Emotion and Emotion Experience
Emotional disturbances are very common in psychopathology, being present at a wide range of psychological conditions, such as mood disorders, anxiety disorders, impulse control disorders, personality disorders and sleep disorders (Berenbaum, Raghavan, Le, Vernon, & Gomez, 2003; Kring, 2008). Their ubiquity and importance for the course of mental disorders have led many researchers to suggest possible mechanisms through which emotional disturbances contribute to the onset or maintenance of these disorders. In this paper, the …definition… influential theories are being presented and their methodological and practical limitations are being discussed.
Emotion and Emotion Experience According to Berenbaum et al.
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The experience of emotion, according to Barrett et al. (2007), is a mental representation of emotion, including memories of feelings, hypothetical feelings and current feelings that give information on how such feeling arise. Emotion experiences have a specific content, which explains what an emotion feels like, and their properties are instantiated through neurobiological processes. The nucleus of emotion experience (or mental representation of emotion) is core affect, i.e. neurophysiological states that are experienced as feelings of pleasure or displeasure in response to external stimuli (Barrett et al., 2007). Additional contents of emotion experience that explain the phenomenological differences between the distinct emotions, i.e. anger, fear, sadness, pride, awe, and joy, are the arousal-based content, the relational content or content related to dominance/submission and the situational content (Barrett et al., 2007). For Barrett et al. (2007), the role of the …show more content…
Those components are expected to cohere with one another and across multiple situations and contexts (Kring, 2008). The lack of such a cohesion, which has been defined as emotional disturbance, has been observed to multiple mental disorders. Examples of emotion disturbances include excesses in emotion (e.g. excessive fear in social phobias), deficits in emotion (e.g. lack of empathy in narcissistic personality disorder), social emotional problems (e.g. lack of emotional reciprocity in autism) and regulation problems (e.g. uncontrollable anger in borderline personality disorders) (Kring, 2008). The adoption of a transdiagnostic approach in psychopathology focusing on the common emotional disturbances across different disorders has been suggested and is expected to provide a number of advantages (Kring, 2008). First, the examination of common emotional processes at the symptom level may offer an explanation for the high levels of comorbidity in the widely accepted diagnostic categories and help to reorganize the current diagnostic system; second, a transdiagnostic approach may provide evidence for the causal or maintaining function of several emotion-related processes in mental disorders; and, third such an approach may guide the development of treatment practices targeting the change of emotion processes (Kring,
Kaplan, H. I., Sadock, B. J., & Grebb, J. A. (1994). Synopsis of psychiatry: behavioral sciences,
The first section explores the “flat-brain theory of emotions, flat-brain syndrome, and flat-brain tango” (Petersen, 2007, pp. 2-45). All three are interrelated (Petersen, 2007). The flat-brain theory of emotions “demonstrates what’s occurring inside of us when things are going well, and how that changes when they are not” (Petersen, 2007, p. 11). Petersen’s (2007) theory “explains how our emotions, thinking, and relating abilities work and how what goes on inside us comes out in the ways we communicate and act” (p. 8). The “flat-brain syndrome” describes what happens when an individual wears their emotions on their sleeve. This “makes it
Weisman, M.M., Livingston, B.M., Leaf, P.J., Florio, L.P., Holzer, C. (1991). Psychiatric Disorders in America. Affective Disorders. Free Press.
Affective instability due to a marked reactivity of mood. For example intense episodic dysphonia, irritability, or anx...
Nolen-Hoeksema, S., & Rector, N. A. (2011). Abnormal psychology. (2 ed., p. 297, 321, 322,
In the world of cinema, there’s almost always a discussion regarding what scenes would be suitable for the grasping imagination of any audience, young or old. Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 film, Psycho, sparked a plug for the movie industry as it was the first movie of its kind to display such graphic scenes of sex and violence to a worldwide audience.
