mugilakil
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12.23.05 (2 years ago)
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Emotions as Descriptors of Contingencies of Reinforcement
Recent social psychological research findings suggest that verbal reports of specific emotions suggest specific antecedent conditions, action tendencies and reinforcing consequences. Emotions can be differentiated by whether the eliciting event represents something desirable or undesirable and is located in the past or in the future (e.g., fear). Furthermore, if the event was in the past, a further consideration is whether it was caused by a deliberate act by another person, was accidental, or was a self action (e.g., anger vs. frustration vs. guilt, shame, or embarrassment). Furthermore, emotional behaviors are followed by natural consequences similar to the endpoints of a behavior systems mode. For example, the action tendencies of anger converge on a goal of retribution. The simplified account below should help the therapist to understand how a patient's verbal report of emotional responses reflects that patients life situations.
Fear and Relief
Verbal descriptions of fear-inducing situations indicate that the unconditional stimulus for fear is an undesirable event in the future signaled by a conditional warning stimulus in the present. Characterized by the action tendencies of avoiding, freezing, or running away, fear is accompanied by autonomic symptoms such as heart palpitations. The emotional expression of fear (e.g., fear vocalizations and facial expressions) tends to elicit vicarious fear reactions in others—including the therapists when accompanying patients are undergoing exposure treatments. Successful escape behaviors tend to be accompanied by a feeling of relief. From an operant perspective, the feeling of relief is a marker for negative reinforcement. Therefore, for patients with agoraphobia, a history of many episodes of relief suggests a history of frequent negatively reinforced escape behaviors. The experience of relief may lead to sensitization rather than desensitization.
Sadness and Joy
Joy marks the attainment of an endpoint of an appetitive behavioral mode. Depending on its intensity, joy tends to be signaled by the behavior of smiling, laughing, jumping up and down, or dancing. (Such behaviors are commonly displayed or enacted by the winners in game shows on television.) Conversely, sadness implies a situation in which the positive reinforcer is no longer available. Behavioral models of depression postulate that depressed individuals do not receive enough positive reinforcement. The action tendency for sadness is giving up. Display of sadness tends to elicit helping behaviors that may restore the lost reinforcer.
Anger
Past undesirable events deliberately caused by another person, such as receipt of punishment, is the primary stimulus for anger. The difference between anger and frustration is that anger is evoked by a deliberate act by another person, whereas with frustration, the event was an accident. Patients with chronic medical disorders should have ample reasons to report frustration. In addition, they may be angry with their physicians for not helping them enough or at the opposing party in a workman's compensation scenario. The action tendency for anger is hitting. The goal associated with anger is punishment of the offender. (However, this punishment is likely to be reciprocated in a coercive escalation.)
Disgust
Disgust is a specific emotional response to decayed animal matter or body waste. It seems to be most closely associated with the olfactory sensory modality. Disgust thus may serve a principal function of avoiding ingestion of harmful substances, and it supports hygienic behaviors of various kinds. A variant of disgust is also involved in a sexual rejection system in which an individual does not want to be touched by a pursuer. Disgusting stimuli follow a special logic called the law of sympathetic magic. For example, the disgust-eliciting function from a stimulus can be transferred to other stimuli that were in physical contact with it or are similar to it in other ways. This logic is also observed in many patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder who avoid touching door knobs touched by others and engage in excessive cleaning behaviors. Blood and injury phobias and phobias of animals of the creeping or crawling type constitute disgust responses rather than fear responses. The distinction has practical importance in that the eliciting stimuli are unconditional, rather than conditional, stimuli.
Shame, Embarrassment, and Guilt
Shame, embarrassment, and guilt are three self-conscious emotions for which the individual's own behavior is the antecedent condition. They can be conceptualized as modes in the dominance/submission system or a larger affiliative behavior system. These emotions reflect various ways of regaining acceptance by the group after an infraction. In guilt, the stimulus is a specific act that caused harm to another person. The action tendency for guilt is undoing and perhaps self-punishment. The undoing aspect can be constructive and lead to conflict resolution. Show of guilt might have a function of preventing punishment by others. For example, criminals may get lighter sentences if they show remorse.
Shame occurs in response to humiliation, or publicly revealed substandard performance. The expression of shame, such as hiding one's face, reflects an action tendency of submitting or hiding. Shame is also related to anger; that is, having one's shameful acts exposed may belong to the class of anger-inducing events. Individuals who report shameful experiences (i.e., shame-prone individuals) tend to be more aggressive in anger-inducing situations than individuals who are guilt prone; the latter tend to use conflict-resolution strategies instead.
Embarrassment occurs when an individual violates a social convention in front of an audience. Stimuli that reliably elicit embarrassment include seeing oneself singing on a video tape, seeing someone else get embarrassed, being the target for teasing, and being praised too effusively. The expression of embarrassment includes a controlled smile, averting one's gaze, and blushing and is thought to have an affiliative function. For example, the blushing response, being only skin deep, is physiologically similar to the blush that occurs in sexual presentations. The natural consequences for embarrassment include sympathy, humor, and forgiveness.
Surprise
Surprise occurs when something that was expected did not occur or when something that was not expected did occur. As discussed above in the section on Pavlovian conditioning, such surprisingness is necessary for conditioning or learning to occur. For example, if an agoraphobic entering a feared situation is unpleasantly surprised by the high intensity of the anxiety response, sensitization might occur. Pleasant surprises, on the other hand, are conducive to desensitization.
Feelings About Feelings
Emotional responses can serve as stimuli for secondary emotional responses. For example, an individual who has a childhood history of losing fights may be fearful of getting angry. Fear of fear tends to develop when the fear responses interfere with task performance. For example, musicians with stage fright fear the effects that being fearful will have on their performance. Similarly, fear of blushing may contribute to the development of social avoidance behaviors. Individuals often attempt to cope with fears of emotions by suppressing the emotional complex. However, this only leads to frustration that further compounds the problem. The reader will recognize this scenario as one leading to emotional avoidance, a target behavior suggesting a treatment-approach based on acceptance.
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