How emotions drive controlled behavior

Emotions have a bad reputation among scholars of cognitive control. Clearly, emotions can be powerful distractors that challenge controlled behavior. Not surprisingly, theoretical accounts often describe emotions as antagonists to controlled behavior. In this talk, I will focus on a different perspective, suggesting that emotions have a signaling function, because they are both output and input for controlled processes. I will present physiological evidence showing that affect follows from controlled processing and review evidence suggesting that affect is causally involved in controlled behavior. Then I will discuss how motivation moderates the impact of affective states on control and apply the notion of affective signaling to the problem of human multitasking, i.e., the question how people decide which task to perform. The talk will portray emotions as an integral part of ´cognitive´ control, allowing to better understand problems and failures of control.