matic Y strategies are liable to cause errors unless controlled. In misleading
situations, two competing affective or cognitive goals (pertinent respectively
to X and Y) can be found; and to solve these misleading situations subjects
must first learn to control their affects–emotions, to delay response and criti-
cally contrast–evaluate the two strategies, directing effort of mental attention
to inhibit Y strategies and hyperactivate X. The appraisal of this state of af-
fairs is done by executive schemes that with experience, via cognitive (L)
learning, develop situatedcriteria of relevancedriven by preeminent affective
goals active in the concrete situation(s). Via these criteria of relevance, affec-
tive–emotion schemes ultimately determine the direction that children’s cop-
ing-with-situations, and subsequent cognitive learning, will take. In this way,
they determine knowledge children acquire, and the personality that emerges
from these experiences and learning.
Although the innate or acquired cognitive–constructive mechanisms of a
child or adult, such as hidden operators and current repertoire of habitual
(i.e., learned) schemes, serve to interpret and construe the actual experience
causing cognitive learning, the direction taken by this interpretive and con-
structive process is due, at every turn, to activated affective–emotion schemes,
because they determine criteria of relevance and choice of executives to be ap-
plied. All cognitive goals have one or several preeminent affective goals as
their driving force, although consolidated (i.e., habitual) cognitive goals, be-
cause they are self-propelling, also have an intrinsic motivational value and
tend to apply by themselves,^4 at times leading to unwanted strategies Y.
To illustrate in an intuitive fashion, this interaction between affective–
emotion schemes and cognitive schemes during development, consider the
well-established psychodynamic processes that in infants lead tofear of
strangers at about 7–8 months andseparation anxietyat around 9–12
months, both often lasting into the second year. We believe that these forms
of anxiety result from dialectical interaction among developmentally evolv-
ing affect–emotion schemes and cognitive schemes. Interpreting ideas and
findings of developmentalists such as Bowlby, Spitz, and others (Saarni,
Mumme, & Campos, 1998; Thomson, 1998), we think that infants construct
early a scheme of their mothers as specific companions and protectors. They
are born “looking for mother.” Attachment is a complex innate emotional
scheme, and this scheme “looks for mother.” Across interactions with
mother, this mother-attachment scheme differentiates, and because at first
mother typically is only rewarding for the baby, this scheme comes to ex-
press–expect agood mother. As baby grows older, however, mother is forced
(perhaps to protect the child from harm) to introduce interdictions, obstacles
to his or her actions, etc., repeatedly leading the baby to frustration and an-
214 PASCUAL-LEONE AND JOHNSON
4 4 This is Piaget’s concept of assimilation that causes the principle of scheme’s overdeter-
mination of performance.