Embodiment of emotion concepts.

Theories of embodied cognition hold that higher cognitive processes operate on perceptual symbols and that concept use involves partial reactivations of the sensory-motor states that occur during experience with the world. On this view, the processing of emotion knowledge involves a (partial) reexperience of an emotion, but only when access to the sensory basis of emotion knowledge is required by the task. In 2 experiments, participants judged emotional and neutral concepts corresponding to concrete objects (Experiment 1) and abstract states (Experiment 2) while facial electromyographic activity was recorded from the cheek, brow, eye, and nose regions. Results of both studies show embodiment of specific emotions in an emotion-focused but not a perceptual-focused processing task on the same words. A follow up in Experiment 3, which blocked selective facial expressions, suggests a causal, rather than simply a correlational, role for embodiment in emotion word processing. Experiment 4, using a property generation task, provided support for the conclusion that emotions embodied in conceptual tasks are context-dependent situated simulations rather than associated emotional reactions. Implications for theories of embodied simulation and for emotion theories are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Review of Emotion-focused therapy: Coaching clients to work through their feelings.

Reviews the book, Emotion-focused therapy: Coaching clients to work through their feelings by Leslie S. Greenberg (see record 2002-00066-000). This book was written for both novice therapists who have had little experience working with emotions in treatment, as well as for experienced therapists looking to systematize their understanding of how emotional change works. The book is divided into four parts. Part I examines the nature and function of emotions. Part II examines the first part of emotional coaching--arriving at emotion. Part III examines the second part of emotional coaching--leaving emotion. Finally, Part IV examines the application of emotion-focused therapy to the problems of living, in the context of individuals, couples therapy, and parenting. This book offers a wealth of therapeutic techniques and theoretical principles about the process of change. As such, it is an important and natural companion to seminal works in cognitive behaviour therapy and interpersonal therapy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotion in psychotherapy.

The therapeutic process involves many different types of affective phenomena. No single therapeutic perspective has been able to encompass within its own theoretical framework all the ways in which emotion plays a role in therapeutic change. A comprehensive, constructive theory of emotion helps transcend the differences in the therapeutic schools by viewing emotion as a complex synthesis of expressive motor, schematic, and conceptual information that provides organisms with information about their responses to situations that helps them orient adaptively in the environment. In addition to improved theory, increased precision in the assessment of affective functioning in therapy, as well as greater specification of different emotional change processes and means of facilitating these, will allow the role of emotion in change to be studied more effectively. Change processes involving emotion are discussed, as well as principles of emotionally focused intervention. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Positive emotions as generators of therapeutic change.

The purpose of this article is to highlight commonalities and facilitate links between the domains of psychotherapy and positive psychology. The authors describe the Broaden-and-Build theory and suggest that it has heuristic value for understanding psychotherapeutic processes. The authors propose that broadening represents a common factor in intrapersonal therapy that contributes to many helpful change events across different psychotherapies. The upward spiral in which positive emotions and broadening feed one another enlarges current psychotherapeutic conceptualizations by suggesting that positive emotions are not just indicators but also generators of change. The positive emotion-broadening spiral offers new avenues for research and ways to understand existing research, an alternative avenue to therapeutic change, and a method to tailor therapeutic work to individual clients. It also bridges researcher, clinician, and client points of view about key change events. Links between different viewpoints enhance therapeutic work. Links across lines of theorizing and research foster interdisciplinary ties that fertilize both fields. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Lateral brain function, emotion, and conceptualization.

