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3 perspectives on the effect of emotions on cognition
- Emotion congruence
- Feelings as information
- Processing style
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Emotion congruence
- Moods an emotions are associative networks
- We should be able to learn material that is congruent with out current emotion
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Feelings as Information
Assumes that emotions themselves are informative when we make judgments
- 2 Assumptions
- 1. Emotions provide us with a rapid signal triggered by something in our environment
- 2. Many of the judgments that we make are often too complex to review all the relevant information
Emotions are heuristics, guesses that work better than chance a lot of the time, short cuts to making judgments or taking action
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Processing style
- Different emotions promote different processing styles
- Happy and angry moods facilitate use of already existing knowledge structures, such as heuristics and stereotypes
- Sad mood facilitates more analytical thought and careful attention to situational details
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Evaluative judgments
When in a positive emotional state, we evaluate objects and events in a more positive light; same for when we're in a negative emotional state
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Future judgments
Negative moods lead people to view the future pessimistically; positive moods lead people to look at the future more optimistically
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Casual judgments
- General attributional bias produced by negative and positive moods
- Anger leads people to blame others for various actions and to be acutely sensitive to unfair actions
- Sadness leads people to positive events to impersonal, situational causes
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The Strange Situation test
Infants emotional reactions to brief separations from, and reunions with, their caregivers
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3 attachment styles and the 4th style added later
- Securely attached: distressed when they leave
- Ambivalently attached: want to be near them upon return but will not be comforted
- Avoidantly attached: make no effort to interact
- Main & Solomon (1986) added disoriented/disorganized style
- Infants respond with disorientation and contradictory behaviors
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Classifying childhood disorders -
How are children diagnosed
- DSMV (Diagnostic and Statistical manual of Mental Disorders - fifth edition)
- No clear cut definition of "emotional disorder" vs. "no emotional disorder"
- Diagnoses are descriptions or patterns of behavior
- Assessment involved...
- Checklists of symptoms or behavior patterns
- Continuous measures
- Clusters of behaviors are identified
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Middle childhood – externalizing versus internalizing disorders – what are the two predominant emotional disorders in each of these categories?
What types of emotions are involved (i.e. “disordered”)?
Roughly what age range are the 2 most common externalizing
disorders typically seen?
Externalizing disorders: Hostility, aggression, stealing, lying, etc.
Internalizing disorders: Anxiety, depression
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3 perspectives on “what” is disordered in emotional disorders
- 1. Predominance of one emotion ⇉ dominated other possible experiences
- Depressed people experience more sadness than other emotions
- Appraisal biases (aggressive children likely to say other kids are being intentionally hostile)
- 2. Inappropriate emotional responses
- Ex: Child laughing when someone else is distressed or crying though nothing happened
- 3. Dysregulation ⇉ emotions are not properly regulated
- Inappropriate to the social context
- May underlie bullying
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Psychiatric epidemiology
Study of how many people show a particular disorder in the population, statistically relating the disorder to factors in people's lives
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Prevalence
Proportion of a population suffering from some disorder over a specified amount of time
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Incidence
Number of new onsets of a particular disorder in a given time
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Trends of anxiety disorders from childhood to adolescence
- Generally increases with age
- Separation anxiety disorder more common in early childhood
- Overanxious disorder more common in adolescence
- 17% preadolescence with anxiety disorder also depressed
- 69% adolescents with anxiety disorder also depressed
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Trends of depressive disorders from childhood to adolescence – gender difference?
- Girls are more likely than boys to show anxiety disorders
- In childhood, both boys and girls ~ equally likely to suffer from depression
- By late adolescence, females twice as likely
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Stress-Diathesis model
- Stress ↪ something that occurs in the environment
- Diathesis ↪ a predisposition to a disorder - genetic
- Neither stress or vulnerability on their own cause a disorder - the specific combination does
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Bi-directional effect
Mutually coercive patterns ↪ children who are more difficult make their parents more angry
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Protective factors
Factors that counteract risks and make things better
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Effects of genes (Diathesis)
- Female vs. Male
- Genetic component for depressive and anxiety symptoms in children has generally been found to be 20-40%
- Diathesis not all genetic ↪ mothers' drinking, smoking, or malnourished during pregnancy
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3 different kinds of depressive disorders
- 1. Major depressive disorder (4+ symptoms)
- 2. Minor depression (2-4 symptoms)
- 3. Bi-polar disorder (depression followed by mania)
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5 different kinds of anxiety disorders
- 1. Panic Attacks
- Sudden terror; bodily symptoms such as racing heart, dizziness, and shortness of breath
- 2. Phobias
- Urge to avoid places, things, or activities
- 3. Generalized Anxiety
- 6 months disabling and persistent anxiety/worry
- 4. Obsessive Compulsive Disorder
- Performing compulsive acts temporarily diminish anxiety
- 5. Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
- Anxiety, disturbed sleep, flashbacks of event, and avoidance of reminders of event
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What kinds of events tend to cause depression versus anxiety disorder?
- Anxiety Disorder
- Events that are future directed - involving danger
- Depression
- Events that were losses
- Both
- Events involving both loss and danger
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Cognitive mechanism for sustaining depression versus anxiety
- Depression → memory
- Anxiety → attention
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Primary, secondary, and instrumental emotions
- Primary emotions → emotions not experienced fully enough
- Secondary emotions → emerge to cover up certain primary emotions that were unacceptable
- Instrumental emotions → emotions learn to express to get their way
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Which form of therapy is most effective?
- Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy
- More effective with antidepressant medication
- Lower rate of relapse
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Which form of therapy tends to be the treatment of choice on the clinicians’ end?
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What types of treatment are available for PTSD sufferers? Which is the most common? Which is the most effective?
Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy
- Most common: prescribing drugs
- Most effective: Exposure therapy (type of cognitive-behavioral therapy)
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Social sharing
- Does not diminish intensity of emotion
- Benefit comes from making sense of emotions
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