Emotional Competence – Mental Health Matters

An Overview of Motivated Reasoning

Published on 12/12/202412/27/2024 by Andrew Marshall4 Comments

Introduction

Motivated reasoning (motivational reasoning bias) is a cognitive and social response in which individuals, consciously or sub-consciously, allow emotion-loaded motivational biases to affect how new information is perceived. Individuals tend to favour evidence that coincides with their current beliefs and reject new information that contradicts them, despite contrary evidence.

Motivated reasoning overlaps with confirmation bias. Both favour evidence supporting one’s beliefs, at the same time dismissing contradictory evidence. However, confirmation bias is mainly a sub-conscious (innate) cognitive bias. In contrast, motivated reasoning (motivational bias) is a sub-conscious or conscious process by which one’s emotions control the evidence supported or dismissed. For confirmation bias, the evidence or arguments can be logical as well as emotional.

Motivated reasoning can be classified into two categories:

Accuracy-oriented (non-directional), in which the motive is to arrive at an accurate conclusion, irrespective of the individual’s beliefs; and
Goal-oriented (directional), in which the motive is to arrive at a particular conclusion.

Refer to Motivated Forgetting, Emotional Reasoning, and Motivated Tactician.

Definitions

Motivated reasoning is a cognitive and social response, in which individuals, consciously or unconsciously, allow emotion-loaded motivational biases to affect how new information is perceived. Individuals tend to favour arguments that support their current beliefs and reject new information that contradicts these beliefs.

Motivated reasoning, confirmation bias and cognitive dissonance are closely related. Both motivated reasoning and confirmation bias favour evidence supporting one’s beliefs, at the same time dismissing contradictory evidence. Motivated reasoning (motivational bias) is an unconscious or conscious process by which personal emotions control the evidence that is supported or dismissed. However, confirmation bias is mainly an unconscious (innate, implicit) cognitive bias, and the evidence or arguments utilised can be logical as well as emotional. More broadly, it is feasible that motivated reasoning can moderate cognitive biases generally, including confirmation bias.

Individual differences such as political beliefs can moderate the emotional/motivational effect. In addition, social context (groupthink, peer pressure) also partly controls the evidence utilised for motivated reasoning, particularly in dysfunctional societies. Social context moderates emotions, which in turn moderate beliefs.

Motivated reasoning differs from critical thinking, in which beliefs are assessed with a sceptical but open-minded attitude.

Cognitive Dissonance

Individuals are compelled to initiate motivated reasoning to lessen the amount of cognitive dissonance they feel. Cognitive dissonance is the feeling of psychological and physiological stress and unease between two conflicting cognitive and/or emotional elements (such as the desire to smoke, despite knowing it is unhealthy). According to Leon Festinger, there are two paths individuals can engage in to reduce the amount of distress: the first is altering behaviour or cognitive bias; the second, more common path is avoiding or discrediting information or situations that would create dissonance.

Research suggests that reasoning away contradictions is psychologically easier than revising feelings. Emotions tend to colour how “facts” are perceived. Feelings come first, and evidence is used in service of those feelings. Evidence that supports what is already believed is accepted; evidence which contradicts those beliefs is not.

Mechanisms: Cold and Hot Cognition

The notion that motives or goals affect reasoning has a long and controversial history in social psychology. This is because supportive research could be reinterpreted in entirely cognitive non-motivational terms (the hot versus cold cognition controversy). This controversy existed because of a failure to explore mechanisms underlying motivated reasoning.

Early research on how humans evaluated and integrated information supported a cognitive approach consistent with Bayesian probability, in which individuals weighted new information using rational calculations (“cold cognition”). More recent theories endorse these cognitive processes as only partial explanations of motivated reasoning, but have also introduced motivational[1] or affective (emotional) processes (“hot cognition”).

Kunda Theory

Ziva Kunda reviewed research and developed a theoretical model to explain the mechanism by which motivated reasoning results in bias. Motivation to arrive at a desired conclusion provides a level of arousal, which acts as an initial trigger for the operation of cognitive processes. To participate in motivated reasoning, either consciously or subconsciously, an individual first needs to be motivated. Motivation then affects reasoning by influencing the knowledge structures (beliefs, memories, information) that are accessed and the cognitive processes used.

Lodge–Taber Theory

Milton Lodge and Charles Taber introduced an empirically supported model in which affect is intricately tied to cognition, and information processing is biased toward support for positions that the individual already holds. Their model has three components:

On-line processing, in which, when called on to make an evaluation, people instantly draw on stored information which is marked with affect;
A component by which affect is automatically activated along with the cognitive node to which it is tied; and
An “heuristic mechanism” for evaluating new information, which triggers a reflection on “How do I feel?” about this topic. This process results in a bias towards maintaining existing affect, even in the face of other, disconfirming information.

This theory is developed and evaluated in their book The Rationalizing Voter (2013). David Redlawsk (2002) found that the timing of when disconfirming information was introduced played a role in determining bias. When subjects encounter incongruity during an information search, the automatic assimilation and update process is interrupted. This results in one of two outcomes:

Subjects may enhance attitude strength in a desire to support existing affect (resulting in degradation in decision quality and potential bias); or
Subjects may counter-argue existing beliefs in an attempt to integrate the new data.

This second outcome is consistent with research on how processing occurs when one is tasked with accuracy goals.

To summarise, the two models differ in that Kunda identifies a primary role for cognitive strategies such as memory processes, and the use of rules in determining biased information selection, whereas Lodge and Taber identify a primary role for affect in guiding cognitive processes and maintaining bias.

Neuroscientific Evidence

A neuroimaging study by Drew Westen and colleagues does not support the use of cognitive processes in motivated reasoning, lending greater support to affective processing as a key mechanism in supporting bias. This study, designed to test the neural circuitry of individuals engaged in motivated reasoning, found that motivated reasoning “was not associated with neural activity in regions previously linked with cold reasoning tasks [Bayesian reasoning] nor conscious (explicit) emotion regulation”.

This neuroscience data suggests that “motivated reasoning is qualitatively distinct from reasoning when people do not have a strong emotional stake in the conclusions reached.” However, if there is a strong emotion attached during their previous round of motivated reasoning and that emotion is again present when the individual’s conclusion is reached, a strong emotional stake is then attached to the conclusion. Any new information in regards to that conclusion will cause motivated reasoning to reoccur. This can create pathways within the neural network that further ingrain the reasoned beliefs of that individual along similar neural networks to where logical reasoning occurs. This causes the strong emotion to reoccur when confronted with contradictory information, time and time again. This is referred to by Lodge and Taber as affective contagion. But instead of “infecting” other individuals, the emotion “infects” the individual’s reasoning pathways and conclusions.

Case Studies

Smoking

When an individual is trying to quit smoking, they might engage in motivated reasoning to convince themselves to keep smoking. They might focus on information that makes smoking seem less harmful while discrediting any evidence which emphasizes any dangers associated with the behaviour. Individuals in situations like this are driven to initiate motivated reasoning to lessen the amount of cognitive dissonance they feel. This can make it harder for individuals to quit and lead to continued smoking, even though they know it is not good for their health.

Political Bias

Peter Ditto and his students conducted a meta-analysis in 2018 of studies relating to political bias. Their aim was to assess which US political orientation (left/liberal or right/conservative) was more biased and initiated more motivated reasoning. They found that both political orientations are susceptible to bias to the same extent. The analysis was disputed by Jonathan Baron and John Jost, to whom Ditto and colleagues responded. Reviewing the debate, Stuart Vyse concluded that the answer to the question of whether US liberals or conservatives are more biased is: “We don’t know.”

