[Knowledge, emotions and regulation of actions or the reason of feelings].

Abstract

This paper concerns the interaction of emotion and knowledge in action regulation. First a new theory of emotions is developed. Emotions are considered as modulations of cognitive processes. Such a modulation is for instance the change of the resolution level of cognitive processes. Another modulation is the change of the "updating rate" of the image of the environment. A theory is developed how these modulations are dependent on "context parameters". Action regulation is a process, which is considered as consisting of three levels. The first one is the level of the automatisms. The second level is reasoning and planning, the third level is information collection by observation or trial and error behaviour. The change between these levels is dependent on the state of the knowledge about the respective domain of reality. It can be shown, that the concept of emotion and emotional change as consisting on a context dependent change of the modulation of cognitive processes and the three stage theory of action regulation is sufficient to explain emotional forms of behaviour.