Motivation and Emotion Part VIII: Self Concept & Regulation

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People who have suffered from traumatic life experiences go through a wide range of emotions throughout their lives and the majority of these emotions are deleterious to the person’s mental and physical health. Specifically, these individuals go through fear via re-experiencing their traumatic life experience or sadness through the victimization process they are likely to undergo. Emotions have four major components including feelings, bodily arousal, sense of purpose, and social-expressive. Recognizing these negative emotions will assist in alleviating the research participants’ aversive symptoms for the treatment of their trauma spectrum disorder. Fear and sadness can have both positive and negative consequences and managing these emotions is a challenging but worthwhile endeavor. The four basic components of fear and sadness include feelings, bodily arousal, sense of purpose, and social expressive components. The bodily arousal includes biological aspects such as neural circuits and hormonal responses to fear and sadness inducing situations. The amygdala and the prefrontal cortex of the brain heavily influence fear processing and people with damage to these areas of the brain have displayed marginalized or the absence of fear responses. Specifically, the neural pathway of fear occurs in the lateral amygdala, to the central nucleus of the amygdala, then to areas of the brain that process and control defensive behavior via the autonomic and endocrine responses. Colloquially called the fight or flight response, this enables a person to either engage in direct action to stop the fear inducing agent or removing one’s self from the agent. The sympathetic branch of the autonomic system becomes active during these situations causin... ... middle of paper ... ... about it, or by asking experienced swimmers about it. Simply learning simply about the emotion-inducing situation can at times assuage the severity of the emotional response. In summation, a person can overcome their aversive situation by breathing techniques or by reshaping their perception of the situation via learned information about it. People who experience traumatic life events have a broad spectrum of emotions, most notably fear and sadness. While, these two emotions are typically considered to be aversive they can also provide benefits to the person such as learning new coping methods for future success or enhanced creativity. Overall, there are four major components of fear and sadness, and if a person understands these components it is possible for them to more appropriately engage in corrective actions, when faced with fearful or sad situations.

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