Books on the topic 'Cognitive appraisal theory'

Chapter 8 discusses people’s tendencies to defend their views on how the world should look and what exact role affective processes and feelings play in these defensive responses. The chapter delineates that worldview-defense reactions tend to be “hot-cognitive” reactions, consisting of a combination of how situations are interpreted, assessed, and appraised and the feelings associated with these interpretations, assessments, and appraisals. The chapter examines three levels of analysis at which feelings play a role in radicalization: (1) individual defensive responses involve processes of self-esteem perseverance; (2) group responses include the buffering role of culture; and (3) ideological and religious concerns often serve important psychological functions that are of special relevance to radicalizing individuals and radical groups and subcultures.

This chapter provides a review and synthesis of the neurocircuitry involved in affect and cognition and their interactions as it relates to regulatory functions. Cognition and emotion are considered together taking a more integrated, functional perspective. The chapter first gives an overview regarding structure and function of key brain regions, that is, prefrontal and cingulate regions, insula, and subcortical regions, as well as other temporal-parietal-occipital regions. Following this overview, the chapter proceeds with summarizing key neuroscientific findings as organized by cognitive processes and their relevance for emotion. The choice of processes reflects the key stages involved in responding to a stimulus, from the time of sensory input to behavioral response/output, namely perception, learning and memory central executive functions, cognitive appraisal, and reappraisal. The overall aim of the chapter is to provide a better understanding of cognitive-emotional interactions at the neurocircuit level.

Chapter 8 explores obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). It first outlines the nature of OCD, its prevalence, the development of current treatments, the behavioural theory of OCD and behaviour therapy in practice, deficit theories and cognitive factors, cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) for OCD, experimental studies of normal intrusive thoughts, distorted thinking and negative appraisals, treatment implications of the cognitive behavioural theory, and strategies in the treatment of OCD.

A large part of the contemporary literature involves functional neuroimaging. Yet few readers are sufficiently familiar with the various imaging methods, their capabilities and limitations, to appraise it correctly. To fulfill that need is the purpose of this Handbook, which consists of an accessible description of the methods and their clinical and research applications. The Handbook begins with an overview of basic concepts of functional brain imaging, magnetoencephalography and the use of magnetic source imaging (MSI), positron emission tomography (PET), diffusion tensor imaging (DTI), and transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS). The authors then discuss the various research applications of imaging, such as white matter connectivity; the function of the default mode network; the possibility and the utility of imaging of consciousness; the search for mnemonic traces of concepts the mechanisms of the encoding, consolidation, and retrieval of memories; executive functions and their neuroanatomical mechanisms; voluntary actions, human will and decision-making; motor cognition; language and the mechanisms of affective states and pain. The final chapter discusses the uses of functional neuroimaging in the presurgical mapping of the brain.

Chapter 7 examines the ways in which a film’s ideological properties contribute to aesthetic pleasure when they intensify, or when they complicate, viewers’ cognitive and affective responses. The chapter demonstrates the ways in which the ideology of a Hollywood film guides our beliefs, values, and emotional responses. In ideologically unified Hollywood films, such as Die Hard, Independence Day, Pickup on South Street, and Casablanca, narrative and stylistic devices concentrate our beliefs, values, and emotional responses, offering us a purer experience than we can find in most real-life situations. By contrast, ideologically complicated Hollywood films, such as Chinatown, The Third Man, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Last Temptation of Christ, and The Dark Knight, advance their worldviews in a novel, ambiguous, or peculiar way, upsetting our appraisals of events and characters and complicating our intellectual and emotional experiences.

This chapter offers an alternative account to the basic emotion theory. In my alternative, termed psychological construction, episodes called “emotional” consist of changes in various component processes (peripheral physiological changes, information processing including appraisals and attributions, expressive and instrumental behavior, subjective experiences), no one of which is itself an emotion or necessary or sufficient for an emotion to be instantiated. One hypothesis, for example, is that the production of facial expressions is accounted for by one or more of various alternative sources(such as perception, cognition, signaling of intented behavior, paralanguage, preparation for action, or core affect), not by a discrete emotion or affect program dedicated exclusively to emotion or to a specific emotion.

Psychoneuroimmunology (PNI) examines the biological and behavioral pathways whereby psychosocial factors may influence the course of chronic medical conditions, including HIV/AIDS. This chapter summarizes PNI research conducted examining the possible role of negative life events (including bereavement), stress reactivity, personality factors, cognitive appraisals, and affective states (depression) in HIV illness progression. Because much of this research was conducted in the era prior to the advent of effective antiretroviral therapy, important questions remain regarding whether there the associations of psychosocial factors with HIV illness progression are independent of medication adherence and persistence. There is also increasing recognition that chronic viral infections such as HIV have neuropsychiatric effects, and more recent PNI research has focused on studying the bidirectional communication between the immune system and central nervous system in HIV. Future research should focus on obtaining definitive answers to these questions to inform the development of novel approaches for reducing psychiatric symptoms and optimizing health outcomes among persons with HIV.

This chapter describes the key challenges and rewards of the implementation and delivery of a programme of advanced communication skills training (ACST) for senior healthcare professionals working in cancer and palliative care in Northern Ireland (NI). It enables participants to reflect and critically appraise their own and others communication skills and to demonstrate the skills required to facilitate a structured patient-centred assessment/consultation using specific strategies to handle complex communication scenarios. Participants should also be able to tailor complex information to meet the needs of patients and carers. The course is based on an experiential, learner-centred approach, which is known to enhance effective person-centred communication and includes cognitive, behavioural, and affective components. A 2014 analysis of the programme recommends the two-day as opposed to the three-day model for ACST, as no disadvantages have been identified and this programme is better meeting the needs of the participants.

