Showing posts with label EmotionalWellness. Show all posts
Showing posts with label EmotionalWellness. Show all posts

Tuesday, November 10, 2026

What Are The Emotional Triggers For Empaths To Watch For?

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Empathy helps you relate to others on a profound human level, understand their problems together, and support the people around you. If you’re a highly empathetic person, you might identify as an empath: someone who can sense others’ feelings and relate to them on a deeper level. But being constantly aware of other people’s emotions can be exhausting. It might even have significant impacts on your own life and make you feel tired and drained — a phenomenon sometimes known as empathy or compassion fatigue…..….Story continues…..

By Allaya Cooks-Campbell

Source: BetterUp

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Critics:

Compassion and sympathy are terms associated with empathy. A person feels compassion when they notice others are in need, and this feeling motivates that person to help. Like empathy, compassion has a wide range of definitions and purported facets (which overlap with some definitions of empathy). 

Sympathy is a feeling of care and understanding for someone in need. Some include in sympathy an empathic concern for another person, and the wish to see them better off or happier. Empathy is also related to pity and emotional contagion. One feels pity towards others who might be in trouble or in need of help. This feeling is described as “feeling sorry” for someone.

Emotional contagion is when a person (especially an infant or a member of a mob) imitatively “catches” the emotions that others are showing without necessarily recognizing this is happening. Alexithymia describes a deficiency in understanding, processing, or describing one’s own emotions (unlike empathy which is about someone else’s emotions).

Affective empathy, also called emotional empathy, is the ability to respond with an appropriate emotion to another’s mental states. Our ability to empathize emotionally is based on emotional contagion: being affected by another’s emotional or arousal state. Affective empathy can be subdivided into the following scales:

Empathic concern: sympathy and compassion for others in response to their suffering. Personal distress: feelings of discomfort and anxiety in response to another’s suffering. There is no consensus regarding whether personal distress is a form of empathy or instead is something distinct from empathy There may be a developmental aspect to this subdivision.

Infants respond to the distress of others by getting distressed themselves; only when they are two years old do they start to respond in other-oriented ways: trying to help, comfort, and share. Affective mentalizing: uses clues like body language, facial expressions, knowledge about the other’s beliefs & situation, and context to understand more about what one is empathizing with.

Cognitive empathy is the ability to understand another’s perspective or mental state. The terms empathic accuracy, social cognition, perspective-taking, theory of mind, and mentalizing are often used synonymously, but due to a lack of studies comparing theory of mind with types of empathy, it is unclear whether these are equivalent.

Athough measures of cognitive empathy include self-report questionnaires and behavioral measures, a 2019 meta-analysis found only a negligible association between self-report and behavioral measures, suggesting that people are generally not able to accurately assess their own cognitive empathy abilities. Cognitive empathy can be subdivided into the following scales: Perspective-taking: the tendency to spontaneously adopt others’ psychological perspectives.

Fantasy: the tendency to identify with fictional characters. Tactical (or strategic) empathy: the deliberate use of perspective-taking to achieve certain desired ends. Emotion regulation: a damper on the emotional contagion process that allows you to empathize without being overwhelmed by the emotion you are empathizing with.

The scientific community has not coalesced around a precise definition of these constructs, but there is consensus about this distinction. Affective and cognitive empathy are also independent from one another; someone who strongly empathizes emotionally is not necessarily good in understanding another’s perspective.

Additional constructs that have been proposed include behavioral empathy (which governs how one chooses to respond to feelings of empathy), social empathy (in which the empathetic person integrates their understanding of broader social dynamics into their empathetic modeling), and ecological empathy (which encompasses empathy directed towards the natural world). 

In addition, Fritz Breithaupt emphasizes the importance of empathy suppression mechanisms in healthy empathy. Efforts to measure empathy go back to at least the mid-twentieth century. Researchers approach the measurement of empathy from a number of perspectives. Behavioral measures normally involve raters assessing the presence or absence of certain behaviors in the subjects they are monitoring.

Both verbal and non-verbal behaviors have been captured on video by experimenters. Other experimenters required subjects to comment upon their own feelings and behaviors, or those of other people involved in the experiment, as indirect ways of signaling their level of empathic functioning to the raters. Physiological responses tend to be captured by elaborate electronic equipment that has been physically connected to the subject’s body.

Researchers then draw inferences about that person’s empathic reactions from the electronic readings produced. Bodily or “somatic” measures can be seen as behavioral measures at a micro level. They measure empathy through facial and other non-verbally expressed reactions. Such changes are presumably underpinned by physiological changes brought about by some form of “emotional contagion” or mirroring.