On 22 April 2011, The New York Times published a series of articles attempting to explain the Barack Obama citizenship conspiracy theories. One of these articles by political scientist David Redlawsk explained these “birther” conspiracies as an example of political motivated reasoning. US presidential candidates are required to be born in the US. Despite ample evidence that President Barack Obama was born in the US state of Hawaii, many people continue to believe that he was not born in the US, and therefore that he was an illegitimate president. Similarly, many people believe he is a Muslim (as was his father), despite ample lifetime evidence of his Christian beliefs and practice (as was true of his mother). Subsequent research by others suggested that political partisan identity was more important for motivating “birther” beliefs than for some other conspiracy beliefs such as 9/11 conspiracy theories.

Climate Change

Despite a scientific consensus on climate change, citizens are divided on the topic, particularly along political lines. A significant segment of the American public has fixed beliefs, either because they are not politically engaged, or because they hold strong beliefs that are unlikely to change. Liberals and progressives generally believe, based on extensive evidence, that human activity is the main driver of climate change. By contrast, conservatives are generally much less likely to hold this belief, and a subset believes that there is no human involvement, and that the reported evidence is faulty (or even fraudulent). A prominent explanation is political directional motivated reasoning, in that conservatives are more likely to reject new evidence that contradicts their long established beliefs. In addition, some highly directional climate deniers not only discredit scientific information on human-induced climate change but also to seek contrary evidence that leads to a posterior belief of greater denial.

A study by Robin Bayes and colleagues of the human-induced climate change views of 1,960 members of the Republican Party found that both accuracy and directional motives move in the desired direction, but only in the presence of politically motivated messages congruent with the induced beliefs.

Social Media

Social media is used for many different purposes and ways of spreading opinions. It is the number one place people go to get information and most of that information is complete opinion and bias. The way this applies to motivated reasoning is the way it spreads. “However, motivated reasoning suggests that informational uses of social media are conditioned by various social and cultural ways of thinking”. All ideas and opinions are shared and makes it very easy for motivated reasoning and biases to come through when searching for an answer or just facts on the internet or any news source.

COVID-19

In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, people who refuse to wear masks or get vaccinated may engage in motivated reasoning to justify their beliefs and actions. They may reject scientific evidence that supports mask-wearing and vaccination and instead seek out information that supports their pre-existing beliefs, such as conspiracy theories or misinformation. This can lead to behaviours that are harmful to both themselves and others.

In a 2020 study, Van Bavel and colleagues explored the concept of motivated reasoning as a contributor to the spread of misinformation and resistance to public health measures during the COVID-19 pandemic. Their results indicated that people often engage in motivated reasoning when processing information about the pandemic, interpreting it to confirm their pre-existing beliefs and values. The authors argue that addressing motivated reasoning is critical to promoting effective public health messaging and reducing the spread of misinformation. They suggested several strategies, such as reframing public health messages to align with individuals’ values and beliefs. In addition, they suggested using trusted sources to convey information by creating social norms that support public health behaviours.

Outcomes and Tackling Strategies

The outcomes of motivated reasoning derive from “a biased set of cognitive processes—that is, strategies for accessing, constructing, and evaluating beliefs. The motivation to be accurate enhances use of those beliefs and strategies that are considered most appropriate, whereas the motivation to arrive at particular conclusions enhances use of those that are considered most likely to yield the desired conclusion.” Careful or “reflective” reasoning has been linked to both overcoming and reinforcing motivated reasoning, suggesting that reflection is not a panacea, but a tool that can be used for rational or irrational purposes depending on other factors. For example, when people are presented with and forced to think analytically about something complex that they lack adequate knowledge of (i.e. being presented with a new study on meteorology whilst having no degree in the subject), there is no directional shift in thinking, and their extant conclusions are more likely to be supported with motivated reasoning. Conversely, if they are presented with a more simplistic test of analytical thinking that confronts their beliefs (i.e. seeing implausible headlines as false), motivated reasoning is less likely to occur and a directional shift in thinking may result.

Hostile Media Effect

Research on motivated reasoning tested accuracy goals (i.e. reaching correct conclusions) and directional goals (i.e. reaching preferred conclusions). Factors such as these affect perceptions; and results confirm that motivated reasoning affects decision-making and estimates. These results have far reaching consequences because, when confronted with a small amount of information contrary to an established belief, an individual is motivated to reason away the new information, contributing to a hostile media effect. If this pattern continues over an extended period of time, the individual becomes more entrenched in their beliefs.

Tipping Point

However, recent studies have shown that motivated reasoning can be overcome. “When the amount of incongruency is relatively small, the heightened negative affect does not necessarily override the motivation to maintain [belief].” However, there is evidence of a theoretical “tipping point” where the amount of incongruent information that is received by the motivated reasoner can turn certainty into anxiety. This anxiety of being incorrect may lead to a change of opinion to the better.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Motivated_reasoning >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

An Overview of Emotional Contagion

Published on 11/20/2024 by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

Introduction

Emotional contagion is a form of social contagion that involves the spontaneous spread of emotions and related behaviours. Such emotional convergence can happen from one person to another, or in a larger group. Emotions can be shared across individuals in many ways, both implicitly or explicitly. For instance, conscious reasoning, analysis, and imagination have all been found to contribute to the phenomenon. The behaviour has been found in humans, other primates, dogs, and chickens.

Emotional contagion is important to personal relationships because it fosters emotional synchrony between individuals. A broader definition of the phenomenon suggested by Schoenewolf is:

“a process in which a person or group influences the emotions or behavior of another person or group through the conscious or unconscious induction of emotion states and behavioral attitudes.”

One view developed by Elaine Hatfield, et al., is that this can be done through automatic mimicry and synchronisation of one’s expressions, vocalisations, postures, and movements with those of another person. When people unconsciously mirror their companions’ expressions of emotion, they come to feel reflections of those companions’ emotions.

In a 1993 paper, Psychologists Elaine Hatfield, John Cacioppo, and Richard Rapson define emotional contagion as “the tendency to automatically mimic and synchronize expressions, vocalizations, postures, and movements with those of another person’s [sic] and, consequently, to converge emotionally”.

Hatfield, et al., theorise emotional contagion as a two-step process: First, we imitate people (e.g. if someone smiles at you, you smile back). Second, our own emotional experiences change based on the non-verbal signals of emotion that we give off. For example, smiling makes one feel happier, and frowning makes one feel worse. Mimicry seems to be one foundation of emotional movement between people.

Emotional contagion and empathy share similar characteristics, with the exception of the ability to differentiate between personal and pre-personal experiences, a process known as individuation. In The Art of Loving (1956), social psychologist Erich Fromm explores these differences, suggesting that autonomy is necessary for empathy, which is not found in emotional contagion.

Etymology

James Baldwin addressed “emotional contagion” in his 1897 work Social and Ethical Interpretations in Mental Development, though using the term “contagion of feeling”. Various 20th century scholars discussed the phenomena under the heading “social contagion”. The term “emotional contagion” first appeared in Arthur S. Reber’s 1985 The Penguin Dictionary of Psychology.

Influencing Factors

Several factors determine the rate and extent of emotional convergence in a group, including membership stability, mood-regulation norms, task interdependence, and social interdependence. Besides these event-structure properties, there are personal properties of the group’s members, such as openness to receive and transmit feelings, demographic characteristics, and dispositional affect that influence the intensity of emotional contagion.

Research

Research on emotional contagion has been conducted from a variety of perspectives, including organisational, social, familial, developmental, and neurological. While early research suggested that conscious reasoning, analysis, and imagination accounted for emotional contagion, some forms of more primitive emotional contagion are far more subtle, automatic, and universal.

Hatfield, Cacioppo, and Rapson’s 1993 research into emotional contagion reported that people’s conscious assessments of others’ feelings were heavily influenced by what others said. People’s own emotions, however, were more influenced by others’ nonverbal clues as to what they were really feeling. Recognizing emotions and acknowledging their origin can be one way to avoid emotional contagion. Transference of emotions has been studied in a variety of situations and settings, with social and physiological causes being two of the largest areas of research.

