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ASP week 1: an introduction to affective science and psychopathology
(1) Gross & Jazaieri (2014)
(2) Nolen-Hoeksema & Watkins (2011)
(3) Insel & Cuthbert (2015)
Door verschillende soorten emoties en de verschillende soorten psychische aandoeningen is het
moeilijk om precies te achterhalen welke problemen met emoties en emotie regulatie de psychische
aandoeningen karakteriseren.
Affective processes involve an evaluation of a situation as salient and thereby triggering an
evolutionary adaptive response. Affective processes consist of: (1) subjective components (negative or
positive feeling), (2) behavioral components (motor expression or inclination), and (3) physiological
components (brain and body).
Emotions are part of affective processes event-focus relates to what extent an affective process is
triggered or coupled directly to an event and embodiment is the bodily response to an affective
process. The relation between affective processes and psychopathology is the clearest in affective
disorders.
Emotions: arise when attending to situations and appraises it as being immediately relevant to
currently active goals.
Emotional reactivity: experiential, behavioral, and physiological responses as emotion arises.
Emotion regulation: occurs when one activates – either implicitly or explicitly – a goal to
influence the emotion generative process. Emotion regulation depends on the context.
There are 3 common factors for adaptive regulation:
(1) awareness of emotions: emotional awareness enhances the range of strategies and flexibility of
using them.
(2) goals: increasing/decreasing the intensity of emotion experience, expression, or physiology.
(3) strategies: executed to achieve the emotion-regulation goals.
Modal model (James Gross): you encounter a
situation, then you have to pay attention to this
situation because it is somehow relevant to you,
then you appraise it, which means that you evaluate
it (do you feel negative or positive about the
situation), and then there is the adaptive response.
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Families of emotion regulation processes that have distinct impact on the emotion-generative process:
(1) Situation selection: influencing whether one will encounter a situation that is likely to generate an
emotion that is desired or not desired.
(2) Situation modification: alter external features of the environment in an effort to influence one’s
emotions.
(3) Attentional deployment: directing attention in such a way to alter emotional response.
(4) Cognitive change: revise the meaning of a situation to influence emotion.
(5) Response modulation: influencing emotional reactivity.
Important cause of many problematic patterns of emotions is emotion dysregulation due to either
emotion regulation failures or emotion dysregulation.
2 categories of affective disturbance:
Emotional reactivity characterized by emotional intensity (over- and underreactions),
emotional duration (too short or too long), emotional frequency (too little or frequent), and
emotion type (inappropriate).
Emotion regulation characterized by awareness (over or under), goals (excessive
dampening or searching for the peak), and strategies (overuse or wrong implementations).
Emotional reactivity:
Problematic emotional Refers to either too large (hyperreactivity) or too small (hypo-activity) response, or both.
intensity SAD: overreaction of fear in social situations.
ASPD: underreaction of regret.
MDD: overreaction of negative emotions and a underreaction of positive emotions.
Problematic emotional Occur when emotions are either too short or too long for a particular situation, or both.
duration Specific phobias: extended duration of negative emotions.
PTSD: too brief emotional responses (due to hypo-activity in brain structures
associated with emotional experience).
BPD: too long and too short emotional response.
Problematic emotion Emotions are experienced too frequently of too infrequently.
frequency IED: impulsive aggressive outbursts happen too frequent.
Dysthymia (persistent depressive disorder): infrequency of positive emotions.
ASD: problematic frequency (e.g., temper tantrums) and a problematic infrequency
(e.g., empathy).
Problematic emotion The emotion type is not appropriate for the context.
type Schizophrenia: emotions are reported that do not match the stimuli.
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Emotion regulation:
Problematic emotional Too much (hyperawareness) or too little awareness (hypo-awareness).
awareness PD: hyperawareness of bodily changes and each change is interpreted as a cue that
something terrible is going to happen.
Bulimia Nervosa: alexithymia (inability to recognize, describe, and communicate
emotions), which makes emotion-regulation difficult.
Problematic emotion- Emotion-regulation goals refer to what the individual would like to achieve with regard to
regulation goals the emotion. Failure to appropriately consider the balance of short- and long-term concerns
may lead to problematic emotion-regulation goals.
BD1: no interest in downregulating the manic state and therefor, less regard for
adverse longer-term consequences of continued goal pursuit.
Problematic emotion- Emotion-regulation strategies refer to the ways in which individuals attempt to achieve their
regulation strategies emotion-regulatory goals. There are 3 relevant factors when choosing strategies: (1) overall
effectiveness, (2) availability of resources, and (3) intensity of the emotion.
Agoraphobia: overuse situation selection (avoidance).
2 components of the implementations of strategies are important: (1) goal shielding
(protecting the emotion-regulatory goals from other competing goals), and (2) goal
flexibility (adjusting the emotion-regulation goal if needed as the situation changes).
ADHD: difficulty with consistently implementing emotion-regulation goals.
It is important to differentiate between problems with emotions and emotion regulation that are part of
a diagnostic criteria, and the same problems where they are not part of the criteria. Emotional
symptoms can overlap between disorders. Different disorders may manifest some of the same
underlying emotion or emotion-regulation difficulties, while disorders that are quite similar to each
other may be manifestations of quite different underlying causes.
Therapies that target problems with emotion and emotion-regulation are: (1) CBT, (2) DBT, (3) ACT,
(4) emotion-focused therapy, and (5) emotion-regulation therapy.
Challenges in treatment: (1) clarification of the mechanisms of actions within each of these treatments,
and (2) improvement of existing treatment furthermore, effective treatments are not perfect and may
be difficult to access.
Efficacy of psychological and pharmacological treatment for mental disorder is around 50%.
Clinical heterogeneity: psychiatric syndromes are hugely divers.
Lack of mechanistic understanding: precludes tailored treatment.
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Transdiagnostic models seek to identify fundamental processes underlying multiple, usually comorbid,
psychopathologies. Current transdiagnostic models fail to explain: (1) multifinality, and (2) divergent
trajectories.
Mid 20th century models of processes of thought that underlie most forms of psychopathology.
1980 DSM-III
21st century transdiagnostic process (processes that may play a causal role in multiple disorders).
Advantages of transdiagnostic perspective:
Focus on fundamental dysfunctional processes which bring us closer to understanding the true
nature of psychopathology.
Helps us understand the comorbidity between disorders.
Assessment and training could be more parsimoniously focused on transdiagnostic factors
related to 2 or more disorders (treatment development).
Disadvantages of transdiagnostic perspective:
Transdiagnostic models generally do a better job explaining multifinality than divergent
trajectories.
They don’t address phenotypic plasticity, wherein the patterns of symptoms morphs across the
life course, often unpredictably, especially during the transitions through childhood and
adolescence.
More work is needed to specify the mechanisms linking some more distal transdiagnostic
factors to the disorders they predict.
Intermediate phenotypes are neurocognitive and affective processes, such as learning, memory,
attention, stress sensitivity, and emotional reactivity that are causally linked to the development of
symptoms.
Endophenotypes are intermediate phenotypes that are heritable.
Heuristic for developing transdiagnostic models of psychopathology: argues that transdiagnostic
factors can be organized in those that are more distal to psychopathology and those that are more
proximal to psychopathology.
Distal: environmental and congenital biological factors. Does not directly cause symptoms but only
influences symptoms via mediating proximal factors. Exposure to a distal risk factor does not
necessarily mean that subsequent psychopathology will follow. The distal risk factors “happen” to an
individual/are independent of actions of the individual and they set stage for proximal risk factors.
