Embodied Hot Cognitive Vulnerability To Emotional Disorders

The way we make sense of emotional situations has long been considered a foundation for the construction of our emotional experiences. Sometimes emotional meanings become distorted and so do our emotional experiences become disturbed. In the last decades, an embodied construction of emotional meanings has emerged. In this book, the embodied simulation framework is introduced for distorted emotional and motivational appraisals such as irrational beliefs, focusing on hyper-reactive emotional and motivational neural embodied simulations as core processes of cognitive vulnerability to emotional disorders. By embodying distorted emotional cognition we can extend the traditional views of the development of distorted emotional appraisals beyond learning from stress-sensitization process. Conclusions for the conceptualization of distorted emotional appraisals and treatment implications are discussed. Distorted emotional cognitions such as rigid thinking (I should succeed), awfulizing (It’s awful) and low frustration tolerance (I can’t stand it) are both vulnerabilities to emotional disorders and targets of psychotherapy. In this book, I argue that distorted emotional cognitions which act as proximal vulnerability to emotional disorders are embodied in hyper-reactive neural states involved in dysregulated emotions. Traditionally, excessive negative knowledge has been considered the basis of the cognitive vulnerability to emotional disorders. I suggest that the differences in the affective embodiments of distorted cognition confer its vulnerability status, rather than the differences in dysfunctional knowledge. I propose that negative knowledge and stress-induced brain changes conflate each other in building cognitive vulnerability to disturbed emotion. This model of distorted emotional cognition suggests new integration of learning and medication interventions in psychotherapy. This book is an important contribution to the literature given that a new model for the conceptualization of cognitive vulnerability is presented which extends the way we integrate biological, behavioral, and memory interventions in cognitive restructuring. This work is part of a larger project on embodied clinical cognition.

Emotional disorders such as anxiety, depression, and dysfunctional patterns of eating are clearly among the most devastating and prevalent confronting practitioners, and they have received much attention from researchers--in personality, social, cognitive, and developmental psychology, as well as in clinical psychology and psychiatry. A major recent focus has been cognitive vulnerability, which seems to set the stage for recurrences of symptoms and episodes. In the last five years there has been a rapid proliferation of studies. In this book, leading experts present the first broad synthesis of what we have now learned about the nature, of cognitive factors that seem to play a crucial role in creating and maintaining vulnerability across the spectrum of emotional disorders. An introductory chapter considers theory and research design and methodology and constructs a general conceptual framework for understanding and studying the relationships between developmental and cognitive variables and later risk, and the difference between distal cognitive antecedents of disorders (e.g. depressive inferential styles, dysfunctional attitudes) and proximal ones (e.g. schema activation or inferences). Subsequent chapters are organized into three sections, on mood, anxiety, and eating disorders. Each section ends with an integrative overview chapter that offers both incisive commentary and insightful suggestions for further systematic research. A rich resource for all those professionally concerned with these problems, Cognitive Vulnerability to Emotional Disorders advances both clinical science and clinical practice.

Recurrence of depressive episodes is not uncommon, even after successful treatment. What makes some people more vulnerable than others to this devastating disorder? Do depressive individuals have characteristic thinking and reasoning styles? By what means can cognitive antecedents to affective disorders be identified at different stages in the lifespan, and how can the risks they represent be mitigated? An important resource for anyone who seeks to understand or treat depression, this volume synthesizes the most current research and theory on cognitive vulnerability. Covering methodological, theoretical, and empirical issues, the authors review cognitive theories of depression; explicate and assess the vulnerability approach to psychopathology; and formulate an integrative view of the key proximal and distal antecedents of depression in adults.

There has been an explosion of interest in applying the methods of experimental cognitive psychology to help understand emotional disorder, especially most common anxiety & depressive disorders. This book reviews this work.

This text reviews the topics which fall under the umbrella of cognition and emotion.

How does a person experience emotions? What is the relationship between the experiential and biological dimensions of emotions? How do emotions figure in a person's relation to the world and to other people? How do emotions feature in human vulnerability to mental illness? Do they play a significant role in the fragile balance between mental health and illness? If emotions are in fact significant, how are they relevant for treatment? Emotions and personhood are important notions within the field of mental health care. What they are, and how they are related though, is less evident. This book provides a framework for understanding this relationship. The authors argue for an account of emotions and personhood that attempts to understand human emotions from the combined approach of philosophy and psychopathology, taking its models particularly from hermeneutical phenomenology and from dialectical psychopathology. Within the book, the authors develop a basic set of concepts for understanding what emotional experience means for a human person, with the assumption that human emotional experience is fragile - a fact which entails vulnerability to mental disturbance. Drawing on research from psychiatry, psychopathology, philosophy, and neuroscience, the book will be valuable for both students and researchers in these disciplines, and more broadly, within the field of mental health.

The study of emotional disorders from the standpoint of cognitive psychology is new. Presents the state of knowledge in the discipline, drawing together information otherwise widely scattered throughout the literature and covers current speculations about causation and mechanism. Emphasis is on disorders of anxiety and depression, patients' biases in information processing, experimental paradigms which work (and those which don't), interpreting the phenomenology of the emotionally disordered, the relation between conscious and nonconscious processing.