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Changing Emotion with Emotion, Leslie Greenberg (2021)

Emotion Theory Introduction  Emotion. Greenberg defines emotion as “a complex reaction pattern involving physiological, experiential, and behavioral elements.”  Emotion’s function. Emotion evolved to “aid survival.” We seek emotions that feel good and promote survival and avoid emotions that feel bad and do not promote emotions. To be more specific, emotion aids survival by performing three major tasks: providing us with an action tendency, providing us with information about our needs in the situation at hand, and communicating our state and intention to others. “For example, when fear is activated, it provides us with an action tendency: to flee. When we feel fear, it tells us that we are in danger, and our expression or our physical action communicates our state to others.” Emotion is triggered by stimuli. Once the emotion is triggered, it follows a five-phase sequence: “(1) emergence, (2) entry into awareness, (3) ownership by the individual, (4) expression through action, and
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Human Nature Index

Affects Ekman, Paul Plutchik, Robert Beebe and Lachmann The Origins of Attachment (2014) Demos, Virginia Affect and the Early Organization of the Self, Demos (1988) Early Organization of the Psyche, Demos (1992) LeDoux, Joseph The Emotional Brain (1996) Rethinking the Emotional Brain (2014) Panksepp, Jaak A Short-Cut to Understanding Affect Neuroscience, Lucy Bevin (2022) Tomkins, Silvan Tompkins, Silvan The Affect Theory of Silvan Tompkins, E. Virginia Demos (2019)
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Rethinking the Emotional Brain, Joseph LeDoux (2014)

We can best learn about emotions by studying animals. LeDoux writes that relying on subjective human reports about their feelings is not the best way to understand emotions, at least not if we’re trying to understand what emotions are shared by humans and animals. Rather, it is more useful to focus “on circuits that instantiate functions that allow organisms to survive and thrive by detecting and responding to challenges and opportunities.” While different animals have some different functions, “there are also core components of these functions that are shared by all mammals.” We can best learn about emotions by focusing on survival circuits. He sidesteps the basic emotions debate, stating that he disagrees with Lisa Feldman Barrett in some ways but agrees with her claim that there is insufficient evidence that basic emotions “have dedicated neural circuits.” He does not deny that mammalian brains might contain emotional circuits but believes it is more fruitful to think of emotions i
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Affective Neuroscience in Psychotherapy, Francis Stevens (2021)

Affective Neuroscience Two Pathways The affective primacy hypothesis holds that we can have an emotion without cognitive processing, while the cognitive processing hypothesis holds that we cannot have an emotion without cognitive processing. Stevens that “neither cognition nor affect is the brain’s primary response.” Rather, the brain has two systems for evaluating stimuli. Steven supports the two-pathway theory, which posits that a region of the thalamus (the pulvinar) has a pathway to the amygdala that allows for “rapid processing… before conscious awareness” and also a pathway to the cortex that allows for cognitive processing. “Neuroimaging studies demonstrate that when stimuli are presented in a rapid fashion where individuals have no conscious perception of what they are seeing, limbic areas like the insula and amygdala are activated.” “In an evolutionary context, having two systems for brain processing makes sense; one can quickly detect threatening stimuli, and the other can ma
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Therapeutic Communication, Paul Wachtel (2011)

One: Rethinking the Talking Cure Psychotherapeutic texts generally focus on the patient’s words and not the therapist’s words. One focus of this book is that every overt message that the therapist intends to convey (the focal message) also contains a second message (the meta-message)which “conveys an attitude about what is being conveyed in the focal message.” “A comment whose focal message is accurate but whose meta-message is poorly wrought can have an effect similar to that of a potentially curative organ transplant that is rejected by the patient’s body because it is registered as alien.” We need to pay attention to the patient’s experience of the therapist’s remarks, as transference makes it “likely that the patient’s experience of the comment will differ in certain respects from what the therapist thinks she is conveying.” Therapist noises are “familiar phrasings that therapists call upon when certain, phrasings that at once convey a blistering sense of professionalism and serv
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A Short-Cut to Understanding Affect Neuroscience, Lucy Bevin (2022)

Infantile Repression Refuted In 1993, a famous custody battle occurred in which a two-year-old girl who had been adopted at birth was now being ordered to return to her biological mother. Many mental health experts predicted that this new custody arrangement would be devastating for the girl. These experts based their thinking on the John Bowlby’s teachings; Bowlby had referred to the findings of Rene Spitz (who found that institutionalized infant who often developed infections and died prematurely), Lorentz (whose imprinting studies found that goslings followed him around as though he were their mother), and Harlow (who found that baby monkeys preferred a terrycloth “mother” without milk to a metal “mother” with milk). Some of Bowlby’s contemporaries disagreed with him, mostly notably Anna Freud and James Robertson. Robertson found that young children could be separated from their mothers for 1-2 weeks without distress, the key seeming to be that the children were gradually introduce
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