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What is Behavioural Neuroscience?

Published on by Andrew Marshall2 Comments

Introduction

Behavioural neuroscience, also known as biological psychology, biopsychology, or psychobiology, is the application of the principles of biology to the study of physiological, genetic, and developmental mechanisms of behaviour in humans and other animals.

Brief History

Behavioural neuroscience as a scientific discipline emerged from a variety of scientific and philosophical traditions in the 18th and 19th centuries. In philosophy, people like René Descartes proposed physical models to explain animal as well as human behaviour. Descartes suggested that the pineal gland, a midline unpaired structure in the brain of many organisms, was the point of contact between mind and body. Descartes also elaborated on a theory in which the pneumatics of bodily fluids could explain reflexes and other motor behaviour. This theory was inspired by moving statues in a garden in Paris. Electrical stimulation and lesions can also show the affect of motor behaviour of humans. They can record the electrical activity of actions, hormones, chemicals and effects drugs have in the body system all which affect ones daily behaviour.

Other philosophers also helped give birth to psychology. One of the earliest textbooks in the new field, The Principles of Psychology by William James, argues that the scientific study of psychology should be grounded in an understanding of biology.

The emergence of psychology and behavioural neuroscience as legitimate sciences can be traced from the emergence of physiology from anatomy, particularly neuroanatomy. Physiologists conducted experiments on living organisms, a practice that was distrusted by the dominant anatomists of the 18th and 19th centuries. The influential work of Claude Bernard, Charles Bell, and William Harvey helped to convince the scientific community that reliable data could be obtained from living subjects.

Even before the 18th and 19th century, behavioural neuroscience was beginning to take form as far back as 1700 B.C. The question that seems to continually arise is: what is the connection between the mind and body? The debate is formally referred to as the mind-body problem. There are two major schools of thought that attempt to resolve the mind–body problem; monism and dualism. Plato and Aristotle are two of several philosophers who participated in this debate. Plato believed that the brain was where all mental thought and processes happened. In contrast, Aristotle believed the brain served the purpose of cooling down the emotions derived from the heart. The mind-body problem was a stepping stone toward attempting to understand the connection between the mind and body.

Another debate arose about localisation of function or functional specialisation versus equipotentiality which played a significant role in the development in behavioural neuroscience. As a result of localisation of function research, many famous people found within psychology have come to various different conclusions. Wilder Penfield was able to develop a map of the cerebral cortex through studying epileptic patients along with Rassmussen. Research on localisation of function has led behavioural neuroscientists to a better understanding of which parts of the brain control behaviour. This is best exemplified through the case study of Phineas Gage.

The term “psychobiology” has been used in a variety of contexts, emphasizing the importance of biology, which is the discipline that studies organic, neural and cellular modifications in behaviour, plasticity in neuroscience, and biological diseases in all aspects, in addition, biology focuses and analyses behaviour and all the subjects it is concerned about, from a scientific point of view. In this context, psychology helps as a complementary, but important discipline in the neurobiological sciences. The role of psychology in this questions is that of a social tool that backs up the main or strongest biological science. The term “psychobiology” was first used in its modern sense by Knight Dunlap in his book An Outline of Psychobiology (1914). Dunlap also was the founder and editor-in-chief of the journal Psychobiology. In the announcement of that journal, Dunlap writes that the journal will publish research “…bearing on the interconnection of mental and physiological functions”, which describes the field of behavioural neuroscience even in its modern sense.

Relationship to Other Fields of Psychology and Biology

In many cases, humans may serve as experimental subjects in behavioural neuroscience experiments; however, a great deal of the experimental literature in behavioural neuroscience comes from the study of non-human species, most frequently rats, mice, and monkeys. As a result, a critical assumption in behavioural neuroscience is that organisms share biological and behavioural similarities, enough to permit extrapolations across species. This allies behavioural neuroscience closely with comparative psychology, evolutionary psychology, evolutionary biology, and neurobiology. Behavioural neuroscience also has paradigmatic and methodological similarities to neuropsychology, which relies heavily on the study of the behaviour of humans with nervous system dysfunction (i.e. a non-experimentally based biological manipulation).

Synonyms for behavioural neuroscience include biopsychology, biological psychology, and psychobiology. Physiological psychology is a subfield of behavioural neuroscience, with an appropriately narrower definition.

Research Methods

The distinguishing characteristic of a behavioural neuroscience experiment is that either the independent variable of the experiment is biological, or some dependent variable is biological. In other words, the nervous system of the organism under study is permanently or temporarily altered, or some aspect of the nervous system is measured (usually to be related to a behavioural variable).

Disabling or Decreasing Neural Function

  • Lesions: A classic method in which a brain-region of interest is naturally or intentionally destroyed to observe any resulting changes such as degraded or enhanced performance on some behavioural measure. Lesions can be placed with relatively high accuracy “Thanks to a variety of brain ‘atlases’ which provide a map of brain regions in 3-dimensional “stereotactic coordinates.
    • Surgical lesions: Neural tissue is destroyed by removing it surgically.
    • Electrolytic lesions: Neural tissue is destroyed through the application of electrical shock trauma.
    • Chemical lesions: Neural tissue is destroyed by the infusion of a neurotoxin.
    • Temporary lesions: Neural tissue is temporarily disabled by cooling or by the use of anaesthetics such as tetrodotoxin.
  • Transcranial magnetic stimulation: A new technique usually used with human subjects in which a magnetic coil applied to the scalp causes unsystematic electrical activity in nearby cortical neurons which can be experimentally analysed as a functional lesion.
  • Synthetic ligand injection: A receptor activated solely by a synthetic ligand (RASSL) or Designer Receptor Exclusively Activated by Designer Drugs (DREADD), permits spatial and temporal control of G protein signalling in vivo. These systems utilise G protein-coupled receptors (GPCR) engineered to respond exclusively to synthetic small molecules ligands, like clozapine N-oxide (CNO), and not to their natural ligand(s). RASSL’s represent a GPCR-based chemogenetic tool. These synthetic ligands upon activation can decrease neural function by G-protein activation. This can with Potassium attenuating neural activity.
  • Psychopharmacological manipulations: A chemical receptor antagonist induces neural activity by interfering with neurotransmission. Antagonists can be delivered systemically (such as by intravenous injection) or locally (intracerebrally) during a surgical procedure into the ventricles or into specific brain structures. For example, NMDA antagonist AP5 has been shown to inhibit the initiation of long term potentiation of excitatory synaptic transmission (in rodent fear conditioning) which is believed to be a vital mechanism in learning and memory.
  • Optogenetic inhibition: A light activated inhibitory protein is expressed in cells of interest. Powerful millisecond timescale neuronal inhibition is instigated upon stimulation by the appropriate frequency of light delivered via fibre optics or implanted LEDs in the case of vertebrates, or via external illumination for small, sufficiently translucent invertebrates. Bacterial Halorhodopsins or Proton pumps are the two classes of proteins used for inhibitory optogenetics, achieving inhibition by increasing cytoplasmic levels of halides (Cl−) or decreasing the cytoplasmic concentration of protons, respectively.

