Emotions define who we are to ourselves as well as to others. They are at the core of many psychiatric disorders, and they can also alter our physical well-being. As we contemplate the study of emotion, we need to make several distinctions. Consciousness and cognition.
Cognition is our ability to process and store information about the world.
We are not necessarily conscious of those activities as they occur. Emotion and cognition. We also must distinguish between cognition and emotion, recognizing that many aspects of emotion rely on cognition and cognition similarly depends on emotion. Implicit and explicit memory. Our ability to consciously remember something is not necessarily the same as our ability to respond to something on the basis of past learning.