Dissociating Enhancing and Impairing Effects of Emotion on Cognition

Emotion is a “double-edged sword” that can either enhance or hinder various aspects of our cognition and behavior. The emotional charge of an event can increase attention to and memory for that event, whereas task-irrelevant emotional information may lead to increased distraction and impaired performance in ongoing cognitive tasks. These opposing effects of emotion can be identified at different levels, both within the same cognitive process and across different processes, and could also be identified at more general levels, such as in the case of the response to stress. The present review discusses emerging evidence regarding factors that influence opposite effects of emotion on cognition in healthy functioning, and how they may be linked to clinical conditions. These issues are important for understanding mechanisms of emotion-cognition interactions in healthy functioning and in emotional disturbances, where both of these effects are exacerbated and tend to co-occur. Overall, the present review highlights the need to consider the various factors that can influence enhancing or impairing effects of emotion on cognition, in studies investigating emotion-cognition interactions.