Abstract
Emotions, generally, are more functional and adaptive than dysfunctional and maladaptive. In the emotion and goal compatibility theory, I argue that discrete emotions promote goal-driven behavior, which prioritize specific executive/cognitive processes to achieve the intended behavior. Emotions are functional when they prioritize executive/cognitive processes that are compatible with situational demands and dysfunctional when those processes are incompatible. Within this chapter, I examine how basic emotions influence access, activation, and retrieval of semantic information. I suggest that happiness promotes goals related to social communication, exploration, and conceptual processing. As a result, people in happy states are more efficient at gaining access to and facilitating the spread of activation among concepts, which facilitates understanding and resolution of ambiguous meanings, learning, and generative abilities; however, conceptually related errors become more likely. Conversely, the emotion of sadness promotes goals related to spatial processing, error analysis, and monitoring, which facilitates spatial analysis, inhibition, and reactive control. Such processes impede semantic activity, comprehension, and generative processes, but facilitate analysis of the content and reduce conceptually related errors. Thus, specific emotions influence meaning and comprehension through semantic activity and situational demands determine the functionality of emotions.
