the effects of depression on cognitive processes (Ellis & Ashbrook, 1988),
stress and cognitive performance (Mandler, 1984), goal orientation theory
(e.g., Nicholls, 1984) are predicated on the assumption of how attention can
be preempted by interfering emotions to the detriment of task focus and per-
formance.
The duality of attention and processing highlights the importance of
emotional self-regulation and control of attention. Success and failure of self-
regulation have profound consequences on intellectual functioning and de-
velopment. On the negative side, intellectual functioning can become de-
graded (Labouvie-Vief & Gonzalez, chap. 9); one is switching to a coping
mode. On the positive side, one can reach complete identification with the ob-
ject of interest, leading to the merge of self and action or the object in an opti-
mal state of flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996). From a developmental point of
view, a person can tune in or tune out of a specific developmental task as a re-
sult of identification or disidentification (Snow, 1992).
Another duality of processing, conscious, effortful, serial (capacity-lim-
ited) versus largely unconscious, automatic, parallel-distributed processing
(seeSimon, 1994) also deserves mention (see also Kahneman, 2003, for a dis-
cussion). Although beyond the scope of this volume, the relevance of the inte-
gration of motivation, cognition, and affect to this duality issue becomes clear
when the outcome of parallel processing often emerges as affective experiences
(Barnes & Thagard, 1996; Iran-Najad, Clore, & Vondruska, 1984; see also
Kihlstrom, 1999, for a discussion of the cognitive, emotional, and motivational
unconscious). For example, in the creativity research, the mind-popping or
sudden-insight phenomenon has puzzled psychologists for decades (Stern-
berg & Davidson, 1995). Very few would put the insight phenomenon in the
context of motivated reasoning and problem solving. However, as Miller
(1996) conjectured in his historical research on scientific discovery:
Activation is maintained in the unconscious as the result of intense conscious
desire to solve the problem at hand. This activation can spread in the uncon-
scious in ways that might not have been possible with the confines of conscious
thought. (p. 337)This example demonstrates the power of motivation in cognitive transforma-
tion beyond those changes pointed out by cognitive psychologists (e.g., with
practice, one can circumvent limits of the working memory capacity,
Ericsson, 1998). It also shows yet another example of embodied cognition
about which we still do not know much as to its exact mechanisms at the psy-
chological and neurological levels (but see Gruber, 1995, for a discussion of
affect and creative insight; Thagard, 2002, for an account of largely parallel
processes of constraint satisfaction in scientific discovery).
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