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is the comprehensive guide to diagnosing psychological disorders. This manual is published by the American Psychiatric Association (APA) and is currently in its fifth revision. Moreover, the manual is utilized by a multitude of mental health care professionals around the world in the process of identifying individuals with disorders and provides a comprehensive list of the various disorders that have been identified. The DSM serves as the essential resource for diagnosis of mental disorders based off of the various signs and symptoms displayed by individuals while also providing a basic reference point for the treatment of the different disorders. The manual attempts to remain scientific in its approach to identifying the underlying symptoms of each disorder while meeting the needs of the different psychological perspectives and the various mental health fields. The DSM has recently gone through a major revision from the DSM-IV-TR to the DSM-5 and contains many significant changes in both the diagnosis of mental disorders and their classifications.
Ellis, A. (1971). Emotional disturbances and its treatment in a nutshell. Canadian Counsellor, 5(3), 168-170.
One famous pioneer in this area is Ekman (1973 in Shiraev & Levy, 2007, 2004) who classified six basic facial expressions as being universal and reflecting most emotional states. They are happy, sad, anger, disgust, surprised and fearful. Ekman (1973) proposed that the universality of emotions allows individuals to empathise with others and enables us to read other’s feelings therefore emotions must serve an adaptive purpose hence supporting the claim that they are universal (Darwin, 1972 in John, Ype, Poortinga, Marshall & Pierre 2002). Moreover, emotions are widely accepted to accompany...
A child is considered an infant from the age of 2 to 12 months. From 12 months to 36 months this is considered the toddler years where the cognitive, emotional, and social development is great. The social emotional development occurs during early childhood where children experience different moods as well as expanding their social world by learning more about their emotions and other people. The social emotional development is a child's way of understanding the feelings of others, controlling their own feelings and behaviors and getting along with peers. The key to a successful emotional and social development are positive relationship with trusting and caring adults. The social and emotional development in infants and toddlers can have negative
Plutchik, Robert (1980), Emotion: Theory, research, and experience: Vol. 1. Theories of emotion, 1, New York: Academic
Discuss the "cognition versus biology" debate in the study of emotion. Outline first the cognitive position and then the biological position. Discuss one possible, satisfying resolution to the cognition versus biology debate, using an original example to illustrate this
Emotion is the “feeling” aspect of consciousness that includes physical, behavioral, and subjective (cognitive) elements. Emotion also contains three elements which are physical arousal, a certain behavior that can reveal outer feelings and inner feelings. One key part in the brain, the amygdala which is located within the limbic system on each side of the brain, plays a key role in emotional processing which causes emotions such as fear and pleasure to be involved with the human facial expressions.The common-sense theory of emotion states that an emotion is experienced first, leading to a physical reaction and then to a behavioral reaction.The James-Lange theory states that a stimulus creates a physiological response that then leads to the labeling of the emotion. The Cannon-Bard theory states that the physiological reaction and the emotion both use the thalamus to send sensory information to both the cortex of the brain and the organs of the sympathetic nervous system. The facial feedback hypothesis states that facial expressions provide feedback to the brain about the emotion being expressed on the face, increasing all the emotions. In Schachter and Singer’s cognitive arousal theory, also known as the two-factor theory, states both the physiological arousal and the actual arousal must occur before the emotion itself is experienced, based on cues from the environment. Lastly, in the cognitive-mediational theory
Daniel Goleman, who help to popularize emotional intelligence explained in his book that the success of a person does not depend on our academic studies or the intellect, if not the emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence is the ability or gift of being able to control, identify, and understand feelings and emotions correctly in a way that facilitates relationships and makes them more productive; We are not born with emotional intelligence, we can only create, nurture, and strengthen through our experiences and knowledge. There are positive and negative emotions they can help or cause problems, depends on the ability to handle them. People with high emotional intelligence doesn’t mean that you have negative emotions, but when they
One scientist, Damasio, provided an explanation how emotions can be felt in humans biologically. Damasio suggested, “Various brain structures map both the organism and external objects to create what he calls a second order representation. This mapping of the organism and the object most likely occurs in the thalamus and cingulate cortices. A sense of self in the act of knowing is created, and the individual knows “to whom this is happening.” The “seer” and the “seen,” the “thought” and the “thinker” are one in the same.” By mapping the brain scientists can have a better understandi...