Enhancing Neural Function

  • Electrical stimulation: A classic method in which neural activity is enhanced by application of a small electric current (too small to cause significant cell death).
  • Psychopharmacological manipulations: A chemical receptor agonist facilitates neural activity by enhancing or replacing endogenous neurotransmitters. Agonists can be delivered systemically (such as by intravenous injection) or locally (intracerebrally) during a surgical procedure.
  • Synthetic Ligand Injection: Likewise, Gq-DREADDs can be used to modulate cellular function by innervation of brain regions such as Hippocampus. This innervation results in the amplification of γ-rhythms, which increases motor activity.
  • Transcranial magnetic stimulation: In some cases (for example, studies of motor cortex), this technique can be analysed as having a stimulatory effect (rather than as a functional lesion).
  • Optogenetic excitation: A light activated excitatory protein is expressed in select cells. Channelrhodopsin-2 (ChR2), a light activated cation channel, was the first bacterial opsin shown to excite neurons in response to light, though a number of new excitatory optogenetic tools have now been generated by improving and imparting novel properties to ChR2

Measuring Neural Activity

  • Optical techniques: Optical methods for recording neuronal activity rely on methods that modify the optical properties of neurons in response to the cellular events associated with action potentials or neurotransmitter release.
    • Voltage sensitive dyes (VSDs) were among the earliest method for optically detecting neuronal activity. VSDs commonly changed their fluorescent properties in response to a voltage change across the neuron’s membrane, rendering membrane sub-threshold and supra-threshold (action potentials) electrical activity detectable. Genetically encoded voltage sensitive fluorescent proteins have also been developed.
    • Calcium imaging relies on dyes or genetically encoded proteins that fluoresce upon binding to the calcium that is transiently present during an action potential.
    • Synapto-pHluorin is a technique that relies on a fusion protein that combines a synaptic vesicle membrane protein and a pH sensitive fluorescent protein. Upon synaptic vesicle release, the chimeric protein is exposed to the higher pH of the synaptic cleft, causing a measurable change in fluorescence.
  • Single-unit recording: A method whereby an electrode is introduced into the brain of a living animal to detect electrical activity that is generated by the neurons adjacent to the electrode tip. Normally this is performed with sedated animals but sometimes it is performed on awake animals engaged in a behavioural event, such as a thirsty rat whisking a particular sandpaper grade previously paired with water in order to measure the corresponding patterns of neuronal firing at the decision point.
  • Multielectrode recording: The use of a bundle of fine electrodes to record the simultaneous activity of up to hundreds of neurons.
  • fMRI: Functional magnetic resonance imaging, a technique most frequently applied on human subjects, in which changes in cerebral blood flow can be detected in an MRI apparatus and are taken to indicate relative activity of larger scale brain regions (i.e., on the order of hundreds of thousands of neurons).
  • PET: Positron Emission Tomography detects particles called photons using a 3-D nuclear medicine examination. These particles are emitted by injections of radioisotopes such as fluorine. PET imaging reveal the pathological processes which predict anatomic changes making it important for detecting, diagnosing and characterising many pathologies.
  • Electroencephalography: Or EEG; and the derivative technique of event-related potentials, in which scalp electrodes monitor the average activity of neurons in the cortex (again, used most frequently with human subjects). This technique uses different types of electrodes for recording systems such as needle electrodes and saline-based electrodes. EEG allows for the investigation of mental disorders, sleep disorders and physiology. It can monitor brain development and cognitive engagement.
  • Functional neuroanatomy: A more complex counterpart of phrenology. The expression of some anatomical marker is taken to reflect neural activity. For example, the expression of immediate early genes is thought to be caused by vigorous neural activity. Likewise, the injection of 2-deoxyglucose prior to some behavioural task can be followed by anatomical localisation of that chemical; it is taken up by neurons that are electrically active.
  • MEG: Magnetoencephalography shows the functioning of the human brain through the measurement of electromagnetic activity. Measuring the magnetic fields created by the electric current flowing within the neurons identifies brain activity associated with various human functions in real time, with millimetre spatial accuracy. Clinicians can noninvasively obtain data to help them assess neurological disorders and plan surgical treatments.

Genetic Techniques

  • QTL mapping: The influence of a gene in some behaviour can be statistically inferred by studying inbred strains of some species, most commonly mice. The recent sequencing of the genome of many species, most notably mice, has facilitated this technique.
  • Selective breeding: Organisms, often mice, may be bred selectively among inbred strains to create a recombinant congenic strain. This might be done to isolate an experimentally interesting stretch of DNA derived from one strain on the background genome of another strain to allow stronger inferences about the role of that stretch of DNA.
  • Genetic engineering: The genome may also be experimentally-manipulated; for example, knockout mice can be engineered to lack a particular gene, or a gene may be expressed in a strain which does not normally do so (the ‘transgenic’). Advanced techniques may also permit the expression or suppression of a gene to occur by injection of some regulating chemical.

Other Research Methods

Computational models, i.e. using a computer to formulate real-world problems to develop solutions. Although this method is often focused in computer science, it has begun to move towards other areas of study. For example, psychology is one of these areas. Computational models allow researchers in psychology to enhance their understanding of the functions and developments in nervous systems. Examples of methods include the modelling of neurons, networks and brain systems and theoretical analysis. Computational methods have a wide variety of roles including clarifying experiments, hypothesis testing and generating new insights. These techniques play an increasing role in the advancement of biological psychology.

Limitations and Advantages

Different manipulations have advantages and limitations. Neural tissue destroyed as a primary consequence of a surgery, electric shock or neurotoxin can confound the results so that the physical trauma masks changes in the fundamental neurophysiological processes of interest. For example, when using an electrolytic probe to create a purposeful lesion in a distinct region of the rat brain, surrounding tissue can be affected: so, a change in behaviour exhibited by the experimental group post-surgery is to some degree a result of damage to surrounding neural tissue, rather than by a lesion of a distinct brain region. Most genetic manipulation techniques are also considered permanent. Temporary lesions can be achieved with advanced in genetic manipulations, for example, certain genes can now be switched on and off with diet. Pharmacological manipulations also allow blocking of certain neurotransmitters temporarily as the function returns to its previous state after the drug has been metabolised.

Topic Areas

In general, behavioural neuroscientists study similar themes and issues as academic psychologists, though limited by the need to use nonhuman animals. As a result, the bulk of literature in behavioural neuroscience deals with mental processes and behaviours that are shared across different animal models such as:

  • Sensation and perception.
  • Motivated behaviour (hunger, thirst, sex).
  • Control of movement.
  • Learning and memory.
  • Sleep and biological rhythms.
  • Emotion.

However, with increasing technical sophistication and with the development of more precise non-invasive methods that can be applied to human subjects, behavioural neuroscientists are beginning to contribute to other classical topic areas of psychology, philosophy, and linguistics, such as:

  • Language.
  • Reasoning and decision making.
  • Consciousness.

Behavioural neuroscience has also had a strong history of contributing to the understanding of medical disorders, including those that fall under the purview of clinical psychology and biological psychopathology (also known as abnormal psychology). Although animal models do not exist for all mental illnesses, the field has contributed important therapeutic data on a variety of conditions, including:

  • Parkinson’s disease, a degenerative disorder of the central nervous system that often impairs the sufferer’s motor skills and speech.
  • Huntington’s disease, a rare inherited neurological disorder whose most obvious symptoms are abnormal body movements and a lack of coordination. It also affects a number of mental abilities and some aspects of personality.
  • Alzheimer’s disease, a neurodegenerative disease that, in its most common form, is found in people over the age of 65 and is characterised by progressive cognitive deterioration, together with declining activities of daily living and by neuropsychiatric symptoms or behavioural changes.
  • Clinical depression, a common psychiatric disorder, characterised by a persistent lowering of mood, loss of interest in usual activities and diminished ability to experience pleasure.
  • Schizophrenia, a psychiatric diagnosis that describes a mental illness characterised by impairments in the perception or expression of reality, most commonly manifesting as auditory hallucinations, paranoid or bizarre delusions or disorganised speech and thinking in the context of significant social or occupational dysfunction.
  • Autism, a brain development disorder that impairs social interaction and communication, and causes restricted and repetitive behaviour, all starting before a child is three years old.
  • Anxiety, a physiological state characterised by cognitive, somatic, emotional, and behavioural components. These components combine to create the feelings that are typically recognised as fear, apprehension, or worry.
  • Drug abuse, including alcoholism.

What is Affect (Psychology)?

Published on by Andrew Marshall1 Comment

Introduction

Affect, in psychology, refers to the underlying experience of feeling, emotion or mood.

Dimensions of Affect

Affective states are psycho-physiological constructs – meaning, largely, concepts that connect mental and physical processes. According to most current views, they vary along three principal dimensions: valence, arousal, and motivational intensity.

