Emotional Regulation And Emotional Expressivity Among Individuals With Depression

The capacity to assert power over one's emotional state is known as emotion management. It could entail actions like evaluating a stressful situation to lessen anger or anxiety, covering up obvious signs of fear or grief, or concentrating on things that make you feel joyful or peaceful. This capacity is referred to as Emotional Regulation.

Emotional Regulation is crucial because, unlike babies and children, adults are typically assumed to be able to control their emotions, particularly their fear and anger, in a way that is acceptable to others. People frequently say or do things when emotional control is compromised that they subsequently blame and wished they had been able to regulate their emotions better. The inability to control one's emotions is a feature of some types of mental illness. It might eventually have a detrimental effect on a person's social interactions and personal well-being.

The term "emotional expressivity" refers to a variety of behavioural modifications (such as changes in posture and facial expression), such as laughing, pouting, sobbing, or slamming doors (Gross & John, 1995). This concept focuses on observable behavioural responses, and the intensity of a person's behavioural impulses determines the extent of their emotional expression. Studies demonstrate the beneficial and protective nature of emotional expression as well as the negative consequences of repressing or not expressing emotions (Lavee & Adital, 2004), because it impairs one's ability to maintain good physical, mental, and cognitive health, emotional repression is seen negatively (Mendes, Reis, Seery, & Blascovich, 2003). Suppression of emotions may have detrimental effects on mental health (Patel & Patel, 2019). The manifestation of genuine emotions is prevented by emotional suppression, due to this circumstance, the person may feel as though their feelings and behaviours are incompatible and may negatively judge their emotions.

In terms of the physical (Fernandez-Ballesteros et al., 1998), psychological (Buck, Goldman, Easton, & Smith, 1998), social (Levine & Feldman, 1997), and personality well-being, emotional expressivity is crucial (Abe & Izard, 1999). People that are highly expressive emotionally do so clearly and concisely (Gross & John, 1995). According to a study by Burgin et al. (2012), people with high levels of emotional expression were less lonely, had stronger social relationships, and predicted higher subjective well-being and life satisfaction.

IN CONTEXT OF DEPRESSION

Major depressive disorder, sometimes known as depression, is a frequent and significant medical condition that hurts your feelings, thoughts, and actions. Thankfully, it can also be treated. Feelings of sadness and/or a loss of interest in past interests are symptoms of depression. It can impair your capacity to function at home, at work, and in general since it can cause a wide range of emotional and physical issues.

The methods people employ to control their emotions, particularly their negative emotions, seem to be closely related to several psychopathologies, including depression. Depression is a very common condition of emotion dysregulation that harms social abilities, life quality, and the ability to categorize and recognize affective states.

Individuals with Major depressive disorder (MDD) fail to employ executive abilities to manage negative feelings and lessen emotional intensity. MDD is associated with failure to manage or repair emotions, which results in protracted episodes of low mood. This is a result of neurobiological variations, such as decreased grey matter density and volume in the prefrontal cortex of the brain. People with depression display reduced brain activity and metabolism in this domain during emotion management activities. The brain's motivational systems, which are a matrix of neural connections between the prefrontal cortex and ventral striatum in the centre of the brain, can exhibit less effective operation in people with MDD. This may account for their inability to control their pleasure feelings and motivation in life (a condition known as anhedonia).

MANAGEMENT OF EMOTIONAL REGULATION AND EXPRESSIVITY

Every moment of our existence, we all practice emotion regulation. We can control our emotions and how we behave in any scenario thanks to this psychological process. However, some people find it difficult to control their emotions, which results in challenging and intense sentiments. As a result, they frequently engage in behaviours like self-harm, alcohol abuse, and overeating in an effort to cope with these experiences. The ability to cope can be beneficial or negative, and emotion regulation techniques are essential. Positive and negative emotion management techniques are referred to as "transdiagnostic" since they apply to various diseases. For instance, we can utilize positive coping to handle any clinical condition, such as diabetes, anxiety, or depression. Coping extends beyond diagnosis and has to do with how we deal with any stressor.

