Emotion interventions Flashcards
Treating affective disorders
- cultural differences?
how people relate to their emotions varies by cultural tradition:
- western society has developed practices and rituals to deal with people’s ‘wrong relations’ with themselves, such as:
1) therapy
2) rehabilitation clinics - Buddhists by contrast cultivate awareness of emotions.
- Western world has transformed this into mindfulness meditation (Segal et al, 2002)
psychotherapy:
- over 400 variations, and often used eclectically (mix parts)
- nearly all involve identifying and challenging emotions through the therapeutic relationship
Types of therapy (3)
psychoanalysis
CBT
emotion-focussed
Psychoanalysis
- Freud focused on emotionally traumatic events
- allowed patient to experience and express associated emotions to free themselves from the trauma
- people seen as having inner conflicts
- involves active listening
- Transference:
emotional attitudes to significant others projected onto others, including therapist
studies have shown positive emotion is more likley to be expressed to someone new when they have traits resembling someone who is liked by the person (Berk & Anderson, 2000) - Emotion beliefs
people may have rigid unhelpful beliefs about emotions (eg. no good comes from anger)
therapy brings this to light and allows patient to choose a new solution
Cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT)
- involves changing emotion by thought
- CBT (Beck, 1976) teaches people to recognise and avoid evaluation errors about incidents leading to emotions, and replace them with alternate thoughts
- help people make external, local and temporary attributions
Emotion-focussed therapy
- involves changing emotion by emotion (Greenberg, 1993)
- emotions can signal concerns and provide clue about person’s goal structure
- allows primary emotions to be expressed, but stops secondary ones which are seen as defensive (eg. anger disguises fear) and unhelpful instrumental emotions (eg, using irritation to stop others challenging)
Effectiveness of psychotherapy
- evidence?
- meta-analysis (smith, Glass & Miller, 1975) found an effect size of .85 ie. those receiving therapy fare better than 85% of those who don’t receive therapy
- other studies support this finding, but show that it depends on the type of therapy and the therapist, and that the gains are not always maintained
- effectiveness of psychoanalysis is difficult to assess due to treatment length. Brief psychodynamic therapy has been found to be as effective as CBT (Barkham et al, 1996)
- effectiveness of emotion-focussed therapy equivalent to CBT
- meta-analysis showed CBT more effective than medication for depression (Gloaguen et al, 1998) but meta-analysis has shown that antidepressants are nonetheless more effective than placebo (cipriani et al, 2018)
- Layard (2006) depression report - therapy as effective as drugs in short term and more so in long term.
Short-term success of CBT is 50% ie. 50 of 100 people will have lost psychiatric symptoms that they would not have lost otherwise. Relapse greater for depression than anxiety. Course of CBT likely to produce one year extra free of depression.
-New forms of transdiagnostic therapy:
recent meta-analysis shows link between major depressive disorder and emotion regulation difficulties (Visted et al, 2018)
This has treatment implications eg. emotion regulation therapy for distress disorders (Renna et al, 2017)
Problems in treating affective disorders?
- only about 1/5 of those with problems consult a professional, and only 1/2 of those are mental health professionals
- alternative sources of help include: self-help groups, friends/ relatives
- sensemaking also occurs through literature, art and drama
Emotions and therapeutic change
integrative memory model (Lane, Ryan, Nadel & Greenberg, 2014)
- therapeutic change results from reactivating old emotional memories, engaging in new emotional experiences that are incorporated into the reactivated memories through reconsolidation, and reinforcing the new memory structure through behaviour and experience
emotional responses (emotion-focussed therapy) episodic memories (psychodynamic psychotherapy) semantic structures (CBT used) (triad)
Enhancing happiness
may emphasise?
happiness
accounts of happiness may emphasise:
- a life of virtue, meaning and personal growth OR
- postivie cognitive evaluation or judgement of one’s life (life satisfaction) OR
- pleasant affective experiences (positive emotions) & moods
Subjective well-being:
satisfaction + positive affect - negative affect
Meta-analysis (Lyubomirsky, King & Dienre, 2005)
- showed that happiness predicts success in life (as measured by relationship satisfaction, work satisfaction and health/ longevity)
Long term effects of happiness:
- yearbooks
- baseball
- nuns
does happiness directly affect mortality?
Long term effects:
- emotions affect life outcomes by influencing how people think, behave and interact
- previous studies had found that positive emotions infered from smile intensity in college yearbooks was not associated with marriage stability and satisfaction (not replicated by Freese et al, 2007)
- smile intensity of major league baseball players form 1952 baseball register was associated with greater longevity. Those showing a Duchenne smile (authentic) were half as likely to die in any year as nonsmilers
- nun study (Danner, Snowdon & Friesen, 2001)
- emotions may also affect body systems
- longitudinal study looking at catholic nuns autobiographies found in convent archives; coded for emotion (writing may reflect emotional experiences and willingness to express emotion
- found: positive emotion in writing was associated with longevity
Does happiness directly affect mortality?