  • Valence is the subjective spectrum of positive-to-negative evaluation of an experience an individual may have had.
    • Emotional valence refers to the emotion’s consequences, emotion-eliciting circumstances, or subjective feelings or attitudes.
  • Arousal is objectively measurable as activation of the sympathetic nervous system, but can also be assessed subjectively via self-report.
  • Motivational intensity refers to the impulsion to act; the strength of an urge to move toward or away from a stimulus and whether or not to interact with said stimulus.
    • Simply moving is not considered approach (or avoidance) motivation.

It is important to note that arousal is different from motivational intensity. While arousal is a construct that is closely related to motivational intensity, they differ in that motivation necessarily implies action while arousal does not.

Affect Display

Affect is sometimes used to mean affect display, which is a facial, vocal, or gestural behaviour that serves as an indicator of affect.

Effects

In psychology, affect brings about an organism’s interaction with stimuli.

Affect can influence cognitive scope (the breadth of cognitive processes). Initially, it was thought that positive affects broadened whereas negative affects narrowed cognitive scope. However, evidence now suggests that affects high in motivational intensity narrow cognitive scope whereas affects low in motivational intensity broaden it. The construct of cognitive scope has proven valuable in cognitive psychology.

Affect Tolerance

According to a research article about affect tolerance written by psychiatrist Jerome Sashin (1985), “Affect tolerance can be defined as the ability to respond to a stimulus which would ordinarily be expected to evoke affects by the subjective experiencing of feelings.” Essentially it refers to one’s ability to react to emotions and feelings. One who is low in affect tolerance would show little to no reaction to emotion and feeling of any kind. This is closely related to alexithymia.

“Alexithymia is a subclinical phenomenon involving a lack of emotional awareness or, more specifically, difficulty in identifying and describing feelings and in distinguishing feelings from the bodily sensations of emotional arousal” (Glimcher & Fehr, 2014). At its core, alexithymia is an inability for an individual to recognise what emotions they are feeling – as well as an inability to describe them. According to Dalya Samur and colleagues (2013) people with alexithymia have been shown to have correlations with increased suicide rates, mental discomfort, and deaths.

Affect tolerance factors, including anxiety sensitivity, intolerance of uncertainty, and emotional distress tolerance, may be helped by mindfulness. Mindfulness refers to the practice of being hyper aware of one’s own feelings, thoughts, sensations, and the stimulus of the environment around you – not in an anxiety-inducing way, but in a gentle and pleasant way. Mindfulness has been shown to produce increased subjective well-being, reduced psychological symptoms and emotional reactivity, and improved behavioural regulation.

Relationship to Behaviour and Cognition

The affective domain represents one of the three divisions described in modern psychology: the other two being the behavioural, and the cognitive. Classically, these divisions have also been referred to as the “ABC’s of psychology”. However, in certain views, the cognitive may be considered as a part of the affective, or the affective as a part of the cognitive; it is important to note that “cognitive and affective states … [are] merely analytic categories.”

Instinctive and Cognitive Factors in Causation of Affect

Affect can mean an instinctual reaction to stimulation that occurs before the typical cognitive processes considered necessary for the formation of a more complex emotion. Robert B. Zajonc (1980) asserts this reaction to stimuli is primary for human beings and that it is the dominant reaction for non-human organisms. Zajonc suggests that affective reactions can occur without extensive perceptual and cognitive encoding and be made sooner and with greater confidence than cognitive judgments.

Many theorists, such as Lazarus (1982) consider affect to be post-cognitive: elicited only after a certain amount of cognitive processing of information has been accomplished. In this view, such affective reactions as liking, disliking, evaluation, or the experience of pleasure or displeasure each result from a different prior cognitive process that makes a variety of content discriminations and identifies features, examines them to find value, and weighs them according to their contributions (Brewin, 1989). Some scholars, such as Lerner and Keltner (2000) argue that affect can be both pre- and post-cognitive: initial emotional responses produce thoughts, which produce affect. In a further iteration, some scholars argue that affect is necessary for enabling more rational modes of cognition (Damasio, 2006).

A divergence from a narrow reinforcement model of emotion allows other perspectives about how affect influences emotional development. Thus, temperament, cognitive development, socialisation patterns, and the idiosyncrasies of one’s family or subculture might interact in nonlinear ways. For example, the temperament of a highly reactive/low self-soothing infant may “disproportionately” affect the process of emotion regulation in the early months of life (Griffiths, 1997).

Some other social sciences, such as geography or anthropology, have adopted the concept of affect during the last decade. In French psychoanalysis a major contribution to the field of affect comes from André Green (1973). The focus on affect has largely derived from the work of Deleuze and brought emotional and visceral concerns into such conventional discourses as those on geopolitics, urban life and material culture. Affect has also challenged methodologies of the social sciences by emphasizing somatic power over the idea of a removed objectivity and therefore has strong ties with the contemporary non-representational theory.

Brief History

A number of experiments have been conducted in the study of social and psychological affective preferences (i.e., what people like or dislike). Specific research has been done on preferences, attitudes, impression formation, and decision making. This research contrasts findings with recognition memory (old-new judgements), allowing researchers to demonstrate reliable distinctions between the two. Affect-based judgements and cognitive processes have been examined with noted differences indicated, and some argue affect and cognition are under the control of separate and partially independent systems that can influence each other in a variety of ways (Zajonc, 1980). Both affect and cognition may constitute independent sources of effects within systems of information processing. Others suggest emotion is a result of an anticipated, experienced, or imagined outcome of an adaptational transaction between organism and environment, therefore cognitive appraisal processes are keys to the development and expression of an emotion (Lazarus, 1982).

Psychometric Measurement

Affect has been found across cultures to comprise both positive and negative dimensions. The most commonly used measure in scholarly research is the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) (Watson, Clark & Tellegen, 1988). The PANAS is a lexical measure developed in a North American setting and consisting of 20 single-word items, for instance excited, alert, determined for positive affect, and upset, guilty, and jittery for negative affect. However, some of the PANAS items have been found either to be redundant or to have ambiguous meanings to English speakers from non-North American cultures. As a result, an internationally reliable short-form, the I-PANAS-SF, has been developed and validated comprising two 5-item scales with internal reliability, cross-sample and cross-cultural factorial invariance, temporal stability, convergent and criterion-related validities.

Mroczek and Kolarz (1998) have also developed another set of scales to measure positive and negative affect. Each of the scales has 6 items. The scales have shown evidence of acceptable validity and reliability across cultures.

Non-Conscious Affect and Perception

In relation to perception, a type of non-conscious affect may be separate from the cognitive processing of environmental stimuli. A monohierarchy of perception, affect and cognition considers the roles of arousal, attention tendencies, affective primacy (Zajonc, 1980), evolutionary constraints (Shepard, 1984; 1994), and covert perception (Weiskrantz, 1997) within the sensing and processing of preferences and discriminations. Emotions are complex chains of events triggered by certain stimuli. There is no way to completely describe an emotion by knowing only some of its components. Verbal reports of feelings are often inaccurate because people may not know exactly what they feel, or they may feel several different emotions at the same time. There are also situations that arise in which individuals attempt to hide their feelings, and there are some who believe that public and private events seldom coincide exactly, and that words for feelings are generally more ambiguous than are words for objects or events. Therefore, non-conscious emotions need to be measured by measures circumventing self-report such as the Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test (IPANAT; Quirin, Kazén & Kuhl, 2009).

Affective responses, on the other hand, are more basic and may be less problematic in terms of assessment. Brewin has proposed two experiential processes that frame non-cognitive relations between various affective experiences: those that are prewired dispositions (i.e. non-conscious processes), able to “select from the total stimulus array those stimuli that are causally relevant, using such criteria as perceptual salience, spatiotemporal cues, and predictive value in relation to data stored in memory” (Brewin, 1989, p.381), and those that are automatic (i.e. subconscious processes), characterised as “rapid, relatively inflexible and difficult to modify… (requiring) minimal attention to occur and… (capable of being) activated without intention or awareness” (Brewin1989 p.381). But a note should be considered on the differences between affect and emotion.