These reactions, while they appear to reflect the internal emotional state of the empathizer, could also, if the stimulus incident lasted more than the briefest period, reflect the results of emotional reactions based on cognitions associated with role-taking (“if I were him I would feel…”). Picture or puppet-story indices for empathy have been adopted to enable even very young, pre-school subjects to respond without needing to read questions and write answers.

Dependent variables (variables that are monitored for any change by the experimenter) for younger subjects have included self reporting on a seven-point smiley face scale and filmed facial reactions. In some experiments, subjects are required to watch video scenarios (either staged or authentic) and to make written responses which are then assessed for their levels of empathy; scenarios are sometimes also depicted in printed form.

Empathy is theatre’s thing, isn’t it? Why not extend that empathy to parents? The Stage 18:57 Wed, 01 May 

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Wednesday, November 4, 2026

Seasonal Affective Disorder Can Be Triggered By Shorter Days

Charlie Riedel / AP Photo

As winter approaches and daylight hours grow shorter, people prone to seasonal depression can feel it in their bodies and brains. The millions of people estimated to have seasonal affective disorder, or SAD, typically have episodes of depression that begin in the fall and ease in the spring or summer. One trigger for SAD is when clocks revert to standard time, which happened Sunday across much of the U.S., bringing darker afternoons. A milder form, subsyndromal SAD, is recognized by medical experts, and there’s also a summer variety of seasonal depression, though less is known about it………Continue reading…

By  Carla K. Johnson

Source: AP News

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Critics:

Acute stressful situations where the stress experienced is severe is a cause of change psychologically to the detriment of the well-being of the individual, such that symptomatic derealization and depersonalization, and anxiety and hyperarousal, are experienced. The International Classification of Diseases includes a group of mental and behavioral disorders which have their aetiology in reaction to severe stress and the consequent adaptive response.

Chronic stress, and a lack of coping resources available, or used by an individual, can often lead to the development of psychological issues such as delusions, depression and anxiety (see below for further information). Chronic stress also causes brain atrophy, which is the loss of neurons and the connections between them. It affects the part of the brain that is important for learning, responding to the stressors and cognitive flexibility.

Chronic stressors may not be as intense as acute stressors such as natural disaster or a major accident, but persist over longer periods of time and tend to have a more negative effect on health because they are sustained and thus require the body’s physiological response to occur daily. This depletes the body’s energy more quickly and usually occurs over long periods of time, especially when these microstressors cannot be avoided (i.e. stress of living in a dangerous neighborhood).

See allostatic load for further discussion of the biological process by which chronic stress may affect the body. For example, studies have found that caregivers, particularly those of dementia patients, have higher levels of depression and slightly worse physical health than non-caregivers. When humans are under chronic stress, permanent changes in their physiological, emotional, and behavioral responses may occur.

Chronic stress can include events such as caring for a spouse with dementia, or may result from brief focal events that have long term effects, such as experiencing a sexual assault. Studies have also shown that psychological stress may directly contribute to the disproportionately high rates of coronary heart disease morbidity and mortality and its etiologic risk factors. Specifically, acute and chronic stress have been shown to raise serum lipids and are associated with clinical coronary events.

However, it is possible for individuals to exhibit hardiness—a term referring to the ability to be both chronically stressed and healthy. Even though psychological stress is often connected with illness or disease, most healthy individuals can still remain disease-free after being confronted with chronic stressful events. This suggests that there are individual differences in vulnerability to the potential pathogenic effects of stress; individual differences in vulnerability arise due to both genetic and psychological factors.

In addition, the age at which the stress is experienced can dictate its effect on health. Research suggests chronic stress at a young age can have lifelong effects on the biological, psychological, and behavioral responses to stress later in life. The term “stress” had none of its contemporary connotations before the 1920s. It is a form of the Middle English destresse, derived via Old French from the Latin stringere, “to draw tight”.

The word had long been in use in physics to refer to the internal distribution of a force exerted on a material body, resulting in strain. In the 1920s and ’30s, biological and psychological circles occasionally used the term to refer to a mental strain or to a harmful environmental agent that could cause illness. Walter Cannon used it in 1926 to refer to external factors that disrupted what he called homeostasi.

But “…stress as an explanation of lived experience is absent from both lay and expert life narratives before the 1930s”. Physiological stress represents a wide range of physical responses that occur as a direct effect of a stressor causing an upset in the homeostasis of the body. Upon immediate disruption of either psychological or physical equilibrium the body responds by stimulating the nervous, endocrine, and immune systems.

