagree, you can't just assume cognition, or emotions, are always right. Given these flaws, oftentimes they'll actually both be "wrong."

So there's no rule that says you must always align your emotions to your cognition, as some people say. In some situations, it might be better to align your cognition to your emotions instead.

But without clarity over what "better" is, you can't judge which direction your emotions and cognition should go.

So you must work with yourself, your family, your religion, your community, your philosophy, however you'd like, to decide your values and judgments. And once you have a direction for better and worse, then work on your cognitive emotions to align your actions to it.

You can't go the other way around – values and judgments come first. And once you have a better idea of how it is you should act, you can start aligning your cognitive emotions toward it.

Aligned cognitive emotions

So we shouldn't always align emotions to our cognition, nor the other way around.

But assuming you have clarity of your values and judgments, it's often best to have cognition and emotions work together. Like rowers in a boat, as long as you know the island you're heading to, you want them rowing in the same direction.

If one of your values is spending more quality time with your kids or partner, you want your emotions to drive you towards those actions and away from distractions, and you want clarity that this is the right way to spend your time, and not the other activities competing for it.

Each of the two aspects of cognitive emotions is aligned through different activities.

Cognition is aligned through learning. Be it by thinking, reading, chatting, listening, watching, debating, etc, we change our understanding of the world by internalizing information we didn't have.

Perhaps you thought not eating meat was a good thing, but then learned otherwise, or you had an opinion over the benefits of working hard and then changed it after talking to a hard-working friend. Or you thought Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu was the right physical activity for you, but not after taking a few classes.

Emotions, on the other hand, get aligned through judgments. If we believe an event is wrong, we'll have negative emotions about it, while others, who believe that the same event is right, will have positive emotions about it.

Much of psychotherapy is about either learning to control (regulate) our emotions or to change them by changing our judgments by understanding the world differently.

The truth is that, unfortunately, we don't know much yet about how to change people's emotions. If you feel afraid but instead you wanted to feel happy while public speaking, or you feel concerned but wanted to feel warm toward strangers, there aren't that many verified ways to change these judgments today.

So I'll close this by talking about an interesting insight into how judgments are made: deep canvassing.

Aligning emotions with deep canvassing

In the book How Minds Change, David McRaney talks about this persuasion method called deep canvassing.

They call it deep canvassing. Not every time, but often, people using their technique could get a person to give up a long-held opinion and change their position, especially about a contentious social issue, in less than twenty minutes.
David McRaney, How Minds Change, pag 15

One of the most interesting things about deep canvassing, which has been quite successful in changing people's judgments and beliefs, is that it doesn't depend on data or facts at all – it doesn't depend on our cognition.

"There's no superior argument, no piece of information that we can offer, that is going to change their mind," [..] "The only way they are going to change their mind is by changing their own mind – by talking themselves through their own thinking, by processing things they've never thought about before, things from their own life that are going to help them see things differently."
David McRaney, How Minds Change, pag 29

In deep canvassing, people will talk to others in a nonjudgmental, empathetic conversation where they'll listen to people's experiences in a pre-determined way to shift their beliefs. It goes roughly like this:

• Start by listening with curiosity and empathy for the person's opinion
• Ask open-ended questions to let the person talk about their experiences
• Listen and reflect back their key points and feelings
• Share a personal story related to the topic that creates an emotional connection
• Guide the conversation towards a shared ground and leave them with something to reflect on

That's it. At no point do they give the person new facts or evidence or try to "win" an argument. And it's quite effective.

There's so much about how the human mind works that we still barely understand.

Evaluating your cognitive emotions

When evaluating your cognitive emotions, the key question is "Are your emotions and cognition working together toward your values and judgments? Or are they pulling in different directions?"

Neither cognition nor emotions will always be right because it's very hard to tell, without shadow of a doubt, what right even means.

So instead, clarify your values and judgments. Once that's clear, assess if your emotional responses and cognitive beliefs are aligned with them.

Cognition can be adjusted with more information, but emotions are harder to change. Psychotherapy is one well-known approach, but other methods like deep canvassing also seem promising at changing our judgments and how we feel.

I've written in the past about how fiction can change our judgments through stories, so maybe that's something you want to explore.

Or perhaps, you can ask ChatGPT to try deep canvassing with you.