A best long outlook and increased resilience are both linked to adaptive coping. Positive psychology is used to reframe the situation and adaptive coping meant taking a constructive attitude to challenges, empowering oneself, relying on practical tools like a workout, sleep, hygiene , establishing routines, and support systems, and avoiding thought patterns that result in unhelpful behaviours. Different factors, including the existence of more severe clinical illnesses like anxiety and depression, as well as other elements like outside stressors and innate predispositions, might significantly impede one's ability to actively adopt adaptive techniques.

Positive reappraisal and repetitive negative thinking are the two broad categories into which researchers classify emotion regulation techniques. Positive reappraisal is defined as "cognitively reframing the meaning of a distressing event less negatively or more positively to minimize its emotional impact," whereas repetitive negative thinking refers to a transdiagnostic process of excessively thinking about negative topics that are passive and/or difficult to control. This definition is taken from Everaert and Joormann (2019), which is reviewed below. Numerous therapeutic strategies aim to change one or both of these elements because we believe doing so is connected to better outcomes. Examples of these therapeutic techniques include increasing positive reappraisal and decreasing repeating negative thinking. For instance, psychodynamic therapy examines how past patterns can recur in the present to give patients more choices through increased self-awareness and fresh experiences in therapeutic relationships, and cognitive-behavioural therapy focuses on identifying and directly modifying patterns of thought and behaviour, to name a few fundamental approaches. Psychiatric medication management also aims to directly modify symptoms. Which components of depression and anxiety are impacted by positive reappraisal vs persistently negative thinking is not fully understood.

By teaching you how to better manage and express your feelings, a mental health practitioner can assist you in developing greater emotional regulation and help you minimize severe reactions to emotional stimulants. This is typically accomplished through a blend of therapies that are particularly beneficial in fostering more emotional consistency and skill-building. There are situations when a physical ailment at the root of the problem causes emotional dysregulation. Any underlying medical issues that might be causing your mood-altering behaviour can be identified and treated by your doctor.

CONCLUSION

Efforts can change and receive therapy to be successful, but caution and compassion are needed. When we don't comprehend what that perspective is actually like, it might be simple to fail to understand others that are experiencing despair and anxiety. People with mental illnesses frequently lack perspective and freedom of choice. It is frequently simply impossible to actively choose to think or view things differently—especially when the disease is more severe.

Some people may find relief from horrible anxieties or bad thoughts with simple exercises like visualising a roadblock or working through worst-case scenarios, but for others, these techniques are insufficient and may leave them feeling frustrated. Similar to how helplessness and hopelessness, uneasy agitation and anxiousness, and exhaustion can make cognitive-behavioural treatment very difficult. Making connections with the past and engaging in traditional therapy may not be able to alter the present, but support and cooperative problem-solving may be able to point out areas where gradual, small-scale improvements are possible. It's best to apply positive reappraisal sparingly and selectively in specific situations.

Prescription medications to having improved or quit thinking negatively could go nowhere fast, leading to mutual frustration, injury, and sometimes relationship destruction—ultimately creating a vicious cycle of dwindling support—when people close to those with depression and anxiety don't recognize the difficulties or get how it feels to have no choice in how one sees oneself and reality.

However, there is a better possibility of long-lasting rehabilitation when there are loved ones and experts who can help identify key areas where growth is possible at a speed that works. A game-changer is collaborating, aligning, and sharing perspectives with one another.

REFERENCES

Joormann, J., & Gotlib, I. H. (2010). Emotion regulation in depression: relation to cognitive inhibition.?Cognition & emotion,?24(2), 281–298. https://doi.org/10.1080/02699930903407948

What Is Emotional Dysregulation? (2021, April 18). WebMD. https://www.webmd.com/mental-health/what-is-emotional-dysregulation

N.P.W. (2019, September 2). How Do We Regulate Emotions in Depression and Anxiety?IN. Psychology Today. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/psychiatry-the-people/201909/how-do-we-regulate-emotions-in-depression-and-anxiety