In addition to the social contexts discussed above, emotional contagion has been studied within organisations. Schrock, Leaf, and Rohr (2008) say organizations, like societies, have emotion cultures that consist of languages, rituals, and meaning systems, including rules about the feelings workers should, and should not, feel and display. They state that emotion culture is quite similar to “emotion climate”, otherwise known as morale, organisational morale, and corporate morale. Furthermore, Worline, Wrzesniewski, and Rafaeli (2002): 318 mention that organizations have an overall “emotional capability”, while McColl-Kennedy, and Smith (2006) examine “emotional contagion” in customer interactions. These terms arguably all attempt to describe a similar phenomenon; each term differs in subtle and somewhat indistinguishable ways.

Controversy

A controversial experiment demonstrating emotional contagion by using the social media platform Facebook was carried out in 2014 on 689,000 users by filtering positive or negative emotional content from their news feeds. The experiment sparked uproar among people who felt the study violated personal privacy. The 2014 publication of a research paper resulting from this experiment, “Experimental evidence of massive-scale emotional contagion through social networks”, a collaboration between Facebook and Cornell University, is described by Tony D. Sampson, Stephen Maddison, and Darren Ellis (2018) as a “disquieting disclosure that corporate social media and Cornell academics were so readily engaged with unethical experiments of this kind.” Tony D. Sampson et al. criticise the notion that “academic researchers can be insulated from ethical guidelines on the protection for human research subjects because they are working with a social media business that has ‘no obligation to conform’ to the principle of ‘obtaining informed consent and allowing participants to opt out’.” A subsequent study confirmed the presence of emotional contagion on Twitter without manipulating users’ timelines.

Beyond the ethical concerns, some scholars criticised the methods and reporting of the Facebook findings. John Grohol, writing for Psych Central, argued that despite its title and claims of “emotional contagion,” this study did not look at emotions at all. Instead, its authors used an application (called “Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count” or LIWC 2007) that simply counted positive and negative words in order to infer users’ sentiments. A shortcoming of the LIWC tool is that it does not understand negations. Hence, the tweet “I am not happy” would be scored as positive: “Since the LIWC 2007 ignores these subtle realities of informal human communication, so do the researchers.” Grohol concluded that given these subtleties, the effect size of the findings are little more than a “statistical blip.”

Kramer et al. (2014) found a 0.07%—that’s not 7 percent, that’s 1/15th of one percent!!—decrease in negative words in people’s status updates when the number of negative posts on their Facebook news feed decreased. Do you know how many words you’d have to read or write before you’ve written one less negative word due to this effect? Probably thousands.

Types

Emotions can be shared and mimicked in many ways. Taken broadly, emotional contagion can be either: implicit, undertaken by the receiver through automatic or self-evaluating processes; or explicit, undertaken by the transmitter through a purposeful manipulation of emotional states, to achieve a desired result.

Implicit

Unlike cognitive contagion, emotional contagion is less conscious and more automatic. It relies mainly on non-verbal communication, although emotional contagion can and does occur via telecommunication. For example, people interacting through e-mails and chats are affected by the other’s emotions, without being able to perceive the non-verbal cues.

One view, proposed by Hatfield and colleagues, describes emotional contagion as a primitive, automatic, and unconscious behaviour that takes place through a series of steps. When a receiver is interacting with a sender, he perceives the emotional expressions of the sender. The receiver automatically mimics those emotional expressions. Through the process of afferent feedback, these new expressions are translated into feeling the emotions the sender feels, thus leading to emotional convergence.

Another view, emanating from social comparison theories, sees emotional contagion as demanding more cognitive effort and being more conscious. According to this view, people engage in social comparison to see if their emotional reaction is congruent with the persons around them. The recipient uses the emotion as a type of social information to understand how he or she should be feeling. People respond differently to positive and negative stimuli; negative events tend to elicit stronger and quicker emotional, behavioural, and cognitive responses than neutral or positive events. So unpleasant emotions are more likely to lead to mood contagion than are pleasant emotions. Another variable is the energy level at which the emotion is displayed. Higher energy draws more attention to it, so the same emotional valence (pleasant or unpleasant) expressed with high energy is likely to lead to more contagion than if expressed with low energy.

Explicit

Aside from the automatic infection of feelings described above, there are also times when others’ emotions are being manipulated by a person or a group in order to achieve something. This can be a result of intentional affective influence by a leader or team member. Suppose this person wants to convince the others of something, he may do so by sweeping them up in his enthusiasm. In such a case, his positive emotions are an act with the purpose of “contaminating” the others’ feelings. A different kind of intentional mood contagion would be, for instance, giving the group a reward or treat, in order to alleviate their feelings.

The discipline of organisational psychology researches aspects of emotional labour. This includes the need to manage emotions so that they are consistent with organisational or occupational display rules, regardless of whether they are discrepant with internal feelings. In regard to emotional contagion, in work settings that require a certain display of emotions, one finds oneself obligated to display, and consequently feel, these emotions. If superficial acting develops into deep acting, emotional contagion is the byproduct of intentional affective impression management.

In Workplaces and Organisations

Intra-Group

Many organisations and workplaces encourage teamwork. Studies conducted by organisational psychologists highlight the benefits of work teams. Emotions come into play and a group emotion is formed.

The group’s emotional state influences factors such as cohesiveness, morale, rapport, and the team’s performance. For this reason, organisations need to take into account the factors that shape the emotional state of the work-teams, in order to harness the beneficial sides and avoid the detrimental sides of the group’s emotion. Managers and team leaders should be cautious with their behaviour, since their emotional influence is greater than that of a “regular” team member: leaders are more emotionally “contagious” than others.

Employee/Customer

The interaction between service employees and customers affects both customers’ assessments of service quality and their relationship with the service provider. Positive affective displays in service interactions are positively associated with important customer outcomes, such as intention to return and to recommend the store to a friend. It is the interest of organisations that their customers be happy, since a happy customer is a satisfied one. Research has shown that the emotional state of the customer is directly influenced by the emotions displayed by the employee/service provider via emotional contagion. But this influence depends on authenticity of the employee’s emotional display, such that if the employee is only surface-acting, the contagion is poor, in which case the beneficial effects will not occur.

Neurological Basis

Vittorio Gallese posits that mirror neurons are responsible for intentional attunement in relation to others. Gallese and colleagues at the University of Parma found a class of neurons in the premotor cortex that discharge either when macaque monkeys execute goal-related hand movements or when they watch others doing the same action. One class of these neurons fires with action execution and observation, and with sound production of the same action. Research in humans shows an activation of the premotor cortex and parietal area of the brain for action perception and execution.

Gallese says humans understand emotions through a simulated shared body state. The observers’ neural activation enables a direct experiential understanding. “Unmediated resonance” is a similar theory by Goldman and Sripada (2004). Empathy can be a product of the functional mechanism in our brain that creates embodied simulation. The other we see or hear becomes the “other self” in our minds. Other researchers have shown that observing someone else’s emotions recruits brain regions involved in:

Experiencing similar emotions; and
Producing similar facial expressions.

This combination indicates that the observer activates:

A representation of the emotional feeling of the other individual which leads to emotional contagion; and
A motor representation of the observed facial expression that could lead to facial mimicry.

In the brain, understanding and sharing other individuals’ emotions would thus be a combination of emotional contagion and facial mimicry. Importantly, more empathic individuals experience more brain activation in emotional regions while witnessing the emotions of other individuals.