The reaction of these systems causes a number of physical changes that have both short- and long-term effects on the body. The Holmes and Rahe stress scale was developed as a method of assessing the risk of disease from life changes. The scale lists both positive and negative changes that elicit stress. These include things such as a major holiday or marriage, or death of a spouse and firing from a job.

Homeostasis is a concept central to the idea of stress. In biology, most biochemical processes strive to maintain equilibrium (homeostasis), a steady state that exists more as an ideal and less as an achievable condition. Environmental factors, internal or external stimuli, continually disrupt homeostasis; an organism’s present condition is a state of constant flux moving about a homeostatic point that is that organism’s optimal condition for living.

Factors causing an organism’s condition to diverge too far from homeostasis can be experienced as stress. A life-threatening situation such as a major physical trauma or prolonged starvation can greatly disrupt homeostasis. On the other hand, an organism’s attempt at restoring conditions back to or near homeostasis, often consuming energy and natural resources, can also be interpreted as stress. The brain cannot sustain an equilibrium under chronic stress; the accumulation of such an ever-deepening deficit is called chronic stress.

The ambiguity in defining this phenomenon was first recognized by Hans Selye (1907–1982) in 1926. In 1951 a commentator loosely summarized Selye’s view of stress as something that “…in addition to being itself, was also the cause of itself, and the result of itself”. First to use the term in a biological context, Selye continued to define stress as “the non-specific response of the body to any demand placed upon it”.

Neuroscientists such as Bruce McEwen and Jaap Koolhaas believe that stress, based on years of empirical research, “should be restricted to conditions where an environmental demand exceeds the natural regulatory capacity of an organism”. The brain cannot live in an harsh family environment, it needs some sort of stability between another brain. People who have reported being raised in harsh environments such as verbal and physical aggression have showed a more immune dysfunction and more metabolic dysfunction.

Indeed, in 1995 Toates already defined stress as a “chronic state that arises only when defense mechanisms are either being chronically stretched or are actually failing,”while according to Ursin (1988) stress results from an inconsistency between expected events (“set value”) and perceived events (“actual value”) that cannot be resolved satisfactorily, which also puts stress into the broader context of cognitive-consistency theory.

Stress can have many profound effects on the human biological systems.Biology primarily attempts to explain major concepts of stress using a stimulus-response paradigm, broadly comparable to how a psychobiological sensory system operates. The central nervous system (brain and spinal cord) plays a crucial role in the body’s stress-related mechanisms. Whether one should interpret these mechanisms as the body’s response to a stressor or embody the act of stress itself is part of the ambiguity in defining what exactly stress is.

The central nervous system works closely with the body’s endocrine system to regulate these mechanisms. The sympathetic nervous system becomes primarily active during a stress response, regulating many of the body’s physiological functions in ways that ought to make an organism more adaptive to its environment. Below there follows a brief biological background of neuroanatomy and neurochemistry and how they relate to stress.

Stress, either severe, acute stress or chronic low-grade stress may induce abnormalities in three principal regulatory systems in the body: serotonin systems, catecholamine systems, and the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenocortical axis. Aggressive behavior has also been associated with formalities in these systems.

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Wednesday, October 28, 2026

How Much Do Our Thoughts Shape Our Health?

Jorm Sangsorn/Getty Images

Time heals all wounds, as the saying goes. But any medical professional can tell you that the hours required for recovery after an injury can vary widely. A person’s age, lifestyle and level of social support, for example, are all known influences on how quickly their body heals. Their thoughts can play a remarkably powerful role as well. In a recent experiment, we tested whether expectations about the time it takes to heal can affect how long it actually takes to recover….Story continues…

By: Ellen Langer

Source: How Much Do Our Thoughts Shape Our Health?

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Critics: 

The well-being of a person is what is good for the person. Theories of well-being try to determine which features of a state are responsible for this state contributing to the person’s well-being. Theories of well-being are often classified into hedonistic theories, desire theories, and objective list theories.

Hedonistic theories and desire theories are subjective theories. According to them, the degree of well-being of a person depends on the subjective mental states and attitudes of this person. Objective list theories, on the other hand, allow that things can benefit a person independent of that person’s subjective attitudes towards these things.

For hedonistic theories, the relevant mental states are experiences of pleasure and pain. One example of such an account can be found in Jeremy Bentham’s works, where it is suggested that the value of experiences only depends on their duration and the intensity of pleasure or pain present in them. Various counterexamples have been formulated against this view.

