Emotional reasoning: Difference between revisions

''Validity testing:'' Patients defend their thoughts and ideas, and they are supposed to bring up objective evidence to support their assumptions. If not, they might be exposed to emotional reasoning.<ref name=":1">Ford-Martin, P. 2003. "Cognitive-behavioral therapy." Pp. 226–28 in ''The Gale Encyclopedia of Mental Disorders'' 1, edited by M. Harris and E. Thackerey. Thousand Oaks, Detroit, MI: Gale.</ref>▼

''Cognitive reversal:'' Patients told of a difficult situation that they had in the past, and they work with a therapist to help them fix practicing their problems. Thus, the patient could know how to face and fix difficult situations instead of reverting to emotional reasoning.<ref name=":1" />▼

''Guided discovery:'' The therapist asks the patients a series of questions designed to help patients realize their cognition distortions.<ref name=":1" />▼

''Writing in a journal:'' Patients form a habit of writing in a journal to record the situations they face, emotions, thoughts they have, and their responses or behaviors to them in their daily life. The therapist and patient will analyze how their maladaptive thought patterns influence their behaviors together.<ref name=":1" />▼

''Homework:'' The patient can acquire the ability to do self-recovery and remember the insights that they gain from therapy sessions, and the therapist would ask patients to write down the note during the session or read the books about the therapy. Doing so, they could be more focused on their thoughts and behaviors and record the outcomes for the next therapy session.<ref name=":1" />▼

''Modeling:'' The therapist could use role-playing to act in different ways to respond to difficult situations so patients could understand and model the behavior.<ref name=":1" />  ▼

''Systematic positive reinforcement:'' Positive reinforcement can reinforce the human’s behavior. In other words, if humans get the reward from anyone or anything for the first time, they are more likely to do it again in the future. The behavior-oriented therapist would use a reward system (systematic positive reinforcement) to motivate patients to reinforce specific behaviors.<ref name=":1" /> ▼

Negative memories from the past and stressful life circumstances at the present have a chance to trigger depression. The main factor for causing depression is unresolved life experiences. People who do emotional reasoning are more likely to connect to depression. Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) is a form of psychotherapy and another way to help people find a positive side for their emotional process. EFT is the research-based treatment, and it emphasizes emotional change and is also the goal of therapy. EFT has two different alternative therapies for treatments. One is cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), which emphasizes changing self-defeating thoughts and behaviors. Another is interpersonal therapy (IPT), which emphasizes changing people’s skills to have better interaction with others.<ref name=":2">Andrews, L. W. 2010. "Emotion-Focused Therapy." Pp. 183–85 in ''Encyclopedia of Depression'' 1. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press.</ref>▼

From EFT’s viewpoint, a person’s development is influenced by emotional memories and experiences. The purpose of therapy is to change the emotional process by resurfacing painful emotional experiences and bringing them into awareness. This process helps patients to recognize between what they experience is at present and how the past experiences influence how they feel at the moment. Thus, they are more likely to know what they want in their life and make better decisions for everything, and their emotional process is less likely to include emotional reasoning. Another purpose of therapy is to promote emotional intelligence - the ability to understand their emotions and perceive emotional information to fix problems and control their behavior.<ref name=":2" />▼

Emotion-focused coping is a way to focus on managing one’s emotions to reduce stress and also to reduce the chance to have emotional reasoning.<ref>Bornstein, M. H.,ed. 2018. "Emotion-Focused Coping." Pp. 730–32 in ''The SAGE Encyclopedia of Lifespan Human Development'' 2. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Reference.</ref> Cognitive therapy is a form of therapy that helps patients recognize their negative thought patterns about themselves and events to revise these thought patterns and change their behavior. <ref>Cognitive Therapy. (2016). In J. L. Longe (Ed.), ''The Gale Encyclopedia of Psychology'' (3rd ed., Vol. 1, pp. 215-217). Farmington Hills, MI: Gale. Retrieved from <nowiki>https://link-gale-com.byui.idm.oclc.org/apps/doc/CX3631000151/GVRL?u=byuidaho&sid=GVRL&xid=76946d80</nowiki></ref> Cognitive-behavioral therapy helps individuals to do well on cognitive tasks and to help them rethink their situation in a way that can benefit them.<ref>Schmidt, R. F., and W. D. Willis, eds. 2018. "Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy." ''Encyclopedia of Pain''. Berlin: Springer. p. 408.</ref> The treatment of cognitive-behavioral therapy is through the process of learning and making the change for maladaptive emotions, thoughts, and behaviors.<ref>Lewin, M. R. 2006. "Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy." Pp. 104–06 in ''Encyclopedia of Multicultural Psychology'', edited by Y. Jackson. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Reference.</ref>▼