Re: Dissociation and emotion

“Now, onto the belief that dissociation is problematic for exposure therapy....the fact is this is a clinical judgement. There are very little data.”

Shawn: You write great posts—backed up with, in my view, overwhelming evidence and reason. Prior to this post, I don’t think you’ve used the term “dissociation”...I’m thinking, yeah, that’s good, because, while I’m reasonably certain there is such a phenom, I doubt it’s nearly as rampant, or counterproductive, as many on this forum suggest. So I went back thru your posts looking for “dissociation,” couldn’t find it, but did, to my horror, find the following (in your 11/03/02 Andrade/ Kavanagh post, discussing, among other things, “distraction”):

“Based on the theory of emotional processing advanced by Foa & Kozak (1986)...fear behavior reflects the activation of a cognitive network that includes interconnections between representations of the feared stimuli, responses made in reaction to the stimulus, and the meaning of the feared stimuli and responses. Many of the connections in a fear network are inaccurate, in that they do not accurately reflect reality. For example, a dog phobic has beliefs (meaning representations) that dogs are dangerous and are likely to bite people.”

Well, it’s my understanding that current neuroscience (e.g., by LeDoux, Damasio, etc.) pretty much confirms that fear reflects the activation of the subcortical amygdala--a “primitive” neural structure--before and without cognitive conscious awareness. We don’t “fear” dogs because we cognitively and/or explicitly “believe” dogs are dangerous; rather we experience “fear” behavior (and feeling) because the amygdala has “learned,” (implicitly, subcortically, subconsciously) to be triggered by dog stimuli. And because of the plasticity of the amygdala, it “learns” (and “remembers”) very quickly to be triggered by stimuli associated with threat/danger. (And this implicit emotional learning and/or memory is NOT consciously/cognitively available.)

As I see it, conscious cognition is mostly bypassed in exposure therapy and the amygdala (in the case of fear) “unlearns” (slowly), by exposure, that a stimulus is not a threat; and because of the amygdala’s plasticity and propensity to “learn,” and/or “remember” stimuli that are a threat/danger, stress in one’s life will often cause the amygdala to quickly regress back to again to being triggered by that stimulus.

Admittedly, I tend to see emotion, for the most part, as being a result of subcortical subconscious neutral structures being triggered by various stimuli, before, and often without, conscious awareness of exactly what the stimuli were. And I’m also convinced of the primacy of emotion over cognition; in the battle between emotion and reason, emotion usually wins.

But I love everything else you’ve posted. Fred H.

Replies:

Re: Dissociation and emotion, by Cahill, 02/08/03 Re: Dissociation and emotion, by Fred H., 02/09/03

| Behavior OnLine Home Page | Disclaimer |

Copyright © 1996-2004 Behavior OnLine, Inc. All rights reserved.