Cognitive Architecture as Hidden Moderator: Reconciling Contradictory Emotion–Cognition Findings with the DLN Framework

Empirical findings on emotion-cognition relations often appear mutually contradictory: in some contexts emotion introduces systematic bias (Kahneman and Tversky, 1979; Slovic et al., 2007), yet in others it provides essential information for adaptive decision making (Bechara et al., 1994). Rather than treating these as competing explanations, this paper argues that the contradiction reflects a hidden moderator: the cognitive architecture governing how affective signals are represented, routed, and used. Drawing on appraisal theory (Lazarus, 1991), affective neuroscience (Pessoa, 2008; Lindquist et al., 2012), and somatic marker theory (Damasio, 1994), this paper proposes that these relationships vary systematically across cognitive developmental stages as defined by the DLN (Dot-Linear-Network) framework (Wu, 2026). Dot-stage cognition exhibits reactive emotional processing with minimal cognitive mediation; linear-stage cognition exhibits suppression or compartmentalization that enables sequential reasoning but creates systematic blind spots; network-stage cognition exhibits integrative fusion where affective signals inform cognitive processing and cognitive context modulates emotional response. A targeted umbrella synthesis of quantitative meta-analyses spanning emotion regulation (Webb et al., 2012), implicit cognition (Greenwald et al., 2009), interoception (Trevisan et al., 2019; Desmedt et al., 2022), and affective decision making (Zanini et al., 2025) identifies persistent heterogeneity patterns consistent with DLN stage as an unmodeled moderator. Ten falsifiable predictions are derived concerning interoceptive accuracy, emotional granularity, alexithymia, decision quality under emotional load, and implicit-explicit attitude discrepancies across stages. The resulting framework reframes the central debate: emotion functions as noise under linear suppression but as signal under network integration.