The Emotional Responding to Aversive Stimuli - Research Paper Example

? PSYCHOLOGY: CRITICAL EVALUATION  & Section Number of Introduction When we discuss human psyche, there is a lot of subjectivity involved. Even the most resilient and the well-adjusted psyches break down in the face of extensive stress caused by the attenuation to their specific phobias, torture or some debilitating natural disaster. These seriously affect their lives and may also render it to come to a standstill. Anxiety, as defined by Carson and Butcher (2009) in their book, Abnormal Psychology, is a general feeling of apprehension about possible danger. Anxiety is a complex blend of unpleasant emotions and cognitions that is both more oriented to the future and much more diffused than fear (Barlow, 2002). Fear, on the other hand, is because of the clear and obvious source of danger that would be regarded as real by most people. According to Gray and McNaughton (1996), fear or panic is a basic emotion shared by many animals that involves activation of the “fight-or-flight” response of the sympathetic nervous system. A phobia is a persistent and disproportionate fear of some specific object or situation that presents little or no actual danger and yet leads to a great deal of avoidance of these feared situations (Carson, 2009). Exposure therapy, the established treatment for phobias (Tabibnia 307), involves controlled exposure by the individual to the stimuli or situations that elicit phobic fear (Antony and Barlow, 2002). In this therapy, the individual is slowly and steadily placed in the vicinity of the situations they find most frightening. This is done either in a symbolic way or under real life conditions. The treatment involves exposure to the fear generating stimulus for longer periods of time such that the fear and the anxiety associated with it subsides (Baumeister et al, 1998). Aim Tabibnia (2008) states, The aim of the present study was to determine whether the emotional responding to aversive stimuli would be attenuated more if those stimuli had been previously exposed along with affective words compared to if they had been previously exposed to if they had been previously exposed with nonaffective words or without words. (p. 308) Rationale The rationale behind this study is to study the lasting effect of words on feelings. This study attempts to decipher the probability of words to facilitate exposure effects on threatening images. The rationale is quite convincing. The researchers have backed their standing statement with two experiments employing exposure therapy in its symbolic form. . The first experiment was biased as the researchers didn’t take the psychological factor of resilience into consideration. They took a variety of individuals from the introductory psychology class, irrespective that their emotional responding to things would be differently manifested. In the second experiment, they used individuals who were fearful about spiders. Again, the researchers generalized the same kind of responses from all the participants in terms of their emotional responses. Even though fear and anxiety are differing entities, in this study the researchers have not been able to decipher whether they are adopting their study on fear or a study on anxiety. This is because the response to both fear and anxiety is a heightened or startled response. The difference between them is that anxiety is generalizing that something painful is going to take place (Delgado et al, 2004); the situation is not real, there is an apprehension that something painful is about to happen. Fear, on the other hand, is a reaction to something that is present in the physical reality of the individual and the person facing it. Methodology In the present study, exposure therapy is employed as a method through the ways of symbolic presentation of the fear generating stimulus. As a fear reduction strategy, exposure therapy derives itself from the laboratory principle of extinction. In this, the repetition of the feared stimulus takes place in the absence of any feared consequence and any escape or avoidance behaviors will result in the reduction of the fear. (Abramowitz, Deacon and Whiteside, 2010). There are potential disadvantages or limitations that may crop up with the usage of exposure therapy. The ambiguity and the fluctuating nature of emotional problems make it difficult to employ this method for different individuals (Shakin, et al, 1985 and Percy, 1996). A proper evaluation will take into consideration the interaction between the person’s actions, the other person’s characteristics, and the environment to which the person with the fear belongs to, and finally, his/her own perception of the entire process (Pratt, 1999). Provided its tedious and exhaustive nature, this part of the evaluation is typically removed, rendering the study biased to a certain extent. Nature of the participants The nature of participants was lopsided for Experiment 1. There were 27 participants, 23 of them were female. The ideal gender related participation should have been equal for both the genders. It was mentioned