Amygdala

The amygdala is one part of the brain that underlies empathy and allows for emotional attunement and creates the pathway for emotional contagion. The basal areas including the brain stem form a tight loop of biological connectedness, re-creating in one person the physiological state of the other. Psychologist Howard Friedman thinks this is why some people can move and inspire others. The use of facial expressions, voices, gestures and body movements transmit emotions to an audience from a speaker.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotional_contagion >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

An Overview of Social Emotions

Published on 11/19/2024 by Andrew Marshall1 Comment

Introduction

Social emotions are emotions that depend upon the thoughts, feelings or actions of other people, “as experienced, recalled, anticipated or imagined at first hand”. Examples are embarrassment, guilt, shame, jealousy, envy, coolness, elevation, empathy, and pride. In contrast, basic emotions such as happiness and sadness only require the awareness of one’s own physical state. Therefore, the development of social emotions is tightly linked with the development of social cognition, the ability to imagine other people’s mental states, which generally develops in adolescence. Studies have found that children as young as 2 to 3 years of age can express emotions resembling guilt and remorse. However, while five-year-old children are able to imagine situations in which basic emotions would be felt, the ability to describe situations in which social emotions might be experienced does not appear until seven years of age.

People may not only share emotions with others, but may also experience similar physiological arousal to others if they feel a sense of social connectedness to the other person. A laboratory-based study by Cwir, Car, Walton, and Spencer (2011) showed that, when a participant felt a sense of social connectedness to a stranger (research confederate), the participant experienced similar emotional states and physiological responses to that of the stranger while observing the stranger perform a stressful task.

Social emotions are sometimes called moral emotions, because they play an important role in morality and moral decision making. In neuroeconomics, the role social emotions play in game theory and economic decision-making is just starting to be investigated.

Behavioural Neuroscience

After functional imaging—functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) in particular—became popular roughly a decade ago, researchers have begun to study economic decision-making with this new technology. This allows researchers to investigate, on a neurological level, the role emotions play in decision-making.

Developmental Picture

The ability to describe situations in which a social emotion will be experienced emerges at around age 7, and, by adolescence, the experience of social emotion permeates everyday social exchange. Studies using fMRI have found that different brain regions are involved in different age groups when performing social-cognitive and social-emotional tasks. While brain areas such as medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC), superior temporal sulcus (STS), temporal poles (TP) and precuneus bordering with posterior cingulate cortex are activated in both adults and adolescents when they reason about intentionality of others, the medial PFC is more activated in adolescents and the right STS more in adults. Similar age effects were found with younger participants, such that, when participants perform tasks that involve theory of mind, increase in age is correlated with an increase in activation in the dorsal part of the MPFC and a decrease in the activity in the ventral part of the MPFC were observed.

Studies that compare adults with adolescents in their processing of basic and social emotions also suggest developmental shifts in brain areas being involved. Comparing with adolescents, the left temporal pole has a stronger activity in adults when they read stories that elicit social emotions. The temporal poles are thought to store abstract social knowledge. This suggests that adult might use social semantic knowledge more often when thinking about social-emotional situations than adolescents.

Neuroeconomics

To investigate the function of social emotions in economic behaviours, researchers are interested in the differences in brain regions involved when participants are playing with, or think that they are playing with, another person as opposed to a computer. A study with fMRI found that, for participants who tend to cooperate on two-person “trust and reciprocity” games, believing that they are playing with another participant activated the prefrontal cortex, while believing that they are playing with a computer did not. This difference was not seen with players who tend not to cooperate. The authors interpret this difference as theory of minds that co-operators employ to anticipate the opponents’ strategies. This is an example of the way social decision making differs from other forms of decision making.

In behavioural economics, a heavy criticism is that people do not always act in a fully rational way, as many economic models assume. For example, in the ultimatum game, two players are asked to divide a certain amount of money, say x. One player, called the proposer, decides ratio by which the money gets divided. The other player, called the responder, decides whether or not to accept this offer. If the responder accepts the offer, say, y amount of money, then the proposer gets x-y amount and the responder gets y. But if the responder refuses to accept the offer, both players get nothing. This game is widely studied in behavioural economics. According to the rational agent model, the most rational way for the proposer to act is to make y as small as possible, and the most rational way for the responder to act is to accept the offer, since little amount of money is better than no money. However, what these experiments tend to find is that the proposers tend to offer 40% of x, and offers below 20% would get rejected by the responders. Using fMRI scans, researchers found that social emotions elicited by the offers may play a role in explaining the result. When offers are unfair as opposed to fair, three regions of the brain are active: the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), and the insula. The insula is an area active in registering body discomfort. It is activated when people feel, among other things, social exclusion. The authors interpret activity in the insula as the aversive reaction one feels when faced with unfairness, activity in the DLPFC as processing the future reward from keeping the money, and the ACC is an arbiter that weighs these two conflicting inputs to make a decision. Whether or not the offer gets rejected can be predicted (with a correlation of 0.45) by the level of the responder’s insula activity.

Neuroeconomics and social emotions are also tightly linked in the study of punishment. Research using PET scan has found that, when players punish other players, activity in the nucleus accumbens (part of the striatum), a region known for processing rewards derived from actions gets activated. It shows that we not only feel hurtful when we become victims of unfairness, but we also find it psychologically rewarding to punish the wrongdoer, even at a cost to our own utility.

Social or Moral Aspect

Some social emotions are also referred to as moral emotions because of the fundamental role they play in morality. For example, guilt is the discomfort and regret one feels over one’s wrongdoing. It is a social emotion, because it requires the perception that another person is being hurt by this act; and it also has implication in morality, such that the guilty actor, in virtue of feeling distressed and guilty, accepts responsibility for the wrongdoing, which might cause desire to make amends or punish the self.

Not all social emotions are moral emotions. Pride, for instance, is a social emotion which involves the perceived admiration of other people, but research on the role it plays in moral behaviours yields problematic results.

Empathic Response

Empathy is defined by Eisenberg and colleagues as an affective response that stems from the apprehension or comprehension of another’s emotional state or condition and is similar to what the other person is feeling or would be expected to feel. Guilt, which is a social emotion with strong moral implication, is also strongly correlated with empathic responsiveness; whereas shame, an emotion with less moral flavour, is negatively correlated with empathic responsiveness, when controlling for guilt.

Perceived controllability also plays an important role modulating people’s socio-emotional reactions and empathic responses. For example, participants who are asked to evaluate other people’s academic performances are more likely to assign punishments when the low performance is interpreted as low-effort, as opposed to low-ability. Stigmas also elicit more empathic response when they are perceived as uncontrollable (i.e. having a biological origin, such as having certain disease), as opposed to controllable (i.e. having a behavioural origin, such as obesity).

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_emotions >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

An Overview of Emotional Self-Regulation

Published on 10/08/2024 by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

Introduction

The self-regulation of emotion or emotion regulation is the ability to respond to the ongoing demands of experience with the range of emotions in a manner that is socially tolerable and sufficiently flexible to permit spontaneous reactions as well as the ability to delay spontaneous reactions as needed. It can also be defined as extrinsic and intrinsic processes responsible for monitoring, evaluating, and modifying emotional reactions. The self-regulation of emotion belongs to the broader set of emotion regulation processes, which includes both the regulation of one’s own feelings and the regulation of other people’s feelings.

Emotion regulation is a complex process that involves initiating, inhibiting, or modulating one’s state or behaviour in a given situation — for example, the subjective experience (feelings), cognitive responses (thoughts), emotion-related physiological responses (for example heart rate or hormonal activity), and emotion-related behaviour (bodily actions or expressions). Functionally, emotion regulation can also refer to processes such as the tendency to focus one’s attention to a task and the ability to suppress inappropriate behaviour under instruction. Emotion regulation is a highly significant function in human life.

Every day, people are continually exposed to a wide variety of potentially arousing stimuli. Inappropriate, extreme or unchecked emotional reactions to such stimuli could impede functional fit within society; therefore, people must engage in some form of emotion regulation almost all of the time. Generally speaking, emotion dysregulation has been defined as difficulties in controlling the influence of emotional arousal on the organisation and quality of thoughts, actions, and interactions. Individuals who are emotionally dysregulated exhibit patterns of responding in which there is a mismatch between their goals, responses, and/or modes of expression, and the demands of the social environment. For example, there is a significant association between emotion dysregulation and symptoms of depression, anxiety, eating pathology, and substance abuse. Higher levels of emotion regulation are likely to be related to both high levels of social competence and the expression of socially appropriate emotions.

