User:I'mDory/Emotional expression

Appraisal Model

The appraisal model supports the idea that emotions are not solely positive or negative attitudes towards an attitude object, but they are motivated states that drive action. They take priority over any other behaviours and mediate physiological responses to stimuli, which further motivates us to terminate or maintain those stimuli. For example, if you encounter an unfair situation, you would act on it to terminate the unfairness. According to appraisal theory, the reason for your action is your motivated state to stop the unfair treatment, which we call emotionExisting studies also demonstrated that whether a behaviour is through autonomous or controlled motivation depends on the intensity and context of the underlying emotion.

Emotion regulation

[edit] Regulation is an active, goal-oriented process that aims to manage emotional responses. Ways of doing this include cognitive reappraisal (interpreting a situation in positive terms) and expressive suppression (masking signs of inner emotional states). The extended process model of emotion regulation outlines several stages: identifying the need to regulate, selecting appropriate strategies, implementing those strategies and monitoring their effectiveness over time. While cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression can be effective, complications in any stage can contribute to emotional dysregulation, which is associated with various mental health conditions, such as anxiety and depression.

Emotional dysregulation is also closely linked to trauma, particularly in children and adolescents. Research suggests that youth with histories of trauma are significantly more likely to experience challenges in emotion regulation, which can manifest as heightened emotional lability, aggression or difficulty calming down after stress. Normal development processes are often disrupted, including the ability to process and express emotions effectively. Trauma-informed approaches have been shown to help address these issues by targeting both emotional dysregulation and the underlying trauma triggers. The presence of protective factors, like supportive caregivers or stable environments, can help lessen the severity of emotional dysregulation in trauma-exposed youth, highlighting the role of both environmental and individual factors in the regulation process.

Disorders

In the context of the extended process model of emotion regulation, difficulties in any of the stages (i.e. identification, selection, implementation and monitoring) can significantly contribute to the development of various disorders, as mentioned earlier. In the identification stage, individuals recognize whether regulation is necessary. For instance, anxiety can arise when individuals overrepresent emotional threats, leading to heightened regulatory efforts, whereas alexithymia is associated with an underrepresentation of emotional states, impairing the ability to recognize emotional needs. The selection stage involves choosing an appropriate regulatory strategy. Failures here may lead to issues such as substance abuse and can occur when individuals value maladaptive strategies or avoidance over healthier techniques. During the implementation stage, people execute these specific tactics. Impairments here, for instance, can result in disorders like generalized anxiety disorder, where tactics that involve worry are excessively used due to their perceived immediate benefit. Difficulties in adjusting or terminating regulatory efforts in the monitoring stage can contribute to disorders like depression or mania, where individuals may switch strategies prematurely. This illustrates how impairments at any stage of emotion regulation can potentially lead to a range of emotional and behavioural disorders.

Alongside of⁣⁣ alexithymia, autism, hypomimia and involuntary expression disorder in which deficits in emotional expressions are primary, other disorders and impairments can effect emotional expression and recognition of emotional expression. Studies show that impairment, such as stroke or damages, to the right parietal lobe, right somatosensory cortex, and cerebellum can impair recognition of facial emotional expressions and can impair visual represenation of emotional expressions . Patients with Alzheimer's, Parkinson's disease, and Huntington's disease, and individuals with traumatic brain injuries and temporal lobe epilepsy, also demonstrate distorted facial emotional expression. It's worth noting that these impairments do not influence exepriencing affect, but distorted recognition of emotional expressions also impaisr one's own emotional expressions.

Other findings on how different disorders can interact with emotional expression change demonstrate disorders such as schizophrenia and antisocial personality disorders can cause impaired emotional expression and recognition of emotional expression . Both schizophrenia and antisocial personality disorder have similar effects on emotional expression in patients diagnosed with these disorders. For both disorders, patients experience symptoms such as reduced ability to perceive and express emotions and high sensitivity to emotional expressions of negative emotions such as fear and anger. For patients diagnosed with antisocial personality disorder, the sensitivity towards expression of anger is significantly higher than those in the control groups. For patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, loss of emotional facial expressions is one of the main negative symptoms.

Emotional Differences Across Cultures

Despite the common conversation over whether emotions are universal or not, research on emotional expression cross-culturally has displayed that emotions aren't expressed exactly the same across cultures. When investigating the types of emotions experienced, there are two kinds known as socially engaging emotions and socially disengaging emotions. Socially engaging emotions refer to emotions that generate closeness, relationships and connection to other people such as friendliness while socially disengaging emotions generate autonomy, independence and disconnection from others such as anger or frustration. Comparing research on Japanese culture with American culture, it was found that Japanese culture utilizes socially engaging emotions more than disengaging ones while American culture utilizes socially disengaging emotions more than engaging ones.

Differences in emotion regulation are also present . In Western cultures, it is very typical to want to maintain and exaggerate feelings of happiness and joy when they are experienced . This often stems from the idea that negative emotions must be avoided while striving for only positive feelings which is widely believed in Western cultures . This differs from Eastern cultures that tend to see the good and bad to positive emotions while not exaggerating positive emotions when experienced . In Eastern cultures, it is recognized that emotions are temporary and that feelings of good and bad can occur at the same time.

Additionally to social scripts on which emotions are more valued cross-culturally, the development of emotional expressions reflects the preference for socially engaging and disengaging emotions and the preference for more positive or balanced emotions that differed across Western and Eastern cultures. Studies conducted with Thai and American mothers revealed that children learn how to express emotions in a way that is appropriate for their cultures from their primary caregivers. There is evidence that the intensity of emotional expressions, the channels through which they are expressed (e.g., behavioural, verbal, etc.), and the emotions expressed by parents all play a role in how infants form culturally appropriate emotional expressions.

The intensity of emotional interaction was found to be higher in American mothers compared to the intensity of behavioural emotional interaction in Thai mothers. These findings also relate to another study suggesting individuals from East Asian cultures tend to downplay their emotional expressions and demonstrate less intense behavioural expressions of emotions compared to American cultures. This does, however, present a limitation in terms of research on cultural differences in emotions and emotional expressions. Individuals from interdependent cultures report experiencing more positive and intense emotions in social settings, whereas individuals from independent cultures report experiencing more positive and intense emotions when thinking about themselves. Considering these findings, a laboratory environment may not be the best context for people from interdependent cultures to experience emotions, since they lack their social environment (e.g., friends and family).

In addition, findings indicated that caregivers from individualistic cultures (American) experienced and interacted with their emotions through their behaviours, and caregivers from collectivist cultures (Thai) expressed and experienced their emotions verbally. Additionally, emotions that are expressed vary across cultures. While American mothers used more positive words when expressing emotions, Thai mothers were found to express more negative words than positive words. These findings support the cultural difference in emotional expressions, where independent cultures tend to express more socially disengaging emotions (that emphasize autonomy and independence), and interdependent cultures tend to express more socially engaging emotions (that emphasize closeness and relationships).