Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Suicide is the primary cause of adolescent death, and suicide seriously endangers the life security and mental health of human being. Suicidal behavior includes suicidal ideation, suicidal attempt and suicide. Suicidal ideation refers to serious suicidal thoughts of preparing for a fatal, self-directed, and potentially injurious behavior, or refers to the intension to die without specific plans. Suicidal attempt refers to the intension to commit suicide, including the plans for suicide and even committed suicide; they might attempt to attract attention through bodily harm, but not necessarily causing actual harm. However, suicide is self-directed harm or death. According to suicidal theories which were based on the ideation-to-action framework, self-disgust is a key factor for the formation of suicidal ideation. This article reviews theoretical basis, correlation factor and neurophysiological mechanism of disgust induced suicidal behavior, and predicts future research direction. Many recent studies suggested that many psychological problems, including suicide, are caused by patients' disgust to the surroundings and the environment. Disgust is a basic emotion, which is a response to disgustful things, and it is a defensive mechanism to keep people away from spoiled foods or from pollutants to prevent potential diseases, viruses and pollution. However, under heavy burdens and pressures, people would feel depressed and self-disgust, and ultimately lead to despair (extreme self-disgust), resulting in suicidal ideation. Under the condition of having suicidal ability, suicidal ideation would turn to be suicidal attempts, and thus suicide. It is also suggested that early life trauma might be the root for disgust inducing suicidal ideation. And life stress and mental illness might aggravate the induction of disgust to suicide. High-intensity self-disgust has been proved to be the most relevant predictor of suicidal risks in mental illness. Psychoanalysis shows that when people are disgusted by themselves, the aggression behavior induced by disgust would also be directed to themselves, so self-disgust might induce suicide. The neural mechanism of self-disgust inducing suicide may be related to monoamine (including serotonin) and oxytocin. Hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis are related to the stress response system that plays a very important role in disgust-induced suicidal ideation. Besides, self-disgust may be affected by traumatic stresses in early life, current psychological problems and mental diseases, which might lead to the mal-development of 5-hydroxytryptamine (5-HT) system, that determines the pattern of stress response in adulthood, including suicide. However, there are still some limitations in current suicide studies. First of all, most studies are still limited to cross-sectional design and cannot compare time factors. Therefore, future studies should adopt vertical design and prospective research. Secondly, since most studies are limited to questionnaire studies, future studies could apply neuroscience technologies, such as neuroimaging and electrophysiology, in investigating the neural mechanisms of suicidal behavior, as well as the psychological and neural mechanisms of suicidal behavior affected by disgust.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Basic emotion theory is the most representative theory in the field of emotion science, which holds that human emotions are composed of a limited number of basic emotions, such as fear, anger, joy, sadness and so on. Basic emotions are evolved for fundamental life tasks, and each basic emotion has its own unique neural structure and physiological basis. Although basic emotion theories are widely accepted, there is little agreement on specific basic emotions. In recent decades, many fMRI studies have attempted to determine the unique neural structural underpinnings of each of the basic emotions, and made many important findings, such as disgust is related to the insula, sadness is related to the anterior cingulate gyrus, and the amygdala is an important limbic structure related to fear. However, recent meta-analysis studies have found that many basic emotions share many brain regions. Therefore, the theory of specific brain regions of basic emotions has been questioned and even denied. Through the discussion of the basic emotions and neural basis, as well as the latest functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study of basic emotion theory analysis found that a lot of brain imaging data have reported certain basic emotion that is associated with a particular brain regions, different stimulation induced a kind of basic emotion is stable to activate the same brain regions. But these studies also raise questions. As Barrett notes, the amygdala is involved in almost all negative emotions, like fear, anger, and surprise. Therefore, it is likely that the amygdala was just involved in regulating arousal. Instead, we believe that the reason for the inconsistencies in these studies is that humans may have only three basic emotions: joy, fear (anger), and sadness. Many of the so-called different basic emotions are actually the same basic emotion. Fear and anger may be the same basic emotions, while surprise may be the cognitive component that induces fear and anger. They share a common neural basis: the amygdala. Recently, researchers have tried to interpret the facial expressions of laboratory rats by using machine-vision technology to process their facial features. Similarly, machine vision can be used to decode human facial expressions, emotion recognition and classification. Future research can focus on multiple forms of common and unique features and connections between features (such as functional brain connections), such as behavioral, physiological, visual cortex, eye movement, facial expression, fMRI imaging, EEG topography and other data features. At the same time, we can try to prototype emotions from many angles. Thus, it is expected to form multi-angle and multi-form emotion prototype, providing new ideas and new evidence for the research of basic emotion theory.