- not according to Liu et al (2015)
- prospective 10 yr study of 700,000 women found that unhappiness didn’t predict mortality after adjusting for health factors
emotional intelligence?
predicted life satisfaction over and above personality factors (Law et al, 2004)
- people are generally poor at making affective forecasts (Gilbert et al, 1998) because they over estimate the emotional impact of events and focus too much on certain events
- individuals high in EI more accurately forecasted how they would feel following events (Dunn et al, 2007)
- EI can be learned, it increases with age as does happiness, which may be due to choice of activities
Environmental influences of happiness
- circumstances
- income
- injection of income
can emotion influence income?
circumstances
- education, marriage, religion have small influences on happiness
- circumstances account for only 10-15% of happiness, whereas genetics account for up to 50%
Income
- meta-analysis found a .17 correlation between income and happiness. More influential when absolute income is low (Myers, 2000)
- absolute income may be less important than how personal income ranks within one’s own comparison group, so increasing income won’t help unless your rank changes (which is at the expense of other’s happiness) (Boyce, Brown & Moore, 2010)
- money appears to inhibit savouring which undermines the positive effect of money on happiness (Quoiabach et al, 2010)
- however, spending on products that match personality (Eg. openness/ agreeableness) associated with life satisfaction (Matz, Gladstone & Stilwell, 2016)
Injection of income:
- little difference in happiness of lottery winners and those who had lost a limb (Brickman, Coates & Janoff- Bulman, 1978)
- Gardener & Oswald (2006) - found an improvement in well-being two years after a medium-sized lottery win
- can emotion influence income?
- momm et al (2015) found that emotion recognition ability predicted annual income via political skill
Personal strategies for happiness
-Sheldon & Lyumbomirsky (2007)
stability of happiness:
- survey of >1 million people in 45 countries showed a mean subjective well being (SWB) of 6.75 on a scale of 1-10 (where 5 = neutral) ie, set point is mildly positive
- hedonistic adaptation. Psychological immune system returns people to their set point happiness
- but major events and psychotherapy can have sustainable effects
- intentional activities also influence activities (Sheldon & Lyumbomirsky, 2007)
- sustainable happiness model (Shelson & Lyumbomirsky, 2007):
changing goals and activities is best route to enhancing happiness
BUT, they must be:
1) certain types of activity
2) fit personality and needs
3) vary in timing
4) provide fresh experiences
Evidence:
found: an activity change group reported more improvement than a circumstance change group
Also, the accumulation of small satsfying experiences predicted enhanced SWB at end of study
Also, expressing gratitude weekly has a greater impact than daily
effective strategies for happiness
- identifying best self
- employing personal strength
- expressing gratitude
- acts of kindness
- recalling happy events
- savouring experiences
- self-selecting an effective strategy is the best approach
- better to have a wide range of strategies
- may be possible to automate some effective strategies eg. using implementation intentions (webb et al, 2010)
- focusing on specific features rather than general features of a stressful situation may reduce global self-judgements and encourage problem-solving (Vrielynck & Philipott, 2009)
- having substantial conversation rather than small talk (Mehl et al, 2010)
- getting good sleep to consolidate emotional memories (Payne & Kensinger, 2010)
- Positive mental time travel and being mindful (Quoidbach et al, 2010)
- using money to benefit others ie. prosocial spending (Dunn, Atkin & Norton, 2014), Especially when it satisfies core needs (relatedness, competence and autonomy)
- studies have suggested that nature (vs urban) walks are restorative. A recent investigation (Miller & Krizan, 2016) found that any type of walking enhances positive affect
- social networks?
facebook may seem to provide a resource to fulfil need for social connection, but, an experience sampling study found that its use undermined well being and satisfaction in young adults (Kross et al, 2013)
Positive thinking
- positive self-statements
- happiness always a good thing?
- positive self-statements can backfire for those with low self-esteem (ie those who need them) because they highlight what is perceived to be lacking (wood et al, 2009)
- positive fantasies predict less concurrent depression but greater depression later on, which may be mediated by lack of success (Oettingen, Mayer & Porthow, 2018)
is happiness always a good thing?
- dark side of happiness! (Gruba, Mauss & Tamir, 2011)
- ‘happiness facilitates the pursuit of important goals, contributes to vital social bonds, and broadens our scope of attention to enable processing of new ideas and stimuli in the environment’ BUT
- ‘it is possible to have too much happiness, to experience happiness in the wrong time, or pursue it in the wrong ways and to expeirence the wrong types of happiness’ eg.
- too much = mania
- wrong time = when things aren’t going right
- wrong type = hubris (excessive pride/ self-confidence)
- wrong way = wanting it too much