Arousal

Arousal is a basic physiological response to the presentation of stimuli. When this occurs, a non-conscious affective process takes the form of two control mechanisms: one mobilising and the other immobilising. Within the human brain, the amygdala regulates an instinctual reaction initiating this arousal process, either freezing the individual or accelerating mobilisation.

The arousal response is illustrated in studies focused on reward systems that control food-seeking behaviour (Balleine, 2005). Researchers have focused on learning processes and modulatory processes that are present while encoding and retrieving goal values. When an organism seeks food, the anticipation of reward based on environmental events becomes another influence on food seeking that is separate from the reward of food itself. Therefore, earning the reward and anticipating the reward are separate processes and both create an excitatory influence of reward-related cues. Both processes are dissociated at the level of the amygdala, and are functionally integrated within larger neural systems.

Motivational intensity and Cognitive Scope

Measuring Cognitive Scope

Cognitive scope can be measured by tasks involving attention, perception, categorisation and memory. Some studies use a flanker attention task to figure out whether cognitive scope is broadened or narrowed. For example:

  • Using the letters “H” and “N” participants need to identify as quickly as possible the middle letter of 5 when all the letters are the same (e.g. “HHHHH”); and
  • When the middle letter is different from the flanking letters (e.g. “HHNHH”).

Broadened cognitive scope would be indicated if reaction times differed greatly from when all the letters were the same compared to when the middle letter is different. Other studies use a Navon attention task to measure difference in cognitive scope. A large letter is composed of smaller letters, in most cases smaller “L”‘s or “F”‘s that make up the shape of the letter “T” or “H” or vice versa. Broadened cognitive scope would be suggested by a faster reaction to name the larger letter, whereas narrowed cognitive scope would be suggested by a faster reaction to name the smaller letters within the larger letter. A source-monitoring paradigm can also be used to measure how much contextual information is perceived: for instance, participants are tasked to watch a screen which serially displays words to be memorised for 3 seconds each, and also have to remember whether the word appeared on the left or the right half of the screen. The words were also encased in a coloured box, but the participants did not know that they would eventually be asked what colour box the word appeared in.

Main Research Findings

Motivation intensity refers to the strength of urge to move toward or away from a particular stimulus.

Anger and fear affective states, induced via film clips, conferred more selective attention on a flanker task compared to controls as indicated by reaction times that were not very different, even when the flanking letters were different from the middle target letter. Both anger and fear have high motivational intensity because propulsion to act would be high in the face of an angry or fearful stimulus, like a screaming person or coiled snake. Affects high in motivational intensity, thus, narrow cognitive scope making people able to focus more on target information. After seeing a sad picture, participants were faster to identify the larger letter in a Navon attention task, suggesting more global or broadened cognitive scope. The sad emotion is thought to sometimes have low motivational intensity. But, after seeing a disgusting picture, participants were faster to identify the component letters, indicative of a localised more narrow cognitive scope. Disgust has high motivational intensity. Affects high in motivational intensity, thus, narrow cognitive scope making people able to focus more on central information. whereas affects low in motivational intensity broadened cognitive scope allowing for faster global interpretation. The changes in cognitive scope associated with different affective states is evolutionarily adaptive because high motivational intensity affects elicited by stimuli that require movement and action should be focused on, in a phenomenon known as goal-directed behaviour. For example, in early times seeing a lion (fearful stimulus) probably elicited a negative but high motivational affective state (fear) in which the human being was propelled to run away. In this case the goal would be to avoid getting killed.

Moving beyond just negative affective states, researchers wanted to test whether or not the negative or positive affective states varied between high and low motivational intensity. To evaluate this theory, Harmon-Jones and Gable (2009) created an experiment using appetitive picture priming and the Navon task, which would allow them to measure the attentional scope with the detection of the Navon letters. The Navon task included a neutral affect comparison condition. Typically, neutral states cause broadened attention with a neutral stimulus. They predicted that a broad attentional scope could cause a faster detection of global (large) letters, whereas a narrow attentional scope could cause a faster detection of local (small) letters. The evidence proved that the appetitive stimuli produced a narrowed attentional scope. The experimenters further increased the narrowed attentional scope in appetitive stimuli by telling participants they would be allowed to consume the desserts shown in the pictures. The results revealed that their hypothesis was correct in that the broad attentional scope led to quicker detection of global letters and the narrowed attentional scope led to quicker detection of local letters.

Bradley and colleagues (2001) wanted to further examine the emotional reactions in picture priming. Instead of using an appetitive stimulus they used stimulus sets from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). The image set includes various unpleasant pictures such as snakes, insects, attack scenes, accidents, illness, and loss. They predicted that the unpleasant picture would stimulate a defensive motivational intensity response, which would produce strong emotional arousal such as skin gland responses and cardiac deceleration. Participants rated the pictures based on valence, arousal and dominance on the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) rating scale. The findings were consistent with the hypothesis and proved that emotion is organised motivationally by the intensity of activation in appetitive or defensive systems.

Prior to research in 2013, Harmon-Jones and Gable (2009) performed an experiment to examine whether neural activation related with approach-motivation intensity (left frontal-central activity) would trigger the effect of appetitive stimuli on narrowed attention. They also tested whether individual dissimilarities in approach motivation are associated with attentional narrowing. In order to test the hypothesis, the researchers used the same Navon task with appetitive and neutral pictures in addition to having the participants indicate how long since they had last eaten in minutes. To examine the neural activation, the researchers used an electroencephalography and recorded eye movements in order to detect what regions of the brain were being used during approach motivation. The results supported the hypothesis suggesting that the left frontal-central hemisphere is relative for approach-motivational processes and narrowed attentional scope. Some psychologists were concerned that the individuals who were hungry had an increase in the left frontal-central due to frustration. This statement was proved false because the research shows that the dessert pictures increase positive affect even in the hungry individuals. The findings revealed that narrowed cognitive scope has the ability to assist us in goal accomplishment.

Clinical Applications

Later on, researchers connected motivational intensity to clinical applications and found that alcohol-related pictures caused narrowed attention for persons who had a strong motivation to consume alcohol. The researchers tested the participants by exposing them to alcohol and neutral pictures. After the picture was displayed on a screen, the participants finished a test evaluating attentional focus. The findings proved that exposure to alcohol-related pictures led to a narrowing of attentional focus to individuals who were motivated to use alcohol. However, exposure to neutral pictures did not correlate with alcohol-related motivation to manipulate attentional focus. The Alcohol Myopia Theory (AMT) states that alcohol consumption reduces the amount of information available in memory, which also narrows attention so only the most proximal items or striking sources are encompassed in attentional scope. This narrowed attention leads intoxicated persons to make more extreme decisions than they would when sober. Researchers provided evidence that substance-related stimuli capture the attention of individuals when they have high and intense motivation to consume the substance. Motivational intensity and cue-induced narrowing of attention has a unique role in shaping people’s initial decision to consume alcohol. In 2013, psychologists from the University of Missouri investigated the connection between sport achievement orientation and alcohol outcomes. They asked varsity athletes to complete a Sport Orientation Questionnaire which measured their sport-related achievement orientation on three scales – competitiveness, win orientation, and goal orientation (Weaver et al., 2013). The participants also completed assessments of alcohol use and alcohol-related problems. The results revealed that the goal orientation of the athletes were significantly associated with alcohol use but not alcohol-related problems.

In terms of psychopathological implications and applications, college students showing depressive symptoms were better at retrieving seemingly “nonrelevant” contextual information from a source monitoring paradigm task. Namely, the students with depressive symptoms were better at identifying the colour of the box the word was in compared to non-depressed students. Sadness (low motivational intensity) is usually associated with depression, so the more broad focus on contextual information of sadder students supports that affects high in motivational intensity narrow cognitive scope whereas affects low in motivational intensity broaden cognitive scope.

The motivational intensity theory states that the difficulty of a task combined with the importance of success determine the energy invested by an individual. The theory has three main layers.

  • The innermost layer says human behaviour is guided by the desire to conserve as much energy as possible. Individuals aim to avoid wasting energy so they invest only the energy that is required to complete the task.
  • The middle layer focuses on the difficulty of tasks combined with the importance of success and how this affects energy conservation. It focuses on energy investment in situations of clear and unclear task difficulty.
  • The last layer looks at predictions for energy invested by a person when they have several possible options to choose at different task difficulties.

