The 1st Workshop on Cognition-oriented Multimodal Affective and Empathetic Computing (CogMAEC) was held at ACM Multimedia 2025. It focused on moving emotional AI beyond basic recognition toward deeper cognitive understanding. While traditional multimodal affective computing has emphasized simple emotion detection, the rise of multimodal large language models (MLLMs) has spurred interest in modeling how emotions emerge and evolve in context. The workshop gathered researchers on emotion reasoning, multimodal understanding, and human-computer empathy, exploring how machines can not only recognize emotions but also explain their causes and simulate human-like affective reasoning. The program featured invited talks, oral presentations, and posters spanning perception, interaction, causal modeling, and cognitive grounding. CogMAEC provided a platform to connect researchers across disciplines and foster future work on cognitively aware affective computing. Materials are available at https://CogMAEC.github.io/MM2025.