They usually involve cases where lower aggregate pleasure are intuitively preferable, for example, that the intellectual or aesthetic pleasures are superior to sensory pleasures or that it would be unwise to enter Robert Nozick’s experience machine. These counter-examples are not necessarily conclusive, yet the proponent of hedonistic theories faces the challenge of explaining why common-sense misleads us in the problematic cases.

Desire theories can avoid some of the problems of hedonistic theories by holding that well-being consists in desire-satisfaction: the higher the number of satisfied desires, the higher the well-being. One problem for some versions of desire theory is that not all desires are good: some desires may even have terrible consequences for the agent. Desire theorists have tried to avoid this objection by holding that what matters are not actual desires but the desires the agent would have if she was fully informed.

Thus, desire theories can incorporate what is plausible about subjective theories of well-being with the lack of personal bias of objective list theories. Objective list theories state that a person’s well-being depends on many different basic objective goods. These goods often include subjective factors like a pleasure-pain-balance or desire-satisfaction besides factors that are independent of the subject’s attitudes, like friendship or having virtues.

Objective list theories face the problem of explaining how subject-independent factors can determine a person’s well-being even if this person does not care about these factors. Another objection concerns the selection of the specific factors included. Different theorists have provided very different combinations of basic objective goods. These groupings seem to constitute arbitrary selections unless a clear criterion could be provided why all and only the items within their selections are relevant factors.

Three subdisciplines in psychology are critical for the study of psychological well-being:

  1. Developmental psychology, in which psychological well-being may be analyzed in terms of a pattern of growth across the lifespan.
  2. Personality psychology, in which it is possible to apply Maslow’s concept of self-actualization, Rogers’ concept of the fully functioning person, Jung’s concept of individuation, and Allport’s concept of maturity to account for psychological well-being.
  3. Clinical psychology, in which well-being consists of biological, psychological and social needs being met.

According to Corey Keyes’ five-component model, social well-being is constituted by the following factors:

  1. social integration,
  2. social contribution,
  3. social coherence,
  4. social actualization,
  5. social acceptance.

There are two approaches typically taken to understand psychological well-being:

  1. Distinguishing positive and negative effects and defining optimal psychological well-being and happiness as a balance between the two.
  2. Emphasizes life satisfaction as the key indicator of psychological well-being.

According to Guttman and Levy (1982) well-being is “…a special case of attitude”. This approach serves two purposes in the study of well-being: “developing and testing a [systematic] theory for the structure of [interrelationships] among varieties of well-being, and integration of well-being theory with the ongoing cumulative theory development in the fields of attitude of related research”.

Different forms of well-being, such as mental, physical, economic, or emotional are often closely interlinked. For example, improved physical well-being (e.g., by reducing or ceasing an addiction) is associated with improved emotional well-being. And better economic well-being (e.g., possessing more wealth) tends to be associated with better emotional well-being even in adverse situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic.

Well-being plays a central role in ethics since what a person ought to do depends, at least to some degree, on what would make someone’s life get better or worse. According to welfarism, there are no other values besides well-being. The terms well-being, pleasure, and happiness are used in overlapping ways in everyday language, but their meanings tend to come apart in technical contexts like philosophy or psychology.

Pleasure refers to experience that feels good and is usually seen as one constituent of well-being. But there may be other factors, such as health, virtue, knowledge or the fulfillment of desires. Happiness for example, often seen either as “the individual’s balance of pleasant over unpleasant experience” or as the state of being satisfied with one’s life as a whole, is also commonly taken to be a constituent of well-being.

Theories of well-being try to determine what is essential to all forms of well-being. Hedonistic theories equate well-being with the balance of pleasure over pain. Desire theories hold that well-being consists in desire-satisfaction: the higher the number of satisfied desires, the higher the well-being. Objective list theories state that a person’s well-being depends on a list of factors that may include both subjective and objective elements.

Well-being is also scientifically dependent on endogenous molecules that impact feelings of happiness such as dopamine, serotonin, endorphins, oxytocin, cortisol and more “Well-being related markers” or “Well-being bio markers”play an important role in the regulation of an organism’s metabolism, and when not working in proper order can lead to malfunction.

In the last half hour

Mental Health Awareness Week: New HSE campaign partners in construction and entertainment Health and Safety Executive (Press Release) 15:54 

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EU Proposes Energy, Water Rating Scheme For Data Centres

Building on the Energy Efficiency Directive, the Commissioner for Energy and Housing Dan JĆørgensen announced the Data Centre Energy Efficien...