The person is free to choose among several possible options of task difficulty. The motivational intensity theory offers a logical and consistent framework for research. Researchers can predict a person’s actions by assuming effort refers to the energy investment. The motivational intensity theory is used to show how changes in goal attractiveness and energy investment correlate.

Mood

Refer to Mood (Psychology).

Mood, like emotion, is an affective state. However, an emotion tends to have a clear focus (i.e. its cause is self-evident), while mood tends to be more unfocused and diffuse. Mood, according to Batson, Shaw and Oleson (1992), involves tone and intensity and a structured set of beliefs about general expectations of a future experience of pleasure or pain, or of positive or negative affect in the future. Unlike instant reactions that produce affect or emotion, and that change with expectations of future pleasure or pain, moods, being diffuse and unfocused and thus harder to cope with, can last for days, weeks, months or even years (Schucman & Thetford, 1975). Moods are hypothetical constructs depicting an individual’s emotional state. Researchers typically infer the existence of moods from a variety of behavioural referents (Blechman, 1990). Habitual negative affect and negative mood is characteristic of high neuroticism.

Positive affect and negative affect (PANAS) represent independent domains of emotion in the general population, and positive affect is strongly linked to social interaction. Positive and negative daily events show independent relationships to subjective well-being, and positive affect is strongly linked to social activity. Recent research suggests that high functional support is related to higher levels of positive affect. In his work on negative affect arousal and white noise, Seidner (1991) found support for the existence of a negative affect arousal mechanism regarding the devaluation of speakers from other ethnic origins. The exact process through which social support is linked to positive affect remains unclear. The process could derive from predictable, regularised social interaction, from leisure activities where the focus is on relaxation and positive mood, or from the enjoyment of shared activities. The techniques used to shift a negative mood to a positive one are called mood repair strategies.

Social Interaction

Affect display is a critical facet of interpersonal communication. Evolutionary psychologists have advanced the hypothesis that hominids have evolved with sophisticated capability of reading affect displays.

Emotions are portrayed as dynamic processes that mediate the individual’s relation to a continually changing social environment. In other words, 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.

Most social and psychological phenomena occur as the result of repeated interactions between multiple individuals over time. These interactions should be seen as a multi-agent system – a system that contains multiple agents interacting with each other and/or with their environments over time. The outcomes of individual agents’ behaviours are interdependent: Each agent’s ability to achieve its goals depends on not only what it does but also what other agents do.

Emotions are one of the main sources for the interaction. Emotions of an individual influence the emotions, thoughts and behaviours of others; others’ reactions can then influence their future interactions with the individual expressing the original emotion, as well as that individual’s future emotions and behaviours. Emotion operates in cycles that can involve multiple people in a process of reciprocal influence.

Affect, emotion, or feeling is displayed to others through facial expressions, hand gestures, posture, voice characteristics, and other physical manifestation. These affect displays vary between and within cultures and are displayed in various forms ranging from the most discrete of facial expressions to the most dramatic and prolific gestures.

Observers are sensitive to agents’ emotions, and are capable of recognising the messages these emotions convey. They react to and draw inferences from an agent’s emotions. The emotion an agent displays may not be an authentic reflection of his or her actual state (refer to Emotional Labour).

Agents’ emotions can have effects on four broad sets of factors:

  • Emotions of other persons.
  • Inferences of other persons.
  • Behaviours of other persons.
  • Interactions and relationships between the agent and other persons.

Emotion may affect not only the person at whom it was directed, but also third parties who observe an agent’s emotion. Moreover, emotions can affect larger social entities such as a group or a team. Emotions are a kind of message and therefore can influence the emotions, attributions and ensuing behaviours of others, potentially evoking a feedback process to the original agent.

Agents’ feelings evoke feelings in others by two suggested distinct mechanisms:

  • Emotion contagion:
    • People tend to automatically and unconsciously mimic non-verbal expressions.
    • Mimicking occurs also in interactions involving textual exchanges alone.
  • Emotion interpretation:
    • An individual may perceive an agent as feeling a particular emotion and react with complementary or situationally appropriate emotions of their own.
    • The feelings of the others diverge from and in some way complement the feelings of the original agent.

People may not only react emotionally, but may also draw inferences about emotive agents such as the social status or power of an emotive agent, his competence and his credibility. For example, an agent presumed to be angry may also be presumed to have high power.

References

Balliene, B.W. (2005) Dietary Influences on Obesity: Environment, Behavior and Biology. Physiology & Behaviour. 86(5), pp.717-730.

Batson, C.D., Shaw, L.L. & Oleson, K.C. (1992). Differentiating Affect, Mood and Emotion: Toward Functionally based Conceptual Distinctions. Emotion. Newbury Park, CA: Sage.

Blechman, E.A. (1990). Moods, Affect, and Emotions. Hillsdale, New Jersey: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates: Hillsdale.

Bradley, M.M., Codispoti, M., Cuthbert, B.N. & Lang, P.J. (2001) Emotion and motivation I: Defensive and appetitive reactions in picture processing. Emotion. 1(3), pp.276-298. doi:10.1037/1528-3542.1.3.276.

Brewin, C.R. (1989) Cognitive Change Processes in Psychotherapy. Psychological Review. 96(45), pp.379-394. doi:10.1037/0033-295x.96.3.379.

Damasio, A. (2006) Descartes’ Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain. London: Vintage (Part of the Random House Group).

Glimcher, P.W. & Fehr, E (Eds.) (2014) Chapter 27 – Understanding Others: Brain Mechanisms of Theory of Mind and Empathy. Neuroeconomics (Second Edition). Academic Press. pp.513-532. https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-416008-8.00027-9.

Green, A. (Author), Sheridan, A. (Trans) & Spillius, E.B. (General Editor) (1999) The Fabric of Affect in the Psychoanalytic Discourse. The New Library of Psychoanalysis 37. London: Routledge.

Griffiths, P.E. (1997) What Emotions Really Are: The Problem of Psychological Categories. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.

Harmon-Jones, E. & Gable, P.A. (2009) Neural Activity Underlying the Effect of Approach-Motivated Positive Affect on Narrowed Attention. Psychological Science. 20(4), pp.406-409. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9280.2009.02302.x.

Lazarus, R.S. (1982) Thoughts on the Relations between Emotions and Cognition. American Physiologist. 37 (10), pp.1019-1024.

Lerner, J.S. & Keltner, D. (2000) Beyond valence: Toward a model of emotion-specific influences on judgement and choice. Cognition and Emotion. 14(4), pp.473-493. doi:10.1080/026999300402763.

Mroczek, D.K. & Kolarz, C.M. (1998) The effect of age on positive and negative affect: A developmental perspective on happiness. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 75(5), pp.1333-1349. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.75.5.1333.

Quirin, M., Kazén, M. & Kuhl, J. (2009) When nonsense sounds happy or helpless: The Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test (IPANAT). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 97(3), pp.500-516. doi:10.1037/a001606

Samur, D., Tops, M., Schlinkert, C., Quirin, M., Cuijpers, P. & Koole, S.L. (2013) Four decades of research on alexithymia: moving toward clinical applications. Frontiers in Psychology. 4, pp.861. https://dx.doi.org/10.3389%2Ffpsyg.2013.00861.

Sashin, J.I. (1985) Affect tolerance: A model of affect-response using catastrophe theory. Journal of Social and Biological Structures. 8(2), pp.175-202.

Schucman, H. & Thetford, C. (1975). A Course in Miracle. New York: Viking Penguin.

Seidner, S.S. (1991). Negative Affect Arousal Reactions from Mexican and Puerto Rican Respondents. Washington, D.C.: ERIC.

Shepard, R.N. (1984) Ecological Constraints on Internal Representation. Psychological Review. 91(4), pp.417-447. doi:10.1037/0033-295x.91.4.417.