Theory

Process Model

The process model of emotion regulation is based upon the modal model of emotion. The modal model of emotion suggests that the emotion generation process occurs in a particular sequence over time. This sequence occurs as follows:

Situation: the sequence begins with a situation (real or imagined) that is emotionally relevant.
Attention: attention is directed towards the emotional situation.
Appraisal: the emotional situation is evaluated and interpreted.
Response: an emotional response is generated, giving rise to loosely coordinated changes in experiential, behavioural, and physiological response systems.

Because an emotional response (4.) can cause changes to a situation (1.), this model involves a feedback loop from (4.) Response to (1.) Situation. This feedback loop suggests that the emotion generation process can occur recursively, is ongoing, and dynamic.

The process model contends that each of these four points in the emotion generation process can be subjected to regulation. From this conceptualization, the process model posits five different families of emotion regulation that correspond to the regulation of a particular point in the emotion generation process. They occur in the following order:

Situation selection
Situation modification
Attentional deployment
Cognitive change
Response modulation

The process model also divides these emotion regulation strategies into two categories: antecedent-focused and response-focused. Antecedent-focused strategies (i.e. situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, and cognitive change) occur before an emotional response is fully generated. Response-focused strategies (i.e. response modulation) occur after an emotional response is fully generated.

Strategies

Situation Selection

Situation selection is an emotional regulation strategy that involves choosing to avoid or approach a future emotional situation. If a person selects to avoid or disengage from an emotionally relevant situation, they are decreasing the likelihood of experiencing an emotion. Alternatively, if a person selects to approach or engage with an emotionally relevant situation, they are increasing the likelihood of experiencing an emotion.

Typical examples of situation selection may be seen interpersonally, such as when a parent removes his or her child from an emotionally unpleasant situation. Use of situation selection may also be seen in psychopathology. For example, avoidance of social situations to regulate emotions is particularly pronounced for those with social anxiety disorder and avoidant personality disorder.

Effective situation selection is not always an easy task. For instance, humans display difficulties predicting their emotional responses to future events. Therefore, they may have trouble making accurate and appropriate decisions about which emotionally relevant situations to approach or to avoid.

Situation Modification

Situation modification involves efforts to modify a situation so as to change its emotional impact. Situation modification refers specifically to altering one’s external, physical environment. Altering one’s “internal” environment to regulate emotion is called cognitive change.

Examples of situation modification may include injecting humour into a speech to elicit laughter or extending the physical distance between oneself and another person.

Attentional Deployment

Attentional deployment involves directing one’s attention towards or away from an emotional situation.

Distraction

Distraction, an example of attentional deployment, is an early selection strategy, which involves diverting one’s attention away from an emotional stimulus and towards other content. Distraction has been shown to reduce the intensity of painful and emotional experiences, to decrease facial responding and neural activation in the amygdala associated with emotion, as well as to alleviate emotional distress. As opposed to reappraisal, individuals show a relative preference to engage in distraction when facing stimuli of high negative emotional intensity. This is because distraction easily filters out high-intensity emotional content, which would otherwise be relatively difficult to appraise and process.

Rumination

Rumination, an example of attentional deployment, is defined as the passive and repetitive focusing of one’s attention on one’s symptoms of distress and the causes and consequences of these symptoms. Rumination is generally considered a maladaptive emotion regulation strategy, as it tends to exacerbate emotional distress. It has also been implicated in a host of disorders including major depression.

Worry

Worry, an example of attentional deployment, involves directing attention to thoughts and images concerned with potentially negative events in the future. By focusing on these events, worrying serves to aid in the down-regulation of intense negative emotion and physiological activity. While worry may sometimes involve problem solving, incessant worry is generally considered maladaptive, being a common feature of anxiety disorders, particularly generalised anxiety disorder.

Thought Suppression

Thought suppression, an example of attentional deployment, involves efforts to redirect one’s attention from specific thoughts and mental images to other content so as to modify one’s emotional state. Although thought suppression may provide temporary relief from undesirable thoughts, it may ironically end up spurring the production of even more unwanted thoughts. This strategy is generally considered maladaptive, being most associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Cognitive Change

Cognitive change involves changing how one appraises a situation so as to alter its emotional meaning.

Reappraisal

Reappraisal, an example of cognitive change, is a late selection strategy, which involves a change of the meaning of an event that alters its emotional impact. It encompasses different sub-strategies, such as positive reappraisal (creating and focusing on a positive aspect of the stimulus), decentring (reinterpreting an event by broadening one’s perspective to see “the bigger picture”), or fictional reappraisal (adopting or emphasizing the belief that event is not real, that it is for instance “just a movie” or “just my imagination”). Reappraisal has been shown to effectively reduce physiological, subjective, and neural emotional responding. As opposed to distraction, individuals show a relative preference to engage in reappraisal when facing stimuli of low negative emotional intensity because these stimuli are relatively easy to appraise and process.

Reappraisal is generally considered to be an adaptive emotion regulation strategy. Compared to suppression (including both thought suppression and expressive suppression), which is positively correlated with many psychological disorders, reappraisal can be associated with better interpersonal outcomes, and can be positively related to well-being. However, some researchers argue that context is important when evaluating the adaptiveness of a strategy, suggesting that in some contexts reappraisal may be maladaptive. Furthermore, some research has shown reappraisal does not influence or affect physiological responses to recurrent stress.

Distancing

Distancing, an example of cognitive change, involves taking on an independent, third-person perspective when evaluating an emotional event. Distancing has been shown to be an adaptive form of self-reflection, facilitating the emotional processing of negatively valenced stimuli, reducing emotional and cardiovascular reactivity to negative stimuli, and increasing problem-solving behaviour.

Humour

Humour, an example of cognitive change, has been shown to be an effective emotion regulation strategy. Specifically, positive, good-natured humour has been shown to effectively up-regulate positive emotion and down-regulate negative emotion. On the other hand, negative, mean-spirited humour is less effective in this regard.

Response Modulation

Response modulation involves attempts to directly influence experiential, behavioural, and physiological response systems.

Expressive Suppression

Expressive suppression, an example of response modulation, involves inhibiting emotional expressions. It has been shown to effectively reduce facial expressivity, subjective feelings of positive emotion, heart rate, and sympathetic activation. However, the research findings are mixed regarding whether this strategy is effective for down-regulating negative emotion. Research has also shown that expressive suppression may have negative social consequences, correlating with reduced personal connections and greater difficulties forming relationships.

Expressive suppression is generally considered to be a maladaptive emotion regulation strategy. Compared to reappraisal, it is positively correlated with many psychological disorders, associated with worse interpersonal outcomes, is negatively related to well-being, and requires the mobilisation of a relatively substantial amount of cognitive resources. However, some researchers argue that context is important when evaluating the adaptiveness of a strategy, suggesting that in some contexts suppression may be adaptive.

Drug Use

Drug use, an example of response modulation, can be used to alter emotion-associated physiological responses. For example, alcohol can produce sedative and anxiolytic effects and beta blockers can affect sympathetic activation.

Exercise

Exercise, an example of response modulation, can be used to down-regulate the physiological and experiential effects of negative emotions. Regular physical activity has also been shown to reduce emotional distress and improve emotional control.

Sleep

Sleep plays a role in emotion regulation, although stress and worry can also interfere with sleep. Studies have shown that sleep, specifically REM sleep, down-regulates reactivity of the amygdala, a brain structure known to be involved in the processing of emotions, in response to previous emotional experiences. On the flip side, sleep deprivation is associated with greater emotional reactivity or overreaction to negative and stressful stimuli. This is a result of both increased amygdala activity and a disconnect between the amygdala and the prefrontal cortex, which regulates the amygdala through inhibition, together resulting in an overactive emotional brain. Due to the subsequent lack of emotional control, sleep deprivation may be associated with depression, impulsivity, and mood swings. Additionally, there is some evidence that sleep deprivation may reduce emotional reactivity to positive stimuli and events and impair emotion recognition in others.

