Response 4.22.07

This week our readings have shed light on human’s ability to regulate their own emotions, and also on the different connections between emotions and health, both physical and psychological. The first article about emotion regulation by James Gross was titled an “Integrative Review” because the author used the pages to stress the importance of the fact that emotion regulation spans many domains and is multi-faceted. First of all, Gross explains the distinction between emotions, emotion episodes, and moods. An emotion, in his view, is a fleeting feeling, generated by an emotional cue, evaluated, evokes an emotion response tendency, gets modulated, and becomes an emotion response. An emotion episode, however, includes “plots”, and “scripts”, and occurs over a generally longer period of time. They include all the events that unfold that contribute to an “emotional scene”. A mood, then, is a seemingly more relaxed, general state, subject to fluctuation. Gross describes moods as being “diffuse”, biasing “cognition more than they bias action”.

Because people spend most of their adult lives regulating their emotions, curtailing them to different social and professional scenes, Gross believes it’s imperative that we understand the intricacies of emotion regulation. Within the psychoanalytic tradition, there are two modes of emotion regulation: “problem-focused” coping, which is aimed at solving the problem, and “emotion-focused” coping, with the goal of decreasing the experience of negative emotion. Both the experience of emotion and their expression may be regulated, and both positive and negative emotions can be regulated. The process can be either automatic or controlled, for instance when someone has learned that in certain social situations or with certain people different displays of emotion are appropriate and others are not, and therefore don’t have to think about regulating them, but it comes automatically, perhaps through conditioned social cues. Gross describes in details the processes of regulation, which occur at different stages during an event. They are: situation selection, situation modulation, attention deployment, cognitive change, and response modulation.

These processes work to change the way people think about their emotional state, and also alter their expression of the emotions they feel. I think it’s important to observe that although we may regulate our expression of emotion, it does not necessarily change our experience of emotion. A lot of cases of depression and anxiety are due to the misalignment of emotion experience and emotion expression.

The Intuition and Autism article by Allman et al described the Von Economo neurons (VENs) which develop in a person between the ages of one to four years old which are involved in our early judgment/intuitive feelings of people and situations. The right hemisphere is specialized for social situations, and it is in this hemisphere where VENs are found. The authors of this article were specifically looking at the effect of a lack of VENs in autistic individuals, whose difficulties include impaired ability to interact in social situations. They believe that VEN development is impaired in autistic children, especially owing to early development period of the neurons.

Eric Kandel’s article “A New Intellectual Framework for Psychiatry” described the evolution of psychoanalysis up until the present, and the different stages and influences it has had since. Psychoanalysis used to have an aversion to neuro science because neuro science was considered to be faulty, and therefore a merger wasn’t considered to be a necessary step. The 1960’s were a turning point for psychoanalysis, however, with the use of pharmacological drugs in conjunction with psychiatric intervention. Kendal’s main point in the paper is to stress the importance of the union between psychiatry and biology, stating that he hopes that in the near future biological and psychiatric practice will so heavily intertwined that psychiatrists will be almost as knowledgeable about the biology of the brain as neurologists. He hopes for a “rapprochement”, where people will realize more fully that “all functions of the mind reflect functions of the brain”, and that there are critical biological explanations and underpinnings for all social actions. He also points to the misuse of scientific/biological information, which is also a very important thing to note.

The Alder et al article about socioeconomic status and health described the overlooked intricacies of SES, and delineated its multi-faceted nature. They described it as a major risk factor, especially when all its factors are taken into consideration. One of the main points made about SES and health was the influence of years of education on health later in life. “The more years of education, the lower is the ratio of observed to expected deaths”. Education is also a factor in the rates of disease. One possible explanation is the “drift hypothesis”, where illness influences SES, rather than SES on illness. This could be an explanation because when someone has a debilitating illness, it may hinder his or her ability to work, which in turn makes it harder to pay for proper health care. Another explanation is that SES affects biological processes that, in turn, influence health status. Along these lines, individual health behaviors also play a role, such as smoking, physical inactivity, poor diet, and substance abuse. The authors also took into consideration the impact of stress on SES and health, noting that generally people with a higher SES encounter less negative events that would generate stress, and also they have more outlets and means of dealing with whatever stress comes about. People with a lower SES generally have less access to social and psychological resources to cope with stressful events, and “thus are more susceptible to subjective experience of stress”.

Lerner et al also discussed the issue of stress in their article “Facial Expressions of Emotion Reveal Neuroendocrine and Cardiovascular Stress Response”. Looking specifically at fear responses and anger/disgust responses, they found that fear displays were related to elevated cortisol (a stress hormone) levels. In anger/disgust displays, however, there were lower levels of cortisol present. When an individual displayed anger/disgust when subjected to a stressful situation, the researchers assumed that the lower levels of cortisol, and lower stress level, were due to the fact that anger and disgust responses are typically associated with asserting control over the situation, thereby reducing the amount of stress felt. In fear, however, the stress level is higher because the individual displaying fear feels out of control of the situation, and therefore holds a pessimistic view of the outcome. In anger/disgust display individuals, the foreseen controllability and/or predictability of the situation reveals a more optimistic outlook.