Shepard, R.N. (1994) Perceptual-cognitive Universals as Reflections of the World. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. 1(1), pp.2-28. doi:10.3758/bf03200759

Watson, D., Clark, L.A. & Tellegen, A. (1988) Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: the PANAS scales. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 54(6), pp.1063-1070. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.54.6.1063.

Weaver, C.C., Martens, M.P., Cadigan, J.M., Takamatsu, S.K., Treloar, H.R. & Pedersen, E.R. (2013) Sport-related achievement motivation and alcohol outcomes: An athlete-specific risk factor among intercollegiate athletes. Addictive Behaviours. 38(12), pp.2930-2936. doi:10.1016/j.addbeh.2013.08.021.

Weiskrantz, L. (1997) Consciousness Lost and Found. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Zajonc, R.B. (1980) Feelings and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences. American Psychologist. 35(2), pp.151-175. doi:10.1037/0003-066x.35.2.151.

What are Hallucinations in Psychosis?

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Introduction

Visual hallucinations in psychosis are hallucinations accompanied by delusions, which are abnormal beliefs that are endorsed by patients as real, that persist in spite of evidence to the contrary, and that are not part of a patient’s culture or subculture.

Presentation

Visual hallucinations in psychoses are reported to have physical properties similar to real perceptions. They are often life-sized, detailed, and solid, and are projected into the external world. They typically appear anchored in external space, just beyond the reach of individuals, or further away. They can have three-dimensional shapes, with depth and shadows, and distinct edges. They can be colourful or in black and white and can be static or have movement.

Simple versus Complex

Visual hallucinations may be simple, or non-formed visual hallucinations, or complex, or formed visual hallucinations.

Simple visual hallucinations are also referred to as non-formed or elementary visual hallucinations. They can take the form of multicoloured lights, colours, geometric shapes, indiscrete objects. Simple visual hallucinations without structure are known as phosphenes and those with geometric structure are known as photopsias. These hallucinations are caused by irritation to the primary visual cortex (Brodmann’s area 17).

Complex visual hallucinations are also referred to as formed visual hallucinations. They tend to be clear, lifelike images or scenes, such as faces of animals or people. Sometimes, hallucinations are ‘Lilliputian’, i.e. patients experience visual hallucinations where there are miniature people, often undertaking unusual actions. Lilliputian hallucinations may be accompanied by wonder, rather than terror.

Content

The frequency of hallucinations varies widely from rare to frequent, as does duration (seconds to minutes). The content of hallucinations varies as well. Complex (formed) visual hallucinations are more common than Simple (non-formed) visual hallucinations. In contrast to hallucinations experienced in organic conditions, hallucinations experienced as symptoms of psychoses tend to be more frightening. An example of this would be hallucinations that have imagery of bugs, dogs, snakes, distorted faces. Visual hallucinations may also be present in those with Parkinson’s, where visions of dead individuals can be present. In psychoses, this is relatively rare, although visions of God, angels, the devil, saints, and fairies are common. Individuals often report being surprised when hallucinations occur and are generally helpless to change or stop them. In general, individuals believe that visions are experienced only by themselves.

Causes

Two neurotransmitters are particularly important in visual hallucinations – serotonin and acetylcholine. They are concentrated in the visual thalamic nuclei and visual cortex.

The similarity of visual hallucinations that stem from diverse conditions suggest a common pathway for visual hallucinations. Three pathophysiologic mechanisms are thought to explain this.

The first mechanism has to do with cortical centres responsible for visual processing. Irritation of visual association cortices (Brodmann’s areas 18 and 19) cause complex visual hallucinations.

The second mechanism is deafferentation, the interruption or destruction of the afferent connections of nerve cells, of the visual system, caused by lesions, leading to the removal of normal inhibitory processes on cortical input to visual association areas, leading to complex hallucinations as a release phenomenon.

The third mechanism has to do with the reticular activating system, which plays a role in the maintenance of arousal. Lesions in the brain stem can cause visual hallucinations. Visual hallucinations are frequent in those with certain sleep disorders, occurring more often when drowsy. This suggests that the reticular activating system plays a part in visual hallucinations, although the precise mechanism has still not fully been established.

Prevalence

Hallucinations in those with psychoses are often experienced in colour, and most often are multi-modal, consisting of visual and auditory components. They frequently accompany paranoia or other thought disorders, and tend to occur during the daytime and are associated with episodes of excess excitability. The DSM-V lists visual hallucinations as a primary diagnostic criterion for several psychotic disorders, including schizophrenia and schizoaffective disorder.

The lifetime prevalence of all psychotic disorders is 3.48% and that of the different diagnostic groups are as follows:

  • 0.87% for schizophrenia.
  • 0.32% for schizoaffective disorder.
  • 0.07% for schizophreniform disorder.
  • 0.18% for delusional disorder.
  • 0.24% for bipolar I disorder.
  • 0.35% for major depressive disorder with psychotic features.
  • 0.42% for substance-induced psychotic disorders.
  • 0.21% for psychotic disorders due to a general medical condition.

Visual hallucinations can occur as a symptom of the above psychotic disorders in 24% to 72% of patients at some point in the course of their illness. Not all individuals who experience hallucinations have a psychotic disorder. Many physical and psychiatric disorders can manifest with hallucinations, and some individuals may have more than one disorder that could cause different types of hallucinations.

On This Day … 28 April

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People (Births)

People (Deaths)

  • 2012 – Milan N. Popović, Serbian psychiatrist and author (b. 1924).

Mike Brearley

John Michael Brearley OBE (born 28 April 1942) is a retired English first-class cricketer who captained Cambridge University, Middlesex, and England.

He captained the international side in 31 of his 39 Test matches, winning 17 and losing only 4. He was the President of the Marylebone Cricket Club (MCC) in 2007-2008. Since his retirement from professional cricket he has pursued a career as a writer and psychoanalyst, serving as President of the British Psychoanalytical Society 2008-2010.

He is married to Mana Sarabhai who is from India and they have two children together.

Milan N. Popovic

Milan Popović (1924 to 28 April 2012) was a renowned Serbian psychiatrist-psychoanalyst, a full professor of the University of Belgrade Faculty of Philosophy.

Biography

He was born in 1924 in Belgrade, Serbia. He graduated from the University of Belgrade School of Medicine, specialized neuropsychiatry and was awarded a doctor’s degree with the theme “Group psychotherapy of the schizophrenic in hospital conditions”. He was elected associate professor of the Faculty of Philosophy of Belgrade University in 1972 and full professor in 1980.

Education

Milan Popović is a pioneer in developing the group psychiatry in Serbia and opening psychiatric departments towards the society. He is a founder of “Psychoanalytical psychotherapy school” at post graduated studies of the Faculty of Medicine in Belgrade.

He is a teacher of many generations of psychiatrists, psychologists and sociologists in Serbia. He has given an important contribution to the development of psychiatry in the country, especially the development of psychotherapy and social psychiatry, truthfully representing domestic achievements abroad.

Scientific and Professional Functions

He was attending professional courses from analytical psychotherapy at Tavistock Clinic in London, the Centre for mental health of 13th Arrondissement in Paris and University of California in Los Angeles, altogether for two years.

As one of the founders of the Institute of Mental Health (Belgrade), he has been leading the first Open department, mostly for psychosis since 1963. The degree of Primarius was given to him in 1968. From 1979 till he retired, he was the chief of the Centre for psychotherapy and sociotherapy, mostly doing educational and scientific activity. He has been working as a director of the Institute for mental health for a year and a half.

At the Faculty of Philosophy of Belgrade University he has been teaching Social Pathology (Sociology of mental disorders) and General psychopathology. He was the chief of sociology department, the director of the Department for philosophy and sociology, and from 1987 till 1989 the Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy of Belgrade University.

At the Faculty of Medicine of Belgrade University he was one of the organizers of postgraduate lectures from psychotherapy and social therapy. He was also the president of committee for passing the sub specialized exam from psychotherapy. He is a founder and the first leader of Psychological counselling service for students of Belgrade University.

