The way emotions influence cognition has been a subject of debate for years.
Leading theorists in the fields of cognitive neuroscience and cognitive psychology have postulated that emotions are interpretations of visceral bodily states that precede cognition. However, these theories do not take into account that internal visceral states (i.e. faster heart-beat) overlap with other emotional states (i.e. anger, excitement, elation). Thus the direct mapping of an emotional response to cognitions is not clear-cut. This thesis examines the interface
of cognition and emotion using a variety of different methodologies (implicit/ explicit behavioural tasks, memory recall and electrophysiology). The relationship between strength of cultural affinity and age of acquisition was explored in Chapter 3, using implicit and explicit cultural identity tasks. We
demonstrated that cultural affinity and age of second language acquisition differentially modulate implicit and explicit attitudes, indicating an interface between emotional evaluations and cultural context. In Chapter 4, the relationship between language, emotional arousal, and memory retrieval was examined using an autobiographical memory recall task in Welsh and English. This chapter indicated that age of acquisition and proficiency modulates the emotional memories retrieved in the first (L1) and second (L2) languages, but
strength of emotional arousal does not differ between languages.
Our findings demonstrate that language, age of acquisition and cultural affinity
compliment different theoretical perspectives, such as psychological constructivism, embodied cognition and evolutionary emotional theories. For Chapters 3 and 4, experiential and contextual factors modulated strength of cultural affinity and memory retrieval consistent with psychological cons
tructivist and evolutionary approaches. Additionally, using event-related potentials in Chapter 5, we showed that people who score highly on traits
of anxiety/depression have cognitive biases associated with the integration of positive meaning. In contrast, people with low traits of anxiety/depression were able to integrate meaning associated with positive, negative and neutral similarly. The results in Chapter 5 provide strong support for theories of
embodied cognition and evolutionary accounts of emotional processing, and indicate that anxiety/ depressive disorders are maintained through cognitive biases with positive information integration. Taken together, the findings from this thesis demonstrate t he interface between emotion and cognition in language tasks, memory retrieval, cultural affinity and even semantic processing in participants with high levels of anxiety and depression. Future studies could examine more visceral emotional arousal using skin conductance responses to cultural affinity and during memory retrieval, which would separate emotion and cognition interactions.