Personal Distress
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Personal Distress
In psychology, personal distress is an aversive, self-focused emotional reaction (e.g., anxiety, worry, discomfort) to the apprehension or comprehension of another's emotional state or condition. This negative affective state often occurs as a result of emotional contagion when there is confusion between self and other. Unlike empathy, personal distress does not have to be congruent with the other's state, and often leads to a self-oriented, egoistic reaction to reduce it, by withdrawing from the stressor, for example, thereby decreasing the likelihood of prosocial behavior. There is evidence that sympathy and personal distress are subjectively different, have different somatic and physiological correlates, and relate in different ways to prosocial behavior. Link to risk and resistance In 1987, one study completed cross-sectional and longitudinal research on a community sample of over 400 adults and their children to examine the link between risk, resistance, and personal distress. ...
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Psychology
Psychology is the scientific study of mind and behavior. Psychology includes the study of conscious and unconscious phenomena, including feelings and thoughts. It is an academic discipline of immense scope, crossing the boundaries between the natural and social sciences. Psychologists seek an understanding of the emergent properties of brains, linking the discipline to neuroscience. As social scientists, psychologists aim to understand the behavior of individuals and groups.Fernald LD (2008)''Psychology: Six perspectives'' (pp.12–15). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications.Hockenbury & Hockenbury. Psychology. Worth Publishers, 2010. Ψ (''psi''), the first letter of the Greek word ''psyche'' from which the term psychology is derived (see below), is commonly associated with the science. A professional practitioner or researcher involved in the discipline is called a psychologist. Some psychologists can also be classified as behavioral or cognitive scientists. Some psychol ...
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Anxiety
Anxiety is an emotion which is characterized by an unpleasant state of inner turmoil and includes feelings of dread over anticipated events. Anxiety is different than fear in that the former is defined as the anticipation of a future threat whereas the latter is defined as the emotional response to a real threat. It is often accompanied by nervous behavior such as pacing back and forth, somatic complaints, and rumination. Anxiety is a feeling of uneasiness and worry, usually generalized and unfocused as an overreaction to a situation that is only subjectively seen as menacing. It is often accompanied by muscular tension, restlessness, fatigue, inability to catch one's breath, tightness in the abdominal region, nausea, and problems in concentration. Anxiety is closely related to fear, which is a response to a real or perceived immediate threat (fight or flight response); anxiety involves the expectation of future threat including dread. People facing anxiety may withdraw ...
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Worry
Worry refers to the thoughts, images, emotions, and actions of a negative nature in a repetitive, uncontrollable manner that results from a proactive cognitive risk analysis made to avoid or solve anticipated potential threats and their potential consequences. Introduction Psychologically, worry is part of Perseverative Cognition (a collective term for continuous thinking about negative events in the past or in the future). As an emotion "worry" is experienced from anxiety or concern about a real or imagined issue, often personal issues such as health or finances, or external broader issues such as environmental pollution, social structure or technological change. It is a natural response to anticipated future problems. Excessive worry is a primary diagnostic feature of generalized anxiety disorder, but also is pervasive in other psychological disorders, like schizophrenia. Most people experience short-lived periods of worry in their lives without incident; indeed, a mild ...
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Comfort
Comfort (or being comfortable'')'' is a sense of physical or psychological ease, often characterized as a lack of hardship. Persons who are lacking in comfort are uncomfortable, or experiencing discomfort. A degree of psychological comfort can be achieved by recreating experiences that are associated with pleasant memories, such as engaging in familiar activities,Daniel Miller, ''The Comfort of Things'' (2009). maintaining the presence of familiar objects, and consumption of comfort foods. Comfort is a particular concern in health care, as providing comfort to the sick and injured is one goal of healthcare, and can facilitate recovery.Katharine Kolcaba, ''Comfort Theory and Practice: A Vision for Holistic Health Care and Research'' (2003). Persons who are surrounded with things that provide psychological comfort may be described as being "in their comfort zone". Because of the personal nature of positive associations, psychological comfort is highly subjective. The use of ...