As a visiting professor he held lectures at Centre for Rehabilitation of psychiatric patients La Verriere in Paris, University of California in Los Angeles and Boston University. In June 1990 he became Affiliate Teacher of Institute of Group Analysis in London.

He has been also working as a consultant of the Centre for victims of war trauma, affiliated department of International Red Cross and Red Crescent Federation (Serbia and Montenegro).

He has been doing medical ethics. He was the president of Ethical committee of Serbian doctors’ society from 1992 till 1997. At the end of 1992 Milan Popović was elected president of the Association of Serbian physicians for peace, the branch of International association of physicians for the prevention of nuclear war. This international association was awarded the Nobel Prize for peace.

He was the president of the section for psychotherapy of Serbian medical association.

Milan Popović has showed great interests in culture too. He was also, among the rest, the President of programmed Council of Cvijeta Zuzoric art gallery. After the invitation, he has been the member of European association of culture with the seat in Venice since 1989.

What is a Therapeutic Relationship?

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Introduction

The therapeutic relationship refers to the relationship between a healthcare professional and a client or patient. It is the means by which a therapist and a client hope to engage with each other and effect beneficial change in the client.

In psychoanalysis the therapeutic relationship has been theorised to consist of three parts: the working alliance, transference/countertransference, and the real relationship. Evidence on each component’s unique contribution to the outcome has been gathered, as well as evidence on the interaction between components. In contrast to a social relationship, the focus of the therapeutic relationship is on the client’s needs and goals.

Therapeutic/Working Alliance

The therapeutic alliance, or the working alliance may be defined as the joining of a client’s reasonable side with a therapist’s working or analysing side. Bordin (1979) conceptualised the working alliance as consisting of three parts: tasks, goals and bond. Tasks are what the therapist and client agree need to be done to reach the client’s goals. Goals are what the client hopes to gain from therapy, based on their presenting concerns. The bond forms from trust and confidence that the tasks will bring the client closer to their goals.

Research on the working alliance suggests that it is a strong predictor of psychotherapy or counselling client outcome. Also, the way in which the working alliance unfolds has been found to be related to client outcomes. Generally, an alliance that experiences a rupture that is repaired is related to better outcomes than an alliance with no ruptures, or an alliance with a rupture that is not repaired. Also, in successful cases of brief therapy, the working alliance has been found to follow a high-low-high pattern over the course of the therapy. Therapeutic alliance has been found to be effective in treating adolescents suffering from PTSD, with the strongest alliances were associated with the greatest improvement in PTSD symptoms. Regardless of other treatment procedures, studies have shown that the degree to which traumatised adolescents feel a connection with their therapist greatly affects how well they do during treatment.

Necessary and Sufficient Conditions

In the Humanistic approach, Carl Rogers identified a number of necessary and sufficient conditions that are required for therapeutic change to take place. These include the three core conditions: congruence, unconditional positive regard, and empathy. Rogers (1957; 1959) stated that there are six necessary and sufficient conditions required for therapeutic change:

  1. Therapist–client psychological contact: a relationship between client and therapist must exist, and it must be a relationship in which each person’s perception of the other is important.
  2. Client incongruence: that incongruence exists between the client’s experience and awareness.
  3. Therapist congruence, or genuineness: the therapist is congruent within the therapeutic relationship. The therapist is deeply involved, they are not ‘acting’ and they can draw on their own experiences (self-disclosure) to facilitate the relationship.
  4. Therapist unconditional positive regard: the therapist accepts the client unconditionally, without judgment, disapproval or approval. This facilitates increased self-regard in the client, as they can begin to become aware of experiences in which their view of self-worth was distorted or denied.
  5. Therapist empathic understanding: the therapist experiences an empathic understanding of the client’s internal frame of reference. Accurate empathy on the part of the therapist helps the client believe the therapist’s unconditional regard for them.
  6. Client perception: that the client perceives, to at least a minimal degree, the therapist’s unconditional positive regard and empathic understanding.

Transference and Counter-Transference

The concept of therapeutic relationship was described by Freud (1912) as “friendly affectionate feeling” in the form of a positive transference. However, transferences, or more correctly here, the therapist’s ‘counter-transferences’ can also be negative. Today transference (from the client) and counter-transference (from the therapist), is understood as subconsciously associating a person in the present, with a person from a past relationship. For example, you meet a new client who reminds you of a former lover. This would be a counter-transference, in that the therapist is responding to the client with thoughts and feelings attached to a person in a past relationship. Ideally, the therapeutic relationship will start with a positive transference for the therapy to have a good chance of effecting positive therapeutic change.

Operationalisation and Measurement

Several scales have been developed to assess the patient-professional relationship in therapy, including:

Reference

Bordin, E.S. (1979). The generalizability of the psychoanalytic concept of the working alliance. Psychotherapy: Theory, Research & Practice. 16(3), pp.252-260.

What is the Mood & Feelings Questionnaire?

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Introduction

The Mood and Feelings Questionnaire (MFQ) is a survey that measures depressive symptoms in children and young adults.

Background

It was developed by Adrian Angold and Elizabeth J. Costello in 1987, and validity data were gathered as part of the Great Smokey Mountain epidemiological study in Western North Carolina.

The questionnaire consists of a variety of statements describing feelings or behaviours that may manifest as depressive symptoms in children between the ages of 6 and 17. The subject is asked to indicate how much each statement applies to their recent experiences. The Mood and Feelings Questionnaire has six versions, short (13 item) and long (33 item) forms of each of the following:

  • A youth self-report;
  • A version that a parent would complete; and
  • A self-report version for adults.

Several peer-reviewed studies have found the Mood and Feelings Questionnaire to be a reliable and valid measure of depression in children. Compared to many other depression scales for youth, it has more extensive coverage of symptoms and more age-appropriate wording and content.

Scoring and Interpretation

The MFQ has several tests, one short and one long, with the short questionnaire including 13 questions and the long questionnaire consisting of 33 questions. Scoring of the MFQ works by summing the point values allocated to each question. The responses and their allocated point values are as follows:

  • “not true” = 0 points.
  • “somewhat true” = 1 point.
  • “true” = 2 points.

Scores on the short MFQ range from 0 to 26, whereas scores on the long version range from 0 to 66. Higher score are indicative of increased depressive symptom severity. Scores larger than 12 on the short version or larger than 27 on the long version are suggestive of likely depression and warrant further clinical assessment.

Validity

The Mood and Feelings Questionnaire, along with the Short Mood and Feelings Questionnaire, shows reasonable psychometric properties for identifying children in early adolescence with a depressive disorder. Secondly, the MFQ does not significantly differentiate between children with depression versus children with anxiety disorders. Finally, the MFQ has been translated into Arabic, Spanish and Norwegian, but testing of these versions is more limited.

Limitations

Questionnaires like the Mood and Feelings Questionnaire should not act as a substitute for thorough clinical evaluations for both the child and parent.

On This Day … 25 April

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People (Births)

  • 1902 – Werner Heyde, German psychiatrist and academic (d. 1964).

Werner Heyde

Werner Heyde (aka Fritz Sawade) (25 April 1902 to 13 February 1964) was a German psychiatrist. He was one of the main organisers of Nazi Germany’s T-4 Euthanasia Programme.

Early Life

Heyde was born in Forst (Lausitz), on 25 May 1902, and completed his Abitur in 1920. From 1922-1925, he studied medicine in Berlin, Freiburg, Marburg, Rostock and Würzburg and after short placements at the General Hospital in Cottbus and the sanatorium Berlin-Wittenau became assistant doctor at the Universitätsnervenklinik (university psychiatric hospital) in Würzburg. He obtained his licence to practice medicine in 1926, having completed all courses throughout his studies with top marks.