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Arousal is an activator for the body's resources, reflecting the strengthened preparation for external stimulus input. As it is introduced into the emotional dimension, arousal is regarded as one of the core characteristics of emotions, which is a measurement of body's wakefulness, and its level changes on the continuum from sleep to provocation. Arousal can be subjectively experienced by individuals, and has a unique physiological mechanism and neural circuit. Its concept contains both psychological arousal and physical arousal. However, as arousal is closely related to emotions, many investigators neglect the original meaning of arousal, taking arousal as a substitute for emotional intensity. The reason for this confusion may be that valence is regarded as the direction of emotions. In fact, valence is only a feature of emotions. It also has different intensities, which affect the emotional intensity. Therefore, arousal cannot be simply equaled with emotional intensity. Instead, emotional intensity should be the vector addition of arousal and valence. In this paper, we analyze the concept of arousal and its relationship with emotions. Then, inspired by Lazarus' argument that stimuli define emotions, we hold that it may be possible to further understand the connotation and psychological mechanism of arousal from the perspective of anticipation. Specifically, a variety of emotions can be summed up to an objective material or stimulus. In other words, it is stimuli that define emotions; when stimuli appear more unexpectedly, it indicates that the level of previous preparedness is lower, so more resources are needed for the individual to mobilize, and the level of arousal rises in response. Anticipation and its related mechanisms (uncertainty, habitation, etc.) are the major cognitive mechanisms of arousal. As for other factors (stimulus attributes, individual differences, etc.), as the number of resources that the individual needs to process the stimulus changes, the one of the resources required to be mobilized after the stimulus appears(arousal level) changes accordingly. Besides, the degree of individual expectations can be affected. As a result, these factors also affect the level of arousal. The neural mechanism of arousal mainly involves a “bottom-up” pathway that originates from the brainstem and projects to the thalamus, hypothalamus, and cerebral cortex. The arousal signals in the brainstem and the tail of the hypothalamus mainly come from the areas rich in monoamine neurons and cholinergic neurons. The GABAergic neurons in the preoptic area of ??the hypothalamus, the lateral hypothalamus, and the sub-substantia nigra reticular region play a role in inhibiting arousal. Some key cortical nodes in the default mode network and the salience network and their interconnections also participate in the processing of arousal levels. It is worth noting that the arousal system almost overlaps with the brain area that encodes unexpected signals. Based on this, the anticipatory mechanism is presumably the key factor that induces arousal changes. This paper suggests that future researchers may further promote the basic and applied research for arousal from the following aspects: FMRI, eye movement, skin conductance and other technical methods may be used to explore the effect of physical arousal on psychological arousal, which is helpful to further clarify the physiological basis of arousal and related processing mechanisms; a model of integrating multimodal data may be used to optimize the measurement of arousal; the arousal characteristics of human mental diseases (especially comorbid problems) may be further evaluated; and it would be better if the discussion of the relationship between arousal and emotional intensity be more in-depth.
Subjects: Psychology >> Other Disciplines of Psychology submitted time 2022-06-09
Abstract：
The death number caused by suicide is increasing, but the psychological mechanism of suicide is not clear. Recent studies have found that disgust might be the major emotional factor leading to suicide, or the reason for people to commit suicide is due to self-disgust. Disgust is a kind of basic emotion that is induced by excreta from oneself or other people. Disgust works to keep the individual away from toxicity and disease, which can be called "immune behavior". Recently, it is found that many psychological problems are resulted from the disgust reactions to surrounding people or environment. Some studies have shown that individuals who commit suicide are very disgustful for themselves, indicating that their disgust emotion is problematic. Just as somatic autoimmunity attacks itself, disgust might lead to attacking behaviors against oneself or suicide. Self-disgust is the key factor of suicidal ideation, and early trauma is the root cause. Life stress and mental illness are involved in that disgust induced suicidal ideation. The neural basis of suicide induced by disgust is related to HPA axis and serotonin system. Future studies might apply neuroscience technologies, such as neuroimaging and electrophysiology, to examine the neural mechanism of suicidal behavior, and to explore the psychological and neural mechanisms of disgust affecting suicidal behaviors.
Peer Review Status:
Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Physiological Psychology submitted time 2021-07-27
Abstract： Disgust is an important basic emotion for human beings and animals, and it derives from distasteful oral responses to bitter (toxic) tastants, often accompanied with nausea and vomiting and a strong desire to stay away from the induced stimulus, and it has the function of avoiding potential disease threats. A large number of studies have shown that oxytocin, progesterone, and estrogens can affect perception, generation and expression of core disgust, as well as learning conditioned disgust and recognizing facial expression in varying degrees. These three hormones mainly affect the processing of disgust by modulating neurotransmitter receptors including serotonin, γ-aminobutyric acid, acetylcholine, and glutamic acid receptors, and thus affecting the activities of amygdala, insula, anterior cingulate gyrus, putamen, piriform cortex, and middle frontal gyrus. Future studies should explore the effects of these hormones on disgust in different sensory channels and also consider their moderating roles in different genders by accurately measuring hormone levels and controlling the task difficulties. In addition, researchers can combine neuroimaging technologies with behavioral studies to clarify the neuroendocrine mechanism of these hormones affecting disgust processing.
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