In Psychotherapy

Emotion regulation strategies are taught, and emotion regulation problems are treated, in a variety of counselling and psychotherapy approaches, including cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), dialectical behaviour therapy (DBT), emotion-focused therapy (EFT), and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT).

For example, a relevant mnemonic formulated in DBT is “ABC PLEASE”:

Accumulate positive experiences.
Build mastery by being active in activities that make one feel competent and effective to combat helplessness.
Cope ahead, preparing an action plan, researching, and rehearsing (with a skilled helper if necessary).
Physical illness treatment and prevention through check-ups.
Low vulnerability to diseases, managed with health care professionals.
Eating healthy.
Avoiding (non-prescribed) mood-altering drugs.
Sleep healthy.
Exercise regularly.

Developmental Process

Infancy

Intrinsic emotion regulation efforts during infancy are believed to be guided primarily by innate physiological response systems. These systems usually manifest as an approach towards and an avoidance of pleasant or unpleasant stimuli. At three months, infants can engage in self-soothing behaviours like sucking and can reflexively respond to and signal feelings of distress. For instance, infants have been observed attempting to suppress anger or sadness by knitting their brow or compressing their lips.

Between three and six months, basic motor functioning and attentional mechanisms begin to play a role in emotion regulation, allowing infants to more effectively approach or avoid emotionally relevant situations. Infants may also engage in self-distraction and help-seeking behaviours for regulatory purposes. At one year, infants are able to navigate their surroundings more actively and respond to emotional stimuli with greater flexibility due to improved motor skills. They also begin to appreciate their caregivers’ abilities to provide them regulatory support. For instance, infants generally have difficulties regulating fear. As a result, they often find ways to express fear in ways that attract the comfort and attention of caregivers.

Extrinsic emotion regulation efforts by caregivers, including situation selection, modification, and distraction, are particularly important for infants. The emotion regulation strategies employed by caregivers to attenuate distress or to up-regulate positive affect in infants can impact the infants’ emotional and behavioural development, teaching them particular strategies and methods of regulation. The type of attachment style between caregiver and infant can therefore play a meaningful role in the regulatory strategies infants may learn to use.

Recent evidence supports the idea that maternal singing has a positive effect on affect regulation in infants. Singing play-songs can have a visible affect-regulatory consequence of prolonged positive affect and even alleviation of distress. In addition to proven facilitation of social bonding, when combined with movement and/or rhythmic touch, maternal singing for affect regulation has possible applications for infants in the NICU and for adult caregivers with serious personality or adjustment difficulties.

Toddler-hood

By the end of the first year, toddlers begin to adopt new strategies to decrease negative arousal. These strategies can include rocking themselves, chewing on objects, or moving away from things that upset them. At two years, toddlers become more capable of actively employing emotion regulation strategies. They can apply certain emotion regulation tactics to influence various emotional states. Additionally, maturation of brain functioning and language and motor skills permits toddlers to manage their emotional responses and levels of arousal more effectively.

Extrinsic emotion regulation remains important to emotional development in toddlerhood. Toddlers can learn ways from their caregivers to control their emotions and behaviours. For example, caregivers help teach self-regulation methods by distracting children from unpleasant events (like a vaccination shot) or helping them understand frightening events.

Childhood

Emotion regulation knowledge becomes more substantial during childhood. For example, children aged six to ten begin to understand display rules. They come to appreciate the contexts in which certain emotional expressions are socially most appropriate and therefore ought to be regulated. For example, children may understand that upon receiving a gift they should display a smile, irrespective of their actual feelings about the gift. During childhood, there is also a trend towards the use of more cognitive emotion regulation strategies, taking the place of more basic distraction, approach, and avoidance tactics.

Regarding the development of emotion dysregulation in children, one robust finding suggests that children who are frequently exposed to negative emotion at home will be more likely to display, and have difficulties regulating, high levels of negative emotion.

Adolescence

Adolescents show a marked increase in their capacities to regulate their emotions, and emotion regulation decision making becomes more complex, depending on multiple factors. In particular, the significance of interpersonal outcomes increases for adolescents. When regulating their emotions, adolescents are therefore likely to take into account their social context. For instance, adolescents show a tendency to display more emotion if they expect a sympathetic response from their peers.

Additionally, spontaneous use of cognitive emotion regulation strategies increases during adolescence, which is evidenced both by self-report data and neural markers.

Adulthood

Social losses increase and health tends to decrease as people age. As people get older their motivation to seek emotional meaning in life through social ties tends to increase. Autonomic responsiveness decreases with age, and emotion regulation skill tends to increase.

Emotional regulation in adulthood can also be examined in terms of positive and negative affectivity. Positive and negative affectivity refers to the types of emotions felt by an individual as well as the way those emotions are expressed. With adulthood comes an increased ability to maintain both high positive affectivity and low negative affectivity “more rapidly than adolescents.” This response to life’s challenges seems to become “automatized” as people progress throughout adulthood. Thus, as individuals age, their capability of self-regulating emotions and responding to their emotions in healthy ways improves.

Additionally, emotional regulation may vary between young adults and older adults. Younger adults have been found to be more successful than older adults in practicing “cognitive reappraisal” to decrease negative internal emotions. On the other hand, older adults have been found to be more successful in the following emotional regulation areas:

Predicting the level of “emotional arousal” in possible situations;
Having a higher focus on positive information rather than negative; and
Maintaining healthy levels of “hedonic well-being” (subjective well-being based on increased pleasure and decreased pain).

Overview of Perspectives

Neuropsychological Perspective

Affective

As people age, their affect – the way they react to emotions – changes, either positively or negatively. Studies show that positive affect increases as a person grows from adolescence to their mid 70s. Negative affect, on the other hand, decreases until the mid 70s. Studies also show that emotions differ in adulthood, particularly affect (positive or negative). Although some studies found that individuals experience less affect as they grow older, other studies have concluded that adults in their middle age experience more positive affect and less negative affect than younger adults. Positive affect was also higher for men than women while the negative affect was higher for women than it was for men and also for single people.

A reason that older people – middle adulthood – might have less negative affect is because they have overcome, “the trials and vicissitudes of youth, they may increasingly experience a more pleasant balance of affect, at least up until their mid-70s”. Positive affect might rise during middle age but towards the later years of life – the 70s – it begins to decline while negative affect also does the same. This might be due to failing health, reaching the end of their lives and the death of friends and relatives.

In addition to baseline levels of positive and negative affect, studies have found individual differences in the time-course of emotional responses to stimuli. The temporal dynamics of emotion regulation, also known as affective chronometry, include two key variables in the emotional response process: rise time to peak emotional response, and recovery time to baseline levels of emotion. Studies of affective chronometry typically separate positive and negative affect into distinct categories, as previous research has shown (despite some correlation) the ability of humans to experience changes in these categories independently of one another. Affective chronometry research has been conducted on clinical populations with anxiety, mood, and personality disorders, but is also utilised as a measurement to test the effectiveness of different therapeutic techniques (including mindfulness training) on emotional dysregulation.

Neurological

The development of functional magnetic resonance imaging has allowed for the study of emotion regulation on a biological level. Specifically, research over the last decade strongly suggests that there is a neural basis. Sufficient evidence has correlated emotion regulation to particular patterns of prefrontal activation. These regions include the orbital prefrontal cortex, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, and the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex. Two additional brain structures that have been found to contribute are the amygdala and the anterior cingulate cortex. Each of these structures are involved in various facets of emotion regulation and irregularities in one or more regions and/or interconnections among them are affiliated with failures of emotion regulation. An implication to these findings is that individual differences in prefrontal activation predict the ability to perform various tasks in aspects of emotion regulation.