Career until 1945

In 1933, Heyde made the acquaintance of Theodor Eicke, and became a member of the NSDAP. One year later, he was appointed director of the polyclinic in Würzburg. In 1935, he entered the SS as medical officer with the rank of SS-Hauptsturmführer, and became commander of the medical unit in the SS-Totenkopfverbände. There he was responsible for establishing a system of psychiatric and eugenic examinations and research in concentration camps, and for the organisation of the T-4 Euthanasia Programme. Additionally, he also worked as a psychiatric consultant for the Gestapo. He also was leader of the Rassenpolitisches Amt in Würzburg, Seelbergstraße 8, 97080 Würzburg. Later he was accompanied by his Rassenpolitisches Amt assistant, Mr. Johannes Riedmiller aka Kurt Riethmüller aka Hans Riedmüller/Hans Riedmiller.

In 1938, he was appointed chief of staff of the medical department in the SS-Hauptamt (headquarters); in 1939, he became professor for psychiatry and neurology at the University of Würzburg, and from 1940 on he also was director of the psychiatric hospital.

He was replaced as head of the T4 program by Paul Nitsche in 1941, but continued his involvement as member of the “department Brack” (after the end of World War II, it was never found out what his role there was).

He worked at Buchenwald, Dachau concentration camp and Sachsenhausen concentration camps.

In 1944, he was awarded the SS-Totenkopfring, and before the end of the war reached the rank of SS-Standartenführer (Colonel).

Life after 1945

After World War II, Heyde was interned and imprisoned, but escaped in 1947. He went underground using the alias Fritz Sawade and continued practicing as a sports physician and psychiatrist in Flensburg. Many friends and associates knew about his real identity, but remained silent even as he was an expert witness in court cases.

His true identity was revealed in the course of a private quarrel, and on 11 November 1959 Heyde surrendered to police in Frankfurt after 13 years as a fugitive. On 13 February 1964, five days before his trial was to start, Heyde hanged himself at the prison in Butzbach.

In Popular Culture

  • Literature:
    • Klee, Ernst, Das Personenlexikon zum Dritten Reich. S. Fischer Verlag 2003. ISBN 3-10-039309-0
    • Godau-Schüttke, Klaus-Detlev, Die Heyde/Sawade-Affäre. Nomos Verlagsgesellschaft 1998. ISBN 3-7890-5717-7.
  • Films:
    • 1963 (GDR): The Heyde-Sawade Affair (Category: biography/drama) (Produced in the DEFA-studios for movies, Potsdam, Babelsberg/Eastern Germany. Produced by Bernhard Gelbe; script by Wolfgang Luderer, Walter Jupé and Friedrich Karl Kaul and directed by Wolfgang Luderer. Available via the Foundation German TV and Broadcast Arkhive Babelsberg. Arkhive-No. IDNR 03581. Length: 101 minutes, First run: 3 June 1963 in the television programme No. 1 of the German Democratic Republic).
  • Paintings:
    • In 1965, German artist Gerhard Richter painted Herr Heyde,[4] based on a photo of Heyde’s 1959 arrest.

On This Day … 24 April

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People (Births)

People (Deaths)

  • 1924 – G. Stanley Hall, American psychologist and academic (b. 1844).
  • 1983 – Erol Güngör, Turkish sociologist, psychologist, and academic (b. 1938).

Eliana Gil

Eliana Gil RPT-S, ATR (born 24 April 1948), is a lecturer, writer, and clinician of marriage, family and child. She is on the board of a number of professional counselling organisations that use play and art therapies, and she is the former president of the Association for Play Therapy (APT).

Dr. Gil is the senior partner of the Gil Institute for Trauma Recovery and Education in Fairfax, Virginia. She is also the director of Starbright Training Institute for Child and Family Play Therapy based in northern Virginia.

G. Stanley Hall

Granville Stanley Hall (01 February 1846 to 24 April 1924) was a pioneering American psychologist and educator. His interests focused on childhood development and evolutionary theory.

Hall was the first president of the American Psychological Association and the first president of Clark University.

Review of General Psychology survey, published in 2002, ranked Hall as the 72nd most cited psychologist of the 20th century, in a tie with Lewis Terman.

Erol Gungor

Erol Güngör (25 November 1938 to 24 April 1983) was a Turkish sociologist, psychologist, and writer.

After spending a period in the Faculty of Law, Güngör graduated from the Faculty of Literature and Social Sciences of Istanbul University in 1961. He received his Ph.D. in 1965 with a thesis titled “Kelâmî (Verbal) Yapılarda Estetik Organizasyon”. Kenneth Hammond invited him to visit the University of Colorado. He became an associate professor with his thesis titled “Şahıslar arası Ihtilafların Çözümünde Lisanın Rolü” in 1970. He became an academic in the Faculty of Literature and Social Sciences of Istanbul University in 1975. He eventually became the president of Selçuk University in 1982.

He mostly studied culture, personality, customs, people and religion. He focused on the identity and cultural problems which Turkish people have faced in the last 150 years.

What is the SCOFF Questionnaire?

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Introduction

The SCOFF questionnaire utilises an acronym in a simple five question test devised for use by non-professionals to assess the possible presence of an eating disorder.

Scoff is also an alternative/slang word for food.

Background

It was devised by John F. Morgan, Fiona Reid, and J Hubert Lacey in 1999.

The original SCOFF questionnaire was devised for use in the United Kingdom, thus the original acronym needs to be adjusted for users in the United States and Canada.

The letters in the full acronym are taken from key words in the questions:

  • Do you make yourself Sick because you feel uncomfortably full?
  • Do you worry that you have lost Control over how much you eat?
  • Have you recently lost more than One stone (14 lb/6.5 kg) in a 3-month period?
  • Do you believe yourself to be Fat when others say you are too thin?
  • Would you say that Food dominates your life?

Notes

  • The “S” stands for “Sick”:
    • In British English means specifically to “vomit”.
    • In American English and Canadian English it is synonymous with “ill”.
  • The “O” is used in the acronym to denote “one stone”.
    • A “stone” is an Imperial unit of weight which made up of 14 lbs (equivalent to 6.35 kg).

All participants (in Morgan and colleagues research) found the questions and the term “SCOFF” acceptable. Setting the threshold at two or more yes answers to all five questions provided 100% sensitivity for anorexia and bulimia, separately and combined (all patients: 95% confidence interval, 96.9%-100.0%; patients with bulimia: 92.6%-100.0%; and patients with anorexia: 94.7%-100.0%), with a specificity of 87.5% (79.2%-93.4%) for controls.

Scoring

One point is assigned for every “yes”; a score greater than two (≥2) indicates a possible case of anorexia nervosa or bulimia nervosa.

Reference

Morgan, J.F., Reid, F. & Lacy, J.H. (2000) The SCOFF Questionnaire. Western Journal of Medicine. 172(3), pp.164-165.

What is Schizoid Avoidant Behaviour?

Published on by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

Introduction

The relationship between schizoid personality disorder (SPD) and avoidant personality disorder (AvPD) has been a subject of controversy for decades.

Today it is still unclear and remains to be seen if these two personality disorders are linked to genetically distinct, but overlapping, personality disorders or if these two personality disorders are merely two different phenotypic expressions of the same genetic disorder.

Background

Both have been associated with a shared genetic risk factor and the same polymorphism within the ANKK1 gene. There is also some evidence that AvPD (like SPD) is a personality disorder of the schizophrenia spectrum.

Originally, schizoid personality disorder involved social avoidance combined with marked ambivalence regarding the desirability of social contact. It included indifference or even cold disdain oscillating with longing for normal relationships. Through the efforts of Theodore Millon, this complex idea was later divided across two disorders with the emergence of a separate AvPD construct and the idea of ambivalence was lost.

According to the differential diagnosis guidelines provided in the text of the DSM-IV the two conditions are distinguished by the extent to which the individual desires social contact versus being indifferent to it. But such distinctions are often difficult to apply in practice, as patients often have unclear, marginal, or shifting status on those elements thought most crucial for differential diagnosis. In the case of the avoidant and schizoid personality disorders, however, both the problem and its solution may be more academic than real.

  • First, research indicates that all of the avoidant symptoms except social withdrawal correlate negatively with the schizoid symptom list and that differential diagnosis is not difficult.
  • Second, schizoid personality disorder is exceedingly rare and the diagnostic quandary may never occur in practice.

However, new research shows that both personality disorders are linked to hypersensitivity.