Reviews research on brain damage, psychiatric disorders, and normal emotion, which has shown the importance of the right hemisphere's holistic and nonverbal conceptualization to emotion. Studies of hemispheric asymmetries in psychiatric patients have suggested the importance of specific and apparently lateralized arousal systems in the brain that support the differential cognitive capacities of the 2 cerebral hemispheres. The operation of these arousal systems seems to vary closely with the individual's affective state. Research on emotional effects of unilateral lesions has suggested that the hemispheres may be specialized not just for the kind of emotion but for its valence, positive or negative. Research issues and methods in this area are still at an early stage of development, yet it seems clear that further research on the lateralization of emotion should reveal how emotional processes are at one level dependent on basic neurophysiological activation processes and at another level intrinsic to the differential forms of conceptualization of the 2 cerebral hemispheres. (3? p ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emotion-focused coping as a mediator of maternal cocaine abuse and antisocial behavior.

A great deal of data implicate parental drug use as a potential risk factor for child abuse, however, theories for understanding the links between maternal drug use and antisocial behavior have yet to be examined empirically. This case-control study investigated correlates of adult antisocial behavior among 279 inner-city mothers in 3 comparison groups: drug abusers, (n = 112), depressed mothers (n = 73), and nonsubstance abusing controls (n = 94). Using hierarchical regression techniques and mediational analyses controlling for ethnicity, current depression, and family history of substance abuse, support was provided for an emotion-focused coping style as a link between addictive and antisocial behavior. These results highlight the importance of focusing on emotion regulation models in the prevention and treatment of violence in drug-abusing women. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Emergent themes in the study of emotional development and emotion regulation.

Makes explicit a reconceptualization of the nature of emotion that over the past decade has fostered the study of emotion regulation. In the past, emotions were considered to be feeling states indexed by behavioral expressions: now, emotions are considered to be processes of establishing, maintaining, or disrupting the relation between the organism and the environment on matters of significance to the person. When emotions were conceptualized in the traditional way as feelings, emotion regulation centered on ego-defense mechanisms and display rules. The former was difficult to test; the latter was narrow in scope. By contrast, the notion of emotions as relational processes has shifted interest to the study of person/environment transactions in the elicitations of emotion and to the functions of action tendencies, emotional "expressions," language, and behavioral coping mechanisms. The article also treats the importance of affect in the continuity of self-development by documenting the impressive stability of at least two emotional dispositions: irritability and inhibition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Hope-focused practices during early psychotherapy sessions: Part II: Explicit approaches.

An avalanche of research on hope over the last 30 years consistently points to the benefits of hope in living and human change processes. Common factors models name hope as one of four key factors accounting for client change across psychotherapeutic models. While research provides evidence for the importance of hope, little research examines how hope is understood and practiced. This paper, the second in a two-part series, examines hope-focused interventions of 5 hope-educated psychotherapists with 11 clients early in the therapy sequence. Two categories characterized the overall findings: implicit and explicit hope-focused interventions. The first paper in this series addressed implicit hope-focused interventions. This second paper focuses on explicit hope-focused interventions (i.e., using the word hope, hoping, etc.). Explicit use of hope in therapy was found to address: (a) multiple dimensions of hope (i.e., cognitive, behavioral, emotional, relational); (b) psychoeducational hope interventions; and (c) framing problems as threats to hope. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Influence of Therapist Adherence and Competence on Client Reprocessing of Child Abuse Memories.

This study follows previous research examining change processes in emotion-focused therapy for adult survivors of child abuse (N = 37). Therapist (n = 10) adherence to intervention principles and competence with an imaginal confrontation (IC) intervention were examined in the context of relationship skills. The Therapist Facilitating Scale assessed competence with IC. Therapists differed in technical (but not relationship) skills; relationship skills and IC competence (but not adherence) improved over therapy. Therapist competence predicted better client processes during IC. Relationship skills independently contributed to abuse resolution; the potency of IC (Competence x Frequency of Implementation) independently contributed to reduced interpersonal problems. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Changing narrative schemas in psychotherapy.

Presents a model of narrative structure, based on work in child therapy and the cognitive developmental investigation of narrative structure and memory. A model is presented of the processes that maximize the likelihood of securing narrative representational change, drawing on work in cognitive/developmental theory and the philosophy of science. Discussion and example show how the models of narrative structure and representational change can be integrated to define specific therapeutic tasks. Ways in which the empirical study of narrative schematic representations in psychotherapy may enhance understanding of various psychotherapeutic techniques are suggested. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The unconscious regulation of emotion: Nonconscious reappraisal goals modulate emotional reactivity.