Sociological

People intuitively mimic facial expressions; it is a fundamental part of healthy functioning. Similarities across cultures in regards to nonverbal communication has prompted the debate that it is in fact a universal language. It can be argued that emotion regulation plays a key role in the ability to generate the correct responses in social situations. Humans have control over facial expressions both consciously and unconsciously: an intrinsic emotion program is generated as the result of a transaction with the world, which immediately results in an emotional response and usually a facial reaction. It is a well documented phenomenon that emotions have an effect on facial expression, but recent research has provided evidence that the opposite may also be true.

This notion would give rise to the belief that a person may not only control his emotion but in fact influence them as well. Emotion regulation focuses on providing the appropriate emotion in the appropriate circumstances. Some theories allude to the thought that each emotion serves a specific purpose in coordinating organismic needs with environmental demands (Cole, 1994). This skill, although apparent throughout all nationalities, has been shown to vary in successful application at different age groups. In experiments done comparing younger and older adults to the same unpleasant stimuli, older adults were able to regulate their emotional reactions in a way that seemed to avoid negative confrontation. These findings support the theory that with time people develop a better ability to regulate their emotions. This ability found in adults seems to better allow individuals to react in what would be considered a more appropriate manner in some social situations, permitting them to avoid adverse situations that could be seen as detrimental.

Expressive Regulation (in Solitary Conditions)

In solitary conditions, emotion regulation can include a minimization-miniaturization effect, in which common outward expressive patterns are replaced with toned down versions of expression. Unlike other situations, in which physical expression (and its regulation) serve a social purpose (i.e. conforming to display rules or revealing emotion to outsiders), solitary conditions require no reason for emotions to be outwardly expressed (although intense levels of emotion can bring out noticeable expression anyway). The idea behind this is that as people get older, they learn that the purpose of outward expression (to appeal to other people), is not necessary in situations in which there is no one to appeal to. As a result, the level of emotional expression can be lower in these solitary situations.

Stress

The way an individual reacts to stress can directly overlap with their ability to regulate emotion. Although the two concepts differ in a multitude of ways, “both coping [with stress] and emotion regulation involve affect modulation and appraisal processes” that are necessary for healthy relationships and self-identity.

According to Yu. V. Shcherbatykh, emotional stress in situations like school examinations can be reduced by engaging in self-regulating activities prior to the task being performed. To study the influence of self-regulation on mental and physiological processes under exam stress, Shcherbatykh conducted a test with an experimental group of 28 students (of both sexes) and a control group of 102 students (also of both sexes).

In the moments before the examination, situational stress levels were raised in both groups from what they were in quiet states. In the experimental group, participants engaged in three self-regulating techniques (concentration on respiration, general body relaxation, and the creation of a mental image of successfully passing the examination). During the examination, the anxiety levels of the experimental group were lower than that of the control group. Also, the percent of unsatisfactory marks in the experimental group was 1.7 times less than in the control group. From this data, Shcherbatykh concluded that the application of self-regulating actions before examinations helps to significantly reduce levels of emotional strain, which can help lead to better performance results.

Emotion regulation has also been associated with physiological responses to stress during laboratory stress paradigms.

Decision Making

Identification of our emotional self-regulating process can facilitate in the decision-making process. Current literature on emotion regulation identifies that humans characteristically make efforts in controlling emotion experiences. There is then a possibility that our present state emotions can be altered by emotion regulation strategies resulting in the possibility that different regulation strategies could have different decision implications.

Digital Emotion Regulation

Following widespread adoption in the 21st century of digital devices and services for use in everyday life, evidence is mounting that people are increasingly using these tools to manage and regulate moods and emotions. A wide range of digital resources are used for emotion regulation including smartphones, social media, streaming services, online shopping, and videogames. Such spontaneous forms of digital emotion regulation can be distinguished from the use of digital interventions such as smartphone apps that have been explicitly designed to support emotional regulation or teach emotion regulation skills in clinical and non-clinical populations. Digital implementation of emotion regulation strategies can occur at all stages of the process model and in all strategy families, including interpersonal emotion regulation.

Effects of Low Self-Regulation

With a failure in emotion regulation, there is a rise in psychosocial and emotional dysfunctions caused by traumatic experiences due to an inability to regulate emotions. These traumatic experiences typically happen in grade school and are sometimes associated with bullying. Children who can not properly self-regulate express their volatile emotions in a variety of ways, including screaming if they do not have their way, lashing out with their fists, throwing objects (such as chairs), or bullying other children. Such behaviours often elicit negative reactions from the social environment, which, in turn, can exacerbate or maintain the original regulation problems over time, a process termed cumulative continuity. These children are more likely to have conflict-based relationships with their teachers and other children. This can lead to more severe problems such as an impaired ability to adjust to school and predicts school dropout many years later. Children who fail to properly self-regulate grow as teenagers with more emerging problems. Their peers begin to notice this “immaturity”, and these children are often excluded from social groups and teased and harassed by their peers. This “immaturity” certainly causes some teenagers to become social outcasts in their respective social groups, causing them to lash out in angry and potentially violent ways. Being teased or being an outcast in childhood is especially damaging because it could lead to psychological symptoms such as depression and anxiety (in which dysregulated emotions play a central role), which, in turn, could lead to more peer victimisation. This is why it is recommended to foster emotional self-regulation in children as early as possible.

Occupational Therapy in Schools

Occupational therapists (OTs) are integrated educators in most public and private schools across the United States. They are trained in mental health and activity analysis to assess the needs of their clients. OTs and students work together to create meaningful and healthy habits for stress management, social skills, emotional labelling, coping strategies, awareness, problem-solving, self-monitoring, judgement, emotional control, and others in the school and home environment. OTs can complete formal assessments for emotional regulation and treat in a client-centred manner for each student. In addition, they can create individualised home programmes for carryover with their families. For example, OTs can work with students to engage in the occupational therapist-developed curriculum The Zones of Regulation, which utilises evidence-based knowledge, formal assessment, and in-classroom treatment to improve self-regulation of emotional behaviours and create long-lasting changes in habits.

Early childhood access to education on emotional regulation mitigates risk factors for increased anxiety, depression, and negative behaviours. It allows the student to create healthy habits for school and home environments. Children should be able to learn to regulate their feelings for full participation in activities, including social skills, play, sports, and school.

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What is Meant by “Fake It Till You Make It”?

Published on 05/24/2024 by Andrew Marshall2 Comments

Introduction

“Fake it till you make it” (or “Fake it until you make it”) is an aphorism that suggests that by imitating confidence, competence, and an optimistic mindset, a person can realise those qualities in their real life and achieve the results they seek.

The phrase is first attested some time before 1973. The earliest reference to a similar phrase occurs in the Simon & Garfunkel song “Fakin’ It”, released in 1968 as a single and also on their Bookends album. Simon sings, “And I know I’m fakin’ it, I’m not really makin’ it.”

Similar advice has been offered by a number of writers over time:

Action seems to follow feeling, but really action and feeling go together; and by regulating the action, which is under the more direct control of the will, we can indirectly regulate the feeling, which is not. Thus the sovereign voluntary path to cheerfulness, if our spontaneous cheerfulness be lost, is to sit up cheerfully, to look round cheerfully, and to act and speak as if cheerfulness were already there. If such conduct does not make you soon feel cheerful, nothing else on that occasion can. So to feel brave, act as if we were brave, use all our will to that end, and a courage-fit will very likely replace the fit of fear. ( William James, “The Gospel of Relaxation”, On Vital Reserves, 1922).

In the law of attraction movement, “act as if you already have it”, or simply “act as if”, is a central concept:

How do you get yourself to a point of believing? Start make-believing. Be like a child, and make-believe. Act as if you have it already. As you make-believe, you will begin to believe you have received. ( Rhonda Byrne, The Secret, 2006).

