The study of emotions and decision making is now of considerable importance. This involves the application of various tools afforded by neuroscience. One important stream of the literature examines people with brain damage and how damage to particular parts of the brain known to be responsible for particular cognitive functions impacts on decision making. One example of this research is the work of Antonio Damasio, who finds that when the emotional part of the brain is damaged, this actually reduces the efficacy of decision making. Good decisions are a product of the emotional part of the brain working in conjunction with the deliberative part. This contradicts the assumptions of conventional economics, where emotions play a negative role in the decision‐making process. Here it is assumed that decision making can be modeled as being generated in a stoic, unemotional fashion, and that's why decisions tend to be optimal. But the evidence suggests that emotions actually play an important and, often, a positive role in decision making.

Quite often the interaction between groups is socially unequal, and this is reflected in the fact that in many cases borrowing of words or constructions goes mostly or entirely in one direction, from the more powerful or prestigious group to the less favored one. The languages of socially subordinated groups may from quite an early period of contact provide terminology for objects or practices with which speakers of the more powerful group were previously unfamiliar, but the effects of contact in that direction may not progress any further than this. In some cases, as with the Dharug language of Sydney, Australia, the source of some of the earliest loans from Indigenous Australian languages into English, the fate of the language system is extinction after the obliteration of many of its speakers. The remainder shifted to varieties of English, the language of the people who had suppressed them.

There is research that supports the idea that cognitive factors influence the phenomenology of the perceived world. Delk and Fillenbaum asked participants to match the color of figures with the color of their background. Some of the figures depicted objects associated with a particular color. These included typically red objects such as an apple, lips, and a symbolic heart. Other objects were presented that are not usually associated with red, such as a mushroom or a bell. However, all the figures were made out of the same red-orange cardboard. Participants then had to match the figure to a background varying from dark to light red. They had to make the background color match the color of the figures. The researchers found that red-associated objects required more red in the background to be judged a match than did the objects that are not associated with the color red. This implies that the cognitive association of objects to color influences how we perceive that color.

The concern about how we appear to others can be seen in children, though work by the psychologist Ervin Staub suggests that the effect may vary with age. In a study where children heard another child in distress, young children (kindergarten through second grade) were more likely to help the child in distress when with another child than when alone. But for older children ― in fourth and sixth grade ― the effect reversed: they were less likely to help a child in distress when they were with a peer than when they were alone. Staub suggested that younger children might feel more comfortable acting when they have the company of a peer, whereas older children might feel more concern about being judged by their peers and fear feeling embarrassed by overreacting. Staub noted that "older children seemed to discuss the distress sounds less and to react to them less openly than younger children." In other words, the older children were deliberately putting on a poker face in front of their peers.

Many things spark envy: ownership, status, health, youth, talent, popularity, beauty. It is often confused with jealousy because the physical reactions are identical. The difference: the subject of envy is a thing (status, money, health etc.). The subject of jealousy is the behaviour of a third person. Envy needs two people. Jealousy, on the other hand, requires three: Peter is jealous of Sam because the beautiful girl next door rings him instead. Paradoxically, with envy we direct resentments toward those who are most similar to us in age, career and residence. We don't envy businesspeople from the century before last. We don't envy millionaires on the other side of the globe. As a writer, I don't envy musicians, managers or dentists, but other writers. As a CEO you envy other, bigger CEOs. As a supermodel you envy more successful supermodels. Aristotle knew this: 'Potters envy potters.'