minants of emotions and of personal–personality processes, and so we call
thempersonal or emotion schemes(Greenberg, 2002; Greenberg & Pascual-
Leone, 2001; Greenberg, Rice, & Elliot, 1993; Pascual-Leone, 1991). As the
child develops, the initial innate affects (affective schemes), released by the
circumstances, come to be more or less coordinated with their corresponding
cognitive schemes, producing emotion schemes (causal substratum of emo-
tions) and personal structures. Affect in consciousness is always carried by
emotions, and this is possibly why many authors (e.g., Ekman & Davidson,
1994) treat affect and emotion as synonymous. In our opinion, this is an er-
ror. Primary affects (e.g., Pascual-Leone, 1991) are clearly innate, but cogni-
tive components of emotions cannot be innate because they are situated (i.e.,
context specific). This error obscures the development of emotions and moti-
vational processes.
Most of the schemes that make up the conscious or preconscious processes
(the person’s ego), whether they refer to one’s own person–organism (self-
schemes), to the outer world or the others (interpersonaland intersubjective
schemes), are hybrids. That is, they are personal or emotion schemes, even
when emotionaldefense mechanisms(special sorts of executive self-schemes)
may keep the emotional component out of consciousness.Executive schemes
are operative schemes that embody plans of action and control and allocate
brain resources to schemes congruently with the current task demands
(Pascual-Leone, 1995, 1996, 1998; Pascual-Leone & Goodman, 1979; Pas-
cual-Leone, Goodman, Ammon, & Subelman, 1978; Pascual-Leone & Irwin,
1998; Pascual-Leone & Johnson, 1991; Pascual-Leone, Johnson, Baskind,
Dworsky, & Severtson, 2000). We do not discuss executive processes, because
they are well recognized in the current literature. We should emphasize, how-
ever, that in our view there is no single central executive system. Rather, there
is a multiplicity of executive schemes that are more or less situation-specific
and context bound and are learned locally in a situated manner (Pascual-
Leone, 2000a).
Affective schemes, and their aptitude to coordinate with cognitive schemes
with the help of mental attentional capacity monitored by executive schemes
(Pascual-Leone, 1991), serve to explain the difference between motives and
specificinterests,^2 and among interest, utility, and personal importance (e.g.,
Eccles et al., 1998). The distinction between motives and interests, not alto-
gether clear in the literature, is important from the perspective of develop-
mental motivation theory.Motives,from an organismic perspective, express
affective goals (i.e., specific action tendencies) that are strong enough to in-
- AFFECT, SELF-MOTIVATION, AND COGNITIVE DEVELOPMENT 203
2 2 Some emotion researchers, such as Izard (1977) and ourselves (Pascual-Leone, 1991), refer
to interest as a general disposition elicited by novelty and curiosity. This is not the sense of inter-
est we are referring to in this paper. Here we refer to specific–substantive interests, as described
in the educational–developmental literature (Renninger, Hidi, & Krapp, 1992).