People often encounter difficulty when making conscious attempts to regulate their emotions. We propose that nonconscious self-regulatory processes may be of help in these difficult circumstances because nonconscious processes are not subject to the same set of limitations as are conscious processes. Two experiments examined the effects of nonconsciously operating goals on people’s emotion regulatory success. In Experiment 1, participants engaged in an anxiety-eliciting task. Participants who had a reappraisal emotion control goal primed and operating nonconsciously achieved the same decrease in physiological reactivity as those explicitly instructed to reappraise. In Experiment 2, the effect of nonconscious reappraisal priming on physiological reactivity was shown to be most pronounced for those who do not habitually use reappraisal strategies. The findings highlight the potential importance of nonconscious goals for facilitating emotional control in complex real-world environments and have implications for contemporary models of emotion regulation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Change Process Research in Couple and Family Therapy: Methodological Challenges and Opportunities.

In our field, the study of therapeutic change processes lags behind the study of treatment efficacy. Nonetheless, in the past 10 years major strides have been made in delineating change process mechanisms in couple and family therapy. To focus the efforts of future change process researchers, the authors discuss 5 critical needs: (a) more well-articulated, midrange theory about systemic change processes; (b) more attention to client change processes; (c) more attention to covert intrapersonal processes (emotion, cognition, and clients' experience of the alliance); (d) better articulation of strategies for analyzing data from multiple participants; and (e) more focus on the degree to which various change processes work similarly (or not) for diverse couples and families. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Catharsis: an investigation of its meaning and nature

Nurses commonly use catharsis and cathartic techniques as part of their clinical practice to enable clients and themselves to release emotion, to feel better and to facilitate coping. However, the literature does not provide clinical nursing evidence for its use. The main purpose of the investigation is to examine the beliefs about and understanding of catharsis which two groups of nurses hold: one group of nurse teachers and one group of nursing students. One hundred and forty-two respondents completed self-administered questionnaires asking about their understanding of and beliefs about catharsis as being beneficial, social, negative or psychotherapeutic in nature. The possible relationship of their answers to age, sex, philosophical orientation and qualifications was deemed to be important. The results suggest nurses understand that catharsis is related to emotion and has a psychotherapeutic purpose. However, there appear to be gaps in their understanding. Nurses also seem to believe that the release and expression of emotions is more acceptable for women than for men. There is also evidence that the more experienced nurses think differently from less experienced nurses, placing more emphasis on behaviour rather than emotion as they grow older. The problems associated with catharsis are discussed along with the implications for research and practice.     

Adjustment to the stress of simulated captivity: Effects of emotion-focused versus problem-focused preparation on hostages differing in locus of control.

Instructed 57 Ss about to be exposed to a simulated abduction and 4 days of captivity in either problem- or emotion-focused coping techniques, or gave them a control orientation presentation. Retrospective self-report data obtained on the Ways of Coping Checklist indicated that Ss tended to use coping processes consistent with the type of prestress preparation they had received. Dramatic fluctuations in State Anxiety scores over the course of captivity indicated that the simulation was perceived to be highly stressful. Ss given emotion-focused preparation reported the lowest anxiety and emotional distress levels and were rated as exhibiting the lowest levels of behavioral disturbance during captivity. Externals engaged in more emotion-focused coping than internals, but externals given problem-focused preparation responded the most poorly of all subgroups on all response measures. Overall, locus of control differences were of secondary impact in influencing anxiety and adjustment. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Case formulation in EFT.

