Two BYU professors challenge traditional philosophical and psychological beliefs that the mind and body act separately—here’s what they have to say.
Imagine hiking the Y to celebrate the start of spring. You finish walking up one switchback and begin making your way up the next when you lock eyes with a snake—what do you do? Regardless of what type of snake you see, you would most likely jump, back up, or even scream in an effort to protect yourself. Interestingly enough, this programmed response doesn’t typically require much thought, something Associate Professor Travis Anderson (Phenomenology, Philosophy of Art) and Professor Patrick Steffen (Psychology) believe indicates a linkage between cognition and affect.
For centuries, philosophers conceptually separated the body and mind using these terms—cognition referring to conscious thought and reflection, and affect being emotions and feelings—claiming they don’t work together to influence thoughts and actions. However, after looking at new research on neuroscience and psychology, Anderson and Steffen instead argue that both are in play constantly.
Challenging a Dualistic Model of Thought
The first record of dualistic theories about the mind and body come from the Ancient Greeks, including Plato and Aristotle. These philosophers prioritized cognition over affect, believing that cognition provided reliable thought based on logic and rationality while affect could cause dangerous and impulsive actions based on feelings. Later on, “Christians introduced a metaphysics of body and soul that reinforced that separation of cognition and affect,” Anderson explains. “The idea being that your rational mind [or cognition] is the way in which human beings are like God. . . . And the affects were associated with a fallen body.”
While most philosophers agreed with this theoretical perspective, Martin Heidegger, a German philosopher, argued that cognition and affect work together. In 2023, Anderson rediscovered Heidegger’s work and collaborated with Steffen from the College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences to reevaluate the mind-body connection accepted by philosophers for centuries. The professors spent years combing through the works of past and present philosophers as well as modern research in psychology and neuroscience. They researched the philosophical theories that founded psychology to see how those theories might need to change. Their efforts pieced together a new understanding of the mind and body: cognition and affect work together, not separately.
Rounding Up the Evidence
In Anderson and Steffen’s recently published paper, the researchers specifically focus on their two main realizations that contradict traditional philosophical and psychological beliefs: The first being that cognition and affect are intertwined and, the second, that our initial reactions to the world—also known as primary appraisals—come from affect or emotions, not cognition. “Our feelings and our emotions tell us things about the world and our environment that we haven’t yet put into conceptual form,” Anderson explains. This means that when seeing a snake on your hike to the Y, your instinctive reaction to jump back comes primarily as a result of your fear or affect, but your cognition processed the logical knowledge that snakes can be dangerous and, therefore, helped instill that instinct.
Anderson argues that contradicting traditional beliefs of cognition and affect will impact the field of psychology significantly, seeing as how some therapy practices still rely on the dualistic model for treatment. In fact, Anderson believes these findings can impact psychological approaches for treating disorders such as anxiety and depression: “Rather than focusing on a purely mind-centered approach or a purely body-centered approach . . . treatments should focus on theories around a mind that is not operating just in terms of intellect, but also in terms of feelings.”
Anderson and Steffen hope to emphasize the importance of adapting traditional practices or beliefs as more information becomes available. He says, “If we rely on more reliable methods of trying to understand ourselves and understand the world, those methods can not only benefit our theology, but they can also benefit our health, our behavior, our self-understanding, and our chances of getting along with one another.”
Read Anderson and Steffen’s full paper here.