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Emotional Contagion
Emotional contagion is a form of social contagion that involves the spontaneous spread of emotions and related behaviors. Such emotional convergence can happen from one person to another, or in a larger group. Emotions can be shared across individuals in many ways, both implicitly or explicitly. For instance, conscious reasoning, analysis, and imagination have all been found to contribute to the phenomenon. The behaviour has been found in humans, other primates, dogs, and chickens. Emotional contagion is important to personal relationships because it fosters emotional synchrony between individuals. A broader definition of the phenomenon suggested by Schoenewolf is "a process in which a person or group influences the emotions or behavior of another person or group through the conscious or unconscious induction of emotion states and behavioral attitudes." One view developed by Elaine Hatfield, et al., is that this can be done through automatic mimicry and synchronization of one's ex ...
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Empathy
Empathy is the capacity to understand or feel what another person is experiencing from within their frame of reference, that is, the capacity to place oneself in another's position. Definitions of empathy encompass a broad range of social, cognitive, and emotional processes primarily concerned with understanding others (and others' emotions in particular). Types of empathy include cognitive empathy, emotional (or affective) empathy, somatic empathy, and spiritual empathy.Rothschild, B. (with Rand, M. L.). (2006). ''Help for the Helper: The psychophysiology of compassion fatigue and vicarious trauma''. Etymology The English word ''empathy'' is derived from the Ancient Greek (''empatheia'', meaning "physical affection or passion"). That word derives from (''en'', "in, at") and ('' pathos'', "passion" or "suffering"). Theodor Lipps adapted the German aesthetic term ("feeling into") to psychology in 1903, and Edward B. Titchener translated into English as "empathy" i ...
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Sympathy
Sympathy is the perception of, understanding of, and reaction to the distress or need of another life form. According to David Hume, this sympathetic concern is driven by a switch in viewpoint from a personal perspective to the perspective of another group or individual who is in need. Hume explained that this is the case because "the minds of all men are similar in their feelings and operations" and that "the motion of one communicates itself to the rest" so that as "affections readily pass from one person to another… they beget correspondent movements." Etymology The roots of the word ''sympathy'' are the Greek words ''sym'', which means "together", and ''pathos'', which refers to feeling or emotion. See '' sympathy § Etymology'' for more information. Distinctions between sympathy and related concepts The related word ''empathy'' is often used interchangeably with ''sympathy'', even though the terms now have different meanings. Dictionaries distinguish the two terms. Com ...
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Common Coding Theory
Common coding theory is a cognitive psychology theory describing how perceptual representations (e.g. of things we can see and hear) and motor representations (e.g. of hand actions) are linked. The theory claims that there is a shared representation (a common code) for both perception and action. More important, seeing an event activates the action associated with that event, and performing an action activates the associated perceptual event. The idea of direct perception-action links originates in the work of the American psychologist William James and more recently, American neurophysiologist and Nobel prize winner Roger Sperry. Sperry argued that the perception–action cycle is the fundamental logic of the nervous system. Perception and action processes are functionally intertwined: perception is a means to action and action is a means to perception. Indeed, the vertebrate brain has evolved for governing motor activity with the basic function to transform sensory patterns i ...
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Mirror Neurons
A mirror neuron is a neuron that fires both when an animal acts and when the animal observes the same action performed by another. Thus, the neuron "mirrors" the behavior of the other, as though the observer were itself acting. Such neurons have been directly observed in human and primate species, and in birds. In humans, brain activity consistent with that of mirror neurons has been found in the premotor cortex, the supplementary motor area, the primary somatosensory cortex, and the inferior parietal cortex. The function of the mirror system in humans is a subject of much speculation. Birds have been shown to have imitative resonance behaviors and neurological evidence suggests the presence of some form of mirroring system. To date, no widely accepted neural or computational models have been put forward to describe how mirror neuron activity supports cognitive functions. The subject of mirror neurons continues to generate intense debate. In 2014, Philosophical Transactions of ...
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Emotion
Emotions are mental states brought on by neurophysiology, neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or suffering, displeasure. There is currently no scientific consensus on a definition. Emotions are often reciprocal determinism, intertwined with mood (psychology), mood, temperament, personality psychology, personality, disposition, or creativity. Research on emotion has increased over the past two decades with many fields contributing including psychology, medicine, history, sociology of emotions, and computer science. The numerous theories that attempt to explain the origin, functional accounts of emotion, function and other aspects of emotions have fostered more intense research on this topic. Current areas of research in the concept of emotion include the development of materials that stimulate and elicit emotion. In addition, positron emission tomography, PET scans and functional magnetic re ...
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