nomenologically distinct, all share the ability to broaden people’s momentary
thought-action repertoires and build their enduring personal resources, rang-
ing from physical and intellectual resources to social and psychological re-
sources” (Fredrickson, 2001, p. 219). In contrast, she looks at negative af-
fects–emotions as promoting narrow, specific action tendencies (i.e., narrow
specific schemes) for coping with unwanted (and often misleading, we wish to
emphasize) situations. This is consistent with our theory. Negative–with-
drawal emotions are likely to produce cognitive–emotional conflicts that
would induce the use of mental-attentional interruption, as a cognitive de-
fense strategy; and this automatic or effortful interruption would cause the
narrow mental focus of attention and action tendencies. Fredrickson (2001)
says as much descriptively: These action tendencies of negative affects–emo-
tions are the “outcome of a psychological process that narrows a person’s
momentary thought-action repertoire by calling to mind an urge to act in a
particular way (e.g., escape, attack, expel)” (p. 220). She concludes that:
“Specific action tendencies called forth by negative emotions represent the
sort of actions that likely worked best to save human ancestors’ lives and
limbs in similar situations” (Fredrickson, 2001, p. 220).
Thus conceived, these affective biases built into brain-wiredaffect-cog-
nition regulationsare different but consistent with current tenets of cognitive
neuroscience (Fox et al., 2001). It is now well established that the left
prefrontal cortex (PFC) serves to control–regulate–potentiate positive emo-
tions, which induce affective goals (leading to cognitive goals) of approach
and exploration. In contrast, the right PFC regulates–potentiates negative
emotions leading to affective–cognitive goals of withdrawal, flight, or aver-
sive reactions (Davidson, 2001; Fox et al., 2001). These findings of Davidson
and Fox can be related to the just mentioned work on motivation and affects
of Kuhl and of Fredrickson, by means of the model of mental attention dis-
cussed in the previous two sections. Indeed we have long upheld the view, for
which there is some empirical support (Pascual-Leone, 1987), that left PFC is
specialized ineffortful mental processes(which engageM-capacity and men-
tal attentional interruption orI-operator, both under the control of the domi-
nant executive schemes orE-operator); and these processes often are needed
to handle novel and misleading situations. In contrast, we believe that right
PFC specializes infamiliar, already learned and more or less automatized,
mental processes, which do not demand as much effort (minimizing the need
ofM,I, andE). We also believe that the right-PFC strategy is suitable in fa-
cilitating situations, in which the rich content (C-) learning of the right hemi-
sphere, the principle of schemes’ overdetermination of performance (i.e.,
SOP), and the lack of need for interrupting (I-operator) misleading schemes,
provide open and broad experiential learning opportunities.
We have synthesized thisdialectical system of affective-cognitive regula-
tionsin Fig. 8.3. Because this model goes beyond what is well established in
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