L11 Emotion Interventions Flashcards
(34 cards)
What is psychotherapy?
A western tradition but how people relate to their emotions varies by culture
Western = believe our emotions are malfunctioning and need to realign with them
Buddhists = cultivate awareness of emotions (west transformed this into shorter mindfulness meditation sessions)
What are the different types of psychotherapy?
There are over 400 variations and often mixed together
Can cause problems as it can mean that the therapist is going against the original principles of the therapy
Nearly all involve identifying and changing emotions
What is psychoanalysis?
Freud
Focused on emotionally traumatic events and allowed the patient to experience and expressed the associated emotions to free themselves to them.
Therapy involves active listening
Saw people as having inner conflicts
What was Freud’s idea of transference?
Emotional attitudes to significant others projected onto others, including the therapist
Studies shown that positive emotion more likely to be expressed to someone new when they have traits resembling someone who is liked by the person
What are emotion beliefs?
People may have rigid unhelpful beliefs about emotions e.g. no good comes of anger and will therefore suppress it
Therapy brings this to light and allows the patient to choose a new solution
What does CBT involve?
Changing emotion by thought (Beck, 1976)
Teaches people to recognise and avoid evaluation errors about incidents leading to emotions and replace them with alternative thoughts
What is emotion-focused therapy?
Involves changing emotion by emotion (Greenberg, 1993)
Emotions can signal concerns and provide clues about a person’s goal structure
It allows primary emotions to be expressed but stops secondary ones which are seen as defensive e.g. anger that disguises fear
What did a meta-analysis by Smith et al. (1975) find about effectiveness of psychotherapy?
Found an effect size of 85 - those who receive therapy fare better than 85% of those who do not receive therapy
Other studies support this finding but state that it depends on the type of therapy and the therapist
Gains aren’t always maintained
Effectiveness of emotion-focused therapy is equivalent to CBT
Why is the effectiveness of psychotherapy difficult to assess?
Due to the treatment length
Brief psychodynamic therapy has been found to be as affective as CBT
What is the effectiveness of therapy vs. medication?
Meta-analysis demonstrated that CBT was more effective than medication for depression but has also shown that are nonetheless more effective than a placebo
May need a combined approach - medication aiding engagement between patient and therapist
What did Layard’s Depression report state?
Therapy is as affective as drugs in the ST and more so in the LT
ST success of CBT is 50% - meaning they lost psychiatric symptoms they would not have lost otherwise
Relapse is greater in depression than anxiety
Course of CBT is likely to produce 1 year extra free of depression
What is the Integrative Memory Model?
Lane et al. (2014)
Above therapies may be effective as they’re working on the same model but working on different parts of it
Therapeutic change results from:
Reactivating old emotional memories,
Engaging in new emotional experiences that are
Incorporated into the reactivated memories through Reconsolidation, and
Reinforcing the new memory structure through behaviour and experience
What aspects does CBT target?
Semantic Structures
What does psychodynamic therapy target?
Episodic memories
What does behaviour therapy target?
Emotional responses (Implicit > Explicit)
What does emotion-focused therapy target?
Emotional responses (Explicit > Implicit)
What are some issues with treating affective disorders?
Only about 1/5 of those with problems consult a professional and only half of those are mental health professionals
Alternative sources of help include: self help groups, friends/relatives
What do accounts of happiness emphasise?
A life of virtue, meaning and personal growth
A positive cognitive evaluation or judgement of one’s life
Pleasant affective experiences and moods
How can subjective well-being (SWB) be quantified?
Satisfaction + positive affect - negative affect
What did a meta-analysis find in happiness research?
That happiness predicts success in life (measured by relationship satisfaction, work satisfaction and health/longevity)
What is the relationship between smiling and longevity?
Positive emotions inferred from smile intensity in college year books was associated with marriage stability and satisfaction
The smile intensity of baseball players from 1952 was associated with greater longevity - those showing a Duchenne smile were half as likely to die in any year than non-smilers
What did findings from the Nun study show? (Donner et al., 2001)
Emotions may also affect body systems
Longitudinal study of catholic nuns as they were a group who had experienced similar events
Looked at autobiographies and coded for emotion, positive emotion in writing was associated with longevity
Does happiness directly affect mortality?
Liu et al. (2015) conducted a prospective 10 year study of 700,000 women and found that unhappiness did not predict mortality after adjusting for health factors
Does emotional intelligence predict life satisfaction?
Yes, over and above personality factors (Law et al., 2004)
People are generally poor at making emotional forecasts because they over-estimate the emotional impact of events
Individuals high in EI more accurately forecast how they would feel
EI can be learned and it increases with age
