Holistic Impacts on Psychological Variable - U5 Pt1

Question 1

What is apart of the psychological variable assessment?

Answer 1

• Emotions
• Cognition and perception
• Self-concept (self-esteem, body image, self-ideal)
• Sexuality
• Self-identity

Question 2

What is affect regulation?

Answer 2

It refers to the ability to maintain or increase positive feelings, as well as the ability to minimize or regulate stress feelings and defensive states (Ramsden, 2017)

Question 3

What is affect DYSregulation?

Answer 3

It is the impaired ability to regulate or tolerate negative emotional states, including mood, personality disorders, and PTSD

Question 4

*Findings from Dvir et al., 2014; Affect dysregulation & Trauma:

Answer 4

• Childhood adversity connected to increased reactivity to stress, and decreased capacity for emotional regulation in children, and often these problems are maintained in adulthood
• Both childhood trauma and emotional dysregulation are highly connected with a variety of mental illnesses, including PTSD, mood disorders, and personality disorders
• Trauma survivors often react more intensely to stimuli, and have less ability to calm themselves (the brain impacts with trauma)
• Deficits in self-soothing and affect regulation are often connected to lack of secure attachment in childhood

Question 5

What are some hyperarousal indicators?

Answer 5

• emotions are easily “triggered”
• hypervigilance
• anxiety
• overwhelmed emotionally

Question 6

What are some hypoarousal indicators?

Answer 6

These indicators are usually missed and are objective*
- flat affect
- emotional numbing, detachment
- feeling disconnected from the body

Question 7

What is the affect regulation theory? “Modern Attachment Theory”

Answer 7

• Created by Schore & Schore
• This theory focuses on the ability to manage emotional states and how it depends on successful attachment
• It considers the impact of attachment on brain development

Question 8

What does affect regulation begin with?

Answer 8

INTERREGULATION:
- modelling soothing, consistent nurturance from a caregiver
- through the experience of modelling, neurological imprinting, and learned behaviour, it becomes introjected by the child and leads to auto-regulation

Question 9

What is trauma and self-concept?

Answer 9

• Following a potentially traumatic event, the individual develops beliefs about the event and about themselves in relation to this event
• It is common for traumatized individuals to internalize core beliefs or “negative underlying assumptions” of the self as being “unlovable”, “Incompetent”, which impacts self-perception, and self-esteem
• Even if prior to a traumatic event an individual had fairly adaptive core beliefs, trauma has the potential to abruptly invalidate them**

Question 10

What is trauma and shame ?

Answer 10

Brene describes shame as “the intensely painful feeling that we are unworthy of love and belonging”
- There are three things associated with shame;
1. Secrecy
2. Silence
3. Judgment
- Shame cannot survive empathy
- The less we talk about it, the more we feel shame

Question 11

Findings from Scoglio et al., 2015; Self-compassion:

Answer 11

• Self-compassion was negatively related to PTSD symptom severity and to emotion dysregulation, and positively related to resilience
• Emotion dysregulation mediated the relationship between PTSD symptom severity and self-compassion, and also influenced the relationship between resilience and self-compassion
  Components of self-compassion include; self kindness, and mindfulness (ability to be aware of thoughts/feelings with no judgment)

Question 12

What is trauma and the impact on attention and consciousness?

Answer 12

DISSOCIATION
“A disruption of the usually integrated functions of consciousness, memory, identity, or perception of the environment” - DSM-IV
- It results in losing touch with one’s surrounding, losing time
- It is normally an adaptive response to traumatic experiences/associated memories
- It can become maladaptive when it is triggered by a “false alarm”
- Occurs on a continuum

Question 13

What is trauma and the impact on attention and consciousness?

Answer 13

DEPERSONALIZATION
It is defined as the sense of being detached from one’s own mental processes or body*
- Sometimes it is accompanied by derealization (the sense that the environment is unreal)
- It is thought to serve as a means of escape from stressful or traumatic realities
- Feels like a robot
- It also occurs on a continuum