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Showing posts from April, 2024

Changing Emotion with Emotion, Leslie Greenberg (2021)

Emotion Theory Introduction  Greenberg defines emotion as “a complex reaction pattern involving physiological, experiential, and behavioral elements.” The function of emotion, he continues, is to “aid survival.” That is to say, we seek emotions that feel good and promote survival and avoid emotions that feel bad and do not promote survival. Emotion aids survival by performing three major tasks: (1) providing us with an action tendency, (2) providing us with information about our needs in the situation at hand, and (3) communicating our state and intention to others. Fear, for example, provides us with an action tendency (to flee) and information about our need (we’re in danger and need to get to safety) and throughout our action tendency and physiological changes communicates itself to others. Each emotion is triggered by a stimulus, and once it’s triggers, the emotion follows a five-phase sequence: “(1) emergence, (2) entry into awareness, (3) ownership by the individual, (4) expr...

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...

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...