in the study that gender should not have any effect on the study but they discounted the fact that men have higher tolerance to stress and pain than females. In a study by Keogh and Birkby (1999) it was seen that females had a lower pain threshold and were less tolerant to pain than males. Gender differences were also found to be associated with sensory pain. However, this effect was dependent on levels of anxiety sensitivity. High anxiety sensitive females reported greater sensory pain than low anxiety sensitive females. No effect of anxiety sensitivity on sensory pain was found among males. Therefore the study illustrates the fact that gender related differences do have a manifestation on the results of the experiments, a direct contradiction of the writers‘ statements (Tabibnia 308). In Experiment 2, the participants were 48 college students, 31 were female. Again the group was unbalanced, with more female participants than male. In the exposure only part of the process, the SCR for the female group was significantly elevated over the males (Tabibnia 312). Results In the results obtained Experiment 1, the skin conductance response (SCR) was affected by the exposure from day 1 to day 8. Significant reduction was seen in the fourth condition of neutral labels resulting in the hypothesis that exposure combined with unrelated negative words led to a greater reduction than use of any of the other conditions. Neutral words did not affect the response, and may have actually interfered with attenuation (Tabibnia 311). As participants think more about the link between the two words and understand the relationship between them, it may disrupt anxiety and change emotional processing (Tabibnia 312). Humans develop an associative chain, not always conscious or converted into verbal metaphors, with their “inner eye” (Bern, 1981 and Falk, et al, 2009). Locke (2007) commented that, “whoever reflects on what passes in his own mind cannot miss it.” The results from Experiment 2 were similar to Experiment 1. All three exposure manipulations reduced SCR from day 1 to day 8; exposure plus unrelated negative words led to a greater reduction in SCR (Tabibnia 313). In the scenario of heart rate acceleration, the results indicated that no main effect of day, no main effect of group and no interaction between day and group effective the group. Unlike Experiment 1, there was generalization indicated to novel pictures, and in the negative label group, SCR to the novel pictures was decreased compared to the results of Day 1 (Tabibnia 314). Implications The results are convincing to a larger extent, but there were some unexpected results. In Experiment 1, there was no effect in the heart rate. This should not have been the case because anxiety and fear both involve heightened heart activity, which was not showcased here. Also, unrelated words led to better long term attenuation because of differential processing. As the words that followed the pictures were unrelated, they led the individual to think even more and at a deeper level about the relationship and the link between them which, was not being established by merely looking at it. This led to an elaborative rehearsal, thereby sending the words to the long term memory and affecting the results. Limitations There were many setbacks in the entire study. Self report of affect measures was not collected. This is an impediment to knowing whether subjective indices of fear or aversion were also reduced after exposure. Consistent effect in heart rate across experiments was not found. Because of this, the autonomic effects discussed here cannot be generalized beyond sympathetic arousal. Although the study demonstrates enhanced exposure effects with effective labels one week after treatment, it is indeterminate whether this effect is maintained over longer intervals of time. Given that verbal communication during therapy does not typically consist of reading single words, follow up studies needs to be conducted with compete sentences read out aloud by the participant or presented in an auditory format. Clinical trials would need to be conducted to determine whether the addition of negative language to exposure in vivo can also enhance treatment outcome. Linguistic stimuli usage in this study was different from the lines, as it should be from cognitive therapy. In cognitive therapy, language is used before and during the therapy to help create a calm environment. But, in the current experiment, words were introduced after initial exposure to allow emotional reactivity to develop. In cognitive therapy, the language is used to shift appraisal of feared stimuli away from threatening to benign or non negative. In the current study, the type of language most beneficial was negative, and unrelated to the consent of the aversive stimulus. Some of the confounding variables with respect to comparison between exposure and cognitive therapy have also been determined like treatment expectancy, treatment duration, and therapist-patient relationship variables. References Bem, S. (1981). 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