Mental health has been at the forefront of conversation more often than ever in the past years. With an influx of speakers, college students pursuing the major of psychology at a 2% increase since the 1980’s, and practically every organization around the country devoting time to developing their mental health resources, this disparity has become increasingly welcomed for discussion. This is partially due to the increased awareness around the topic and the increased rates of depression, anxiety, and suicide especially amongst teens. While the awareness has increased to new heights, behavioral health research is still very much underdeveloped despite the effort to promote therapy, open dialogue conversations, and peer-to-peer support. One of the key areas that has seen limited research is the topic of positive emotional regulation. In Dr. Rebecca Silton’s research article entitled, “Regulating Positive Emotions: Implications for Promoting Well-Being in Individuals With Depression”, she discusses the role positive emotions can have on depression levels. While positive emotional regulation has been studied its relation to depression hasn't, which is what this paper is dissecting. Positive emotion is defined as the modulation of the response to stimuli such that the momentary experience of positive emotions is enhanced.
Positive or negative emotions can play an essential role in many of our bodily functions and have the ability to increase or decrease our performance levels. “Positive emotions are also related to improved sleep quality, increased exercise, and lower levels of cortisol, as well as decreased levels of depression and pain resilience.” (Silton, 93) Because all of these side effects are very important to development and vitality, evidence-based research on this topic will help tremendously in finding therapeutic approaches that boost societal health. To examine the correlation between depression and positive emotions Dr. Silton took a look at Anhedonia. Anhedonia is a medical term for the lack of enjoyment or pleasure from an experience. Dr. Silton describes it as a hallmark feature of major depressive disorder. “Treatment outcomes for depression show that 54% of individuals relapse within two years following cognitive-behavioral therapy.” (Vittengl, Clark, Dunn, & Jarrett, 2007) Knowing the role of anhedonia on emotional well being, Dr. Silton knew the role it could play in advancing effective evidence based therapies. Dr. Silton recognized that the previous way of approaching therapy was down regulating negative emotions to decrease sadness. But her proposal is to target specific impairments to improve the low treatment outcomes.
Regulating positive emotions can be extremely beneficial to mitigating depressive symptoms and increasing the life expectancy for people that suffer from depression. It will be interesting to see the additional research that comes from this topic because addressing the regulation of positive emotions can lead to learning how the regulation in anxiety, ADHD, OCD, and other major mental health disorders. Because mental health disorders become present at such an early stage in our lives it will be thought-provoking to see how this same research process may apply to youth and if new therapy intervention strategies are what we needed the whole time.
References:
https://summer.harvard.edu/blog/why-choose-psychology-as-your-college-major/#:~:text=Accor ding%20to%20a%20Niche%20ranking,5%20percent%20in%20the%201980s.
Silton, R. L., Kahrilas, I. J., Skymba, H. V., Smith, J., Bryant, F. B., & Heller, W. (2020). Regulating positive emotions: Implications for promoting well-being in individuals with depression. Emotion, 20(1), 93–97. https://doi.org/10.1037/emo0000675
Vittengl, J. R., Clark, L. A., Dunn, T. W., & Jarrett, R. B. (2007). Reducing relapse and recurrence in unipolar depression: A comparative meta-analysis of cognitive-behavioral therapy's effects. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 75(3), 475–488. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006X.75.3.475
No comments:
Post a Comment