Posts tagged emotions
Articles and news from the latest research reports.
Angry? Sad? Ashamed? Depressed people can’t tell difference
Clinically depressed people have a hard time telling the difference between negative emotions such as anger and guilt, a new University of Michigan study found.
The ability to distinguish between various emotional experiences affects how individuals deal with life stressors, said Emre Demiralp, a researcher in the U-M Department of Psychology and the lead author of the study recently published in Psychological Science.
Being unable to differentiate certain emotions from each other might lead to a person choosing an action that is not appropriate, thus exacerbating the problem, she said.
"It is difficult to improve your life without knowing whether you are sad or angry about some aspect of it," Demiralp said. "For example, imagine not having a gauge independently indicating the gasoline level of your car. It would be challenging to know when to stop for gas.
"We wanted to investigate whether people with clinical depression had emotional gauges that were informative and whether they experienced emotions with the same level of specificity and differentiation as healthy people."
A better judge of character with oxytocin nasal spray?
In other contexts, oxytocin is already well-known as the “bliss hormone”. The hormone is secreted upon stimulation by touch and is known to result in a feeling of calm and physical relaxation. It is also used to induce labour in childbirth and as an aid for women experiencing difficulties in breastfeeding.
Oxytocin has also been referred to as a “mindreading” hormone. Recent research findings show that there may be some truth to these claims – although the mindreading component may have a more down-to-earth explanation.
“Emotion Detectives” Uncover New Ways to Address Youth Anxiety and Depression
26 July 2012
Emotional problems in childhood are common. Approximately 8 to 22 percent of children suffer from anxiety, often combined with other conditions such as depression. However, most existing therapies are not designed to treat coexisting psychological problems and are therefore not very successful in helping children with complex emotional issues.
To develop a more effective treatment for co-occurring youth anxiety and depression, University of Miami psychologist Jill Ehrenreich-May and her collaborator Emily L. Bilek analyzed the efficacy and feasibility of a novel intervention created by the researchers, called Emotion Detectives Treatment Protocol (EDTP). Preliminary findings show a significant reduction in the severity of anxiety and depression after treatment, as reported by the children and their parents.
“We are very excited about the potential of EDTP,” says Ehrenreich-May, associate professor of psychology in the College of Arts and Sciences at UM and principal investigator of the study. “Not only could the protocol better address the needs of youth with commonly co-occurring disorders and symptoms, it may also provide additional benefits to mental health professionals,” she says. “EDTP offers a more unified approach to treatment that, we hope, will allow for an efficient and cost-effective treatment option for clinicians and clients alike.”
Emotion Detectives Treatment Program is an adaptation of two treatment protocols developed for adults and adolescents, the Unified Protocols. The program implements age-appropriate techniques that deliver education about emotions and how to manage them, strategies for evaluating situations, problem-solving skills, behavior activation (a technique to reduce depression), and parent training.
In the study, 22 children ages 7 to 12 with a principal diagnosis of an anxiety disorder and secondary issues of depression participated in a 15-session weekly group therapy of EDTP. Among participants who completed the protocol (18 out of 22), 14 no longer met criteria for an anxiety disorder at post-treatment. Additionally, among participants who were assigned a depressive disorder before treatment (5 out of 22), only one participant continued to meet such criteria at post-treatment.
Unlike results from previous studies, the presence of depressive symptoms did not predict poorer treatment response. The results also show a high percentage of attendance. The findings imply that EDTP may offer a better treatment option for children experiencing anxiety and depression.
“Previous research has shown that depressive symptoms tend to weaken treatment response for anxiety disorders. We were hopeful that a broader, more generalized approach would better address this common co-occurrence,” says Bilek, doctoral candidate in clinical psychology at UM and co-author of the study. “We were not surprised to find that the EDTP had equivalent outcomes for individuals with and without elevated depressive symptoms, but we were certainly pleased to find that this protocol may address this important issue.”
The study, titled “An Open Trial Investigation of a Transdiagnostic Group Treatment for Children with Anxiety and Depressive Symptoms,” is published online ahead of print in the journal Behavior Therapy.
The team is currently recruiting participants for a randomized controlled trial comparing the EDTP to another group treatment protocol for anxiety disorders. For more information, please contact the study coordinators at www.miami.edu/childanxiety.
Source: ScienceBlog
Fear study reveals mental processes
July 25, 2012
A University study has shown how our minds unconsciously respond to threats.
Researchers studying how our minds develop fears in response to danger found that people can quickly learn to recognise a threat even when they are unaware of it.
However, they also found that this learning is swiftly forgotten. In contrast, when people are aware of the threat, they take longer to learn to be afraid of it, but retain the fear in the long term.
Scientists from the University of Edinburgh and New York University, who carried out the study, say the finding may be a key insight into the differences between conscious and nonconscious mental processes.
Fear study
Researchers measured physiological fear responses - the amount of sweat on the fingertips - in groups of people who looked at pictures and were given mild electric shocks whenever one of these pictures was shown.
All the people who participated in the study saw the pictures with just one eye. But whereas some of them were allowed to see the pictures clearly, the researchers suppressed the pictures from other subjects’ awareness by showing colourful, dynamic images to the other eye.
The study found that subjects who were prevented from consciously seeing the pictures learned to be afraid of the image associated with a shock more quickly than those who were allowed to see them without suppression.
However, these subjects quickly forgot this association between the images and the electric shocks as the experiment continued.
In contrast, those subjects who were allowed to see the image clearly formed a stronger association over time.
How the brain reacts to threats is key to understanding how human beings function. This study shows that we are capable of learning very rapidly that something is a threat even when we don’t perceive it consciously. Such learning, however, is fleeting.
-David Carmel, Researcher, Department of Psychology
Source: The University of Edinburgh