Hollywood makes the most widely successful pleasure-giving artworks the world has ever known. The American film industry operates under the assumption that pleasurable aesthetic experiences, among large populations, translate into box office success. More than any other historical mode of art, Hollywood has systematized the delivery of aesthetic pleasure, packaging and selling it on a mass scale. If the Hollywood film industry succeeds in delivering aesthetic pleasure both routinely and, at times, in an outstanding way, then we should ultimately regard Hollywood cinema as an artistic achievement, not merely a commercial success. Hollywood Aesthetic accounts for the chief attraction of Hollywood cinema worldwide: its entertainment value. The book addresses four fundamental components of Hollywood’s aesthetic design: narrative, style, ideology, and genre. Grounded in film history and in the psychological and philosophical literature in aesthetics, the book explains: (1) the intrinsic properties characteristic of Hollywood cinema that induce aesthetic pleasure; (2) the cognitive and affective processes, sparked by Hollywood movies, that become engaged during aesthetic pleasure; and (3) the exhilarated aesthetic experiences afforded by an array of persistently entertaining Hollywood movies. Offering a comprehensive appraisal of the capacity of Hollywood cinema to provide aesthetic pleasure, the book sets out to explain how Hollywood creates, for masses of people, some of their most exhilarating experiences of art.

The critical theory tradition has, since its inception, sought to distinguish its perspective on society from more purely descriptive or normative approaches by maintaining that persons have a deep-seated interest in the free development of their personality—an interest that can only be realized in and through the rational organization of society, but which is systematically stymied by existing society. Yet it has struggled to specify this emancipatory interest in a way that avoids being either excessively utopian or overly accommodating to existing society. Despite the fact that Hegel’s concept of reconciliation is normally thought to run aground on the latter horn of this dilemma, this book argues that reconciliation is the best available conceptualization of this emancipatory interest. It presents Hegel’s idea of freedom as something actualized in individuals’ lives through their becoming reconciled to how society shapes their roles, prospects, and sense of self; it presents reconciliation as being less a matter of philosophical cognition, and more of inclusion in a responsive, transparent political process. It then introduces the concept of reification, which—through its development in Marx and Lukács, through Horkheimer and Adorno—substantiates an increasingly cogent critique of reconciliation as something unachievable within the framework of modern society. Giving equal attention to psychoanalysis and legal theory, the second half critically appraises the writings of Rawls, Honneth, and Habermas as efforts to spell out what a concept of reconciliation more democratic and inclusive than Hegel, yet sensitive to the reifying effects of legal systems, might mean.

Adaptive governance is defined by a focus on decentralized decision-making structures and procedurally rational policy, supported by intensive natural and social science. Decentralized decision-making structures allow a large, complex problem like global climate change to be factored into many smaller problems, each more tractable for policy and scientific purposes. Many smaller problems can be addressed separately and concurrently by smaller communities. Procedurally rational policy in each community is an adaptation to profound uncertainties, inherent in complex systems and cognitive constraints, that limit predictability. Hence planning to meet projected targets and timetables is secondary to continuing appraisal of incremental steps toward long-term goals: What has and hasn’t worked compared to a historical baseline, and why? Each step in such trial-and-error processes depends on politics to balance, if not integrate, the interests of multiple participants to advance their common interest—the point of governance in a free society. Intensive science recognizes that each community is unique because the interests, interactions, and environmental responses of its participants are multiple and coevolve. Hence, inquiry focuses on case studies of particular contexts considered comprehensively and in some detail.Varieties of adaptive governance emerged in response to the limitations of scientific management, the dominant pattern of governance in the 20th century. In scientific management, central authorities sought technically rational policies supported by predictive science to rise above politics and thereby realize policy goals more efficiently from the top down. This approach was manifest in the framing of climate change as an “irreducibly global” problem in the years around 1990. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established to assess science for the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The parties negotiated the Kyoto Protocol that attempted to prescribe legally binding targets and timetables for national reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. But progress under the protocol fell far short of realizing the ultimate objective in Article 1 of the UNFCCC, “stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference in the climate system.” As concentrations continued to increase, the COP recognized the limitations of this approach in Copenhagen in 2009 and authorized nationally determined contributions to greenhouse gas reductions in the Paris Agreement in 2015.Adaptive governance is a promising but underutilized approach to advancing common interests in response to climate impacts. The interests affected by climate, and their relative priorities, differ from one community to the next, but typically they include protecting life and limb, property and prosperity, other human artifacts, and ecosystem services, while minimizing costs. Adaptive governance is promising because some communities have made significant progress in reducing their losses and vulnerability to climate impacts in the course of advancing their common interests. In doing so, they provide field-tested models for similar communities to consider. Policies that have worked anywhere in a network tend to be diffused for possible adaptation elsewhere in that network. Policies that have worked consistently intensify and justify collective action from the bottom up to reallocate supporting resources from the top down. Researchers can help realize the potential of adaptive governance on larger scales by recognizing it as a complementary approach in climate policy—not a substitute for scientific management, the historical baseline.