In Psychology

In the 1920s, Alfred Adler developed a therapeutic technique that he called “acting as if”, asserting that “if you want a quality, act as if you already have it”. This strategy gave his clients an opportunity to practice alternatives to dysfunctional behaviours. Adler’s method is still used today and is often described as role play.

“Faking it till you make it” is a psychological tool discussed in neuroscientific research. A 1988 experiment by Fritz Strack claimed to show that mood can be improved by holding a pen between the user’s teeth to force a smile, but a posterior experiment failed to replicate it, due to which Strack was awarded the Ig Nobel Prize for psychology in 2019. A later 2022 study about strategies to counter emotional distress found forced smiling not more effective than forced neutral expressions and other strategies of emotional regulation.

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What is Emotion Work?

Published on 05/23/2024 by Andrew MarshallLeave a comment

Introduction

Emotion work is understood as the art of trying to change in degree or quality an emotion or feeling.

Emotion work may be defined as the management of one’s own feelings, or work done in an effort to maintain a relationship; there is dispute as to whether emotion work is only work done regulating one’s own emotion, or extends to performing the emotional work for others.

Hochschild

Arlie Russell Hochschild, who introduced the term in 1979, distinguished emotion work – unpaid emotional work that a person undertakes in private life – from emotional labour: emotional work done in a paid work setting. Emotion work has use value and occurs in situations in which people choose to regulate their emotions for their own non-compensated benefit (e.g. in their interactions with family and friends). By contrast, emotional labour has exchange value because it is traded and performed for a wage.

In a later development, Hochschild distinguished between two broad types of emotion work, and among three techniques of emotion work. The two broad types involve evocation and suppression of emotion, while the three techniques of emotion work that Hochschild describes are cognitive, bodily and expressive.

However, the concept (if not the term) has been traced back as far as Aristotle: as Aristotle saw, the problem is not with emotionality, but with the appropriateness of emotion and its expression.

Examples

Examples of emotion work include showing affection, apologizing after an argument, bringing up problems that need to be addressed in an intimate relationship or any kind of interpersonal relationship, and making sure the household runs smoothly.

Emotion work also involves the orientation of self/others to accord with accepted norms of emotional expression: emotion work is often performed by family members and friends, who put pressure on individuals to conform to emotional norms. Arguably, then, an individual’s ultimate obeisance and/or resistance to aspects of emotion regimes are made visible in their emotion work.

Cultural norms often imply that emotion work is reserved for females. There is certainly evidence to the effect that the emotional management that women and men do is asymmetric; and that in general, women come into a marriage groomed for the role of emotional manager.

Criticism

The social theorist Victor Jeleniewski Seidler argues that women’s emotion work is merely another demonstration of false consciousness under patriarchy, and that emotion work, as a concept, has been adopted, adapted or criticised to such an extent that it is in danger of becoming a “catch-all-cliché”.

More broadly, the concept of emotion work has itself been criticised as a wide over-simplification of mental processes such as repression and denial which continually occur in everyday life.

Literary Analogues

Rousseau in The New Heloise suggests that the attempt to master instrumentally one’s affective life always results in a weakening and eventually the fragmentation of one’s identity, even if the emotion work is performed at the demand of ethical principles.

This page is based on the copyrighted Wikipedia article < https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emotion_work >; it is used under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA). You may redistribute it, verbatim or modified, providing that you comply with the terms of the CC-BY-SA.

What is Emotional Competence?

Published on 02/29/2024 by Andrew Marshall1 Comment

Introduction

Emotional competence and emotional capital refer to the essential set of personal and social skills to recognise, interpret, and respond constructively to emotions in oneself and others. The term implies an ease around others and determines one’s ability to effectively and successfully lead and express.

Definition

Emotional competence refers to an important set of personal and social skills for identifying, interpreting, and constructively responding to emotions in oneself and others. The term implies ease in getting along with others and determines one’s ability to lead and express effectively and successfully. Psychologists define emotional competence as the ability to monitor one’s own and others’ feelings and emotions and to use this information to guide one’s thinking and actions.

Description

Emotional competence is another term for emotional intelligence. It describes a person’s ability to express their emotions completely freely, and it comes from emotional intelligence, the ability to recognise emotions. Individual’s emotional competence is considered to be an important predictor of their ability to adapt to their environment, and it refers primarily to their ability to identification, understanding, expression, regulation, and use their own and other’s emotions. Emotional competence is often referred to in social contexts, and is considered a capability of recognising their own emotions, as well as those of others and expressing them in socially acceptable ways. Competence is the level of skill at which a person interacts constructively with others. This personal emotional capacity is based on a person’s perception of their emotions and how they affect others, as well as the ability to maintain control and adaptation of emotions.

Brief History

In 1999, Carolyn Saarni wrote a book named The Development of Emotional Competence. Saarni believed that emotional abilities are not innate, but are cultivated and developed through children’s interactions with others, especially family members and peers. Saarni defined emotional capacity as the functional ability of humans to achieve goals after experiencing an emotion-eliciting encounter. She defined emotion as a component of self-efficacy, and she described the use of emotions as a set of skills that lead to the development of emotional capacity.

Examples

Understand others: To be aware of other people’s feelings and perspectives
Develop others: Be aware of the development needs of others and enhance their capabilities
Service orientation: Anticipate, recognise and meet customer needs
Leverage diversity: Nurture opportunities through different types of people

Intelligence Quotient and Emotional Quotient

Intelligence quotient (IQ): Is a measure of person’s reasoning ability, introduced by the German psychologist Louis William Stern as a qualitative method of assessing individual differences.
Emotional quotient (EQ): Is a measure of self-emotional control ability, introduced in American psychologist Peter Salovey in 1991. The emotional quotient is commonly referred to in the field of psychology as emotional intelligence(also known as emotional competence or emotional skills). IQ reflects a person’s cognitive and observational abilities and how quickly they can use reasoning to solve problems. EQ, on the other hand, is an index of a person’s ability to manage their own emotions and to manage the emotions of others.

Daniel Goleman’s Model

In Daniel Goleman’s Emotional Intelligence, he introduced components of EQ:

Self-awareness: precise awareness of self emotions
Self-regulation: controlled emotional expression
Motivation: emotional self-motivation
Empathy: adept at modulating the emotional responses of others and helping them to express their emotions
Social skills: excellent communication skills
Personal Competence

Self-Awareness – Know one’s internal states, preferences, resources and intuitions. The competencies in this category include:
- Emotional Awareness – Recognize one’s emotions and their effects
- Accurate Self-Assessment – Know one’s strengths and limits
- Self-Confidence – A strong sense of one’s self-worth and abilities
- Self-Regulation – Manage one’s internal states, impulses and resources.
Social Competence:
- Empathy – Awareness of others’ feelings, needs and concerns. The competencies in this category include:
  - Understand Others – Sense others’ feelings and perspectives
  - Develop Others – Sense others’ development needs and bolstering their abilities
  - Service Orientation – Anticipate, recognise and meet customers’ needs
  - Leverage Diversity – Cultivate opportunities through different kinds of people
  - Political Awareness – Read a group’s emotional currents and power relationships
Emotional intelligence

Emotional Intelligence and the Four-Branch Model

Psychologists see emotional competence as a continuum, ranging from lower levels of emotional competence to perform mental functions to complex emotional competence for personal self-control and management. The higher levels of emotional competence, on the other hand, comprise four branches:

Perceive emotions in oneself and others accurately
Use emotions to facilitate thinking
Understand emotions, emotional language, and the signals conveyed by emotions
Manage emotions so as to attain specific goals

Each branch describes a set of skills that make up overall emotional intelligence, ranging from low to high complexity. For example, perceiving emotions usually begins with the ability to perceive basic emotions from faces and vocal tones, and may progress to the accurate perception of emotional blends and the capture and understanding of facial micro-expressions.

Assertiveness

Building up emotional competence is one way of learning to handle manipulative or passive-aggressive behaviour in which the manipulator exploits the feelings of another to try to get what they want.

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