Don’t miss THIS EMOTIONAL LIFE – Premiering on PBS January 4, 2010 . This 3-part series represents what television does best. It opens a window into real lives, exploring ways to improve our social relationships, cope with emotional issues, and become more positive, resilient individuals. Viewers are taken on an in-depth tour of the science of human emotions in an effort to truly understand what makes us tick. Every day, it seems, some new study reveals a previously hidden epidemic of depression, anxiety or other psychological problem. At the root of the confusion lie three key questions: what is biological, what is cultural and what can we do when things go wrong? After centuries of assuming that we humans, with our mysterious minds and messy emotions, were just not fit subjects for study, science has developed some startling insights into human nature. Using the latest cutting edge research from neuroscience, startling observations from social science and experts in psychology, THIS EMOTIONAL LIFE explores the biological need for social relationships, how to manage negative feelings and the search for greater happiness, unveiling a new understanding of what it means to be human.
We show how being “jilted”—that is, being thwarted from obtaining a desired outcome—can concurrently increase desire to obtain the outcome, but reduce its actual attractiveness. Thus, people can come to both want something more and like it less. Two experiments illustrate such disjunctions following jilting experiences. In Experiment 1, participants who failed to win a prize were willing to pay more for it than those who won it, but were also more likely to trade it away when they ultimately obtained it. In Experiment 2, failure to obtain an expected reward led to increased choice, but also negatively biased evaluation, of an item that was merely similar to that reward. Such disjunctions were exhibited particularly by individuals low in intensity of felt affect, a finding supporting an emotional basis for relative harmonization of wanting and liking. These results demonstrate how dissociable psychological subsystems for wanting and liking can be driven in opposing directions.
An investigation published in the current issue of Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics explores the link between child sexual abuse and inability to express emotions in adulthood.
Alexithymia, a clinical condition typified by a reported inability to identify or describe one’s emotions, is associated with various forms of psychopathology, including depression. Highly alexithymic (HA) outpatients are more likely to be female, less likely to have children and are characterized by more somatic-affective symptoms of depression and interpersonal aloofness. [continue reading…]