A case formulation, for a client with depression, based on emotion-focused therapy treatment principles will be presented. The client was seen for 16 sessions in emotion-focused therapy. Based on information provided in the first interview, the therapist discusses how the client’s issues can be formulated in an emotion-focused treatment by attending to different process markers, including markers of characteristic styles of being or ways of treating the self and emotional experience; modes of engagement or ways that emotional experience is processed in terms of whether it is overregulated or underregulated; specific in-session tasks like focusing, two-chair or empty chair work; and micromarkers of nonverbal behaviors including vocal quality. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Wizard of Oz as cultural narrative and conceptual model for psychotherapy.

Narrative has long served as a means of communicating important information that explains the relationships among events and as a guide for learning skills. This article examines a major contemporary narrative, The Wizard of Oz, as it elucidates difficulties encountered in our society and how they are addressed through development and change. The implications of the film for psychotherapy are explored using the comparative approach developed by Jerome Frank. The narrative is considered as it illustrates Frank's notion of demoralization and the elements and processes hypothesized to be shared by all effective psychotherapeutic approaches. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Appraisal, coping, health status, and psychological symptoms.

Examined the relation between personality factors (mastery and interpersonal trust), primary appraisal (the stakes a person has in a stressful encounter), secondary appraisal (options for coping), 8 forms of problem- and emotion-focused coping, and somatic health status and psychological symptoms among 75 married couples (aged 26–54 yrs). Measures included the Hopkins Symptom Checklist, Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, and items from the Rotter Trust Scale. It was assumed that appraisal and coping processes should be characterized by a moderate degree of stability across stressful encounters for them to have an effect on somatic health status and psychological symptoms. These processes were assessed in 5 stressful situations that Ss experienced in their day-to-day lives. Certain processes (e.g., secondary appraisal) were highly variable, whereas others (e.g., emotion-focused forms of coping) were moderately stable. Mastery and interpersonal trust, primary appraisal, and coping variables (aggregated over 5 occasions) explained a significant amount of the variance in psychological symptoms but not somatic health status. (49 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The role of subjectivity and intersubjectivity in the reconstruction of dissociated schemas; converging perspectives from psychoanalysis, cognitive science and affective neuroscience.

Therapeutic change involves integration of emotion schemas that have been dissociated. Two types of avoidant dissociation are distinguished: primary dissociation dominated by fragmentary emotional memories; and secondary dissociation involving initial encoding of more organized memories whose meaning is avoided. Reconstruction of dissociated emotion schemas occurs through the referential process which includes three basic components: arousal of the subsymbolic affective core of a dissociated schema in the treatment relationship; connections of subsymbolic processes to symbolic representations in narratives and interactions in the session; and reflection leading to reorganization of the schema. The role of enactive perception and embodied communication as underlying intersubjectivity in the referential process is reviewed. Variations in states of awareness associated with each phase of the process, in both analyst and patient, and their effects on therapeutic change are examined. Current work in cognitive science and affective neuroscience supporting this process model is reviewed. This formulation is largely compatible with Freud's early theory of recollection and “associative working-over” with new emphasis on subjective state and the relational context. Studies of the referential process provide a potential interface between investigations of psychotherapy process and basic cognitive science and neuroscience research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Put Your Money Where Your Mouth Is! Explaining Collective Action Tendencies Through Group-Based Anger and Group Efficacy.

Insights from appraisal theories of emotion are used to integrate elements of theories on collective action. Three experiments with disadvantaged groups systematically manipulated procedural fairness (Study 1), emotional social support (Study 2), and instrumental social support (Study 3) to examine their effects on collective action tendencies through group-based anger and group efficacy. Results of structural equation modeling showed that procedural fairness and emotional social support affected the group-based anger pathway (reflecting emotion-focused coping), whereas instrumental social support affected the group efficacy pathway (reflecting problem-focused coping), constituting 2 distinct pathways to collective action tendencies. Analyses of the means suggest that collective action tendencies become stronger the more fellow group members "put their money where their mouth is." The authors discuss how their dual pathway model integrates and extends elements of current approaches to collective action. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)