emotions at work in reasoning and knowledge

Yang and Damasio's article on emotions and their role in learning and making decisions in the world makes a really strong case for the importance of cultivating and understanding our emotions. Before reading this article I was more or less convinced that for the most part understanding our emotions was important insofar as we ought to be aware when our emotions are screwing with our ability to reason. The only really important use emotions seemed to have was to allow us to relate to others. This article makes a strong case for showing that I have just completely misunderstood what emotions have been doing. Instead of emotions screwing with my ability to act rationally in the world they have actual been what makes it possible for me to pick a best response and then act on it. Their argument says that it is not just because of our ability to learn from past mistakes by judging other people's responses to particular actions but also our ability to select a set of reasoning as being appropriate for a given situation. The evidence of this is from lab work where people with frontal lobe brain damage can use logic and prior knowledge to come to conclusions in the lab which seem to be ethical but if given the situation in life they are at a loss about what to do. If I understand this article, the reason for their inability to choose how to respond as effectively as they could in the lab is because they now lack the proper emotional response to value the situation in a way that allows them to pick the correct response. But in the lab it is not needed because they are provided with the information needed and an emotional response is not needed. What this makes me curious about is how different is the decision making process of someone who attempts to suppress emotions verse someone who embraces their emotions?