Emotions are mental states brought on by neurophysiological changes, variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. There is currently no scientific consensus on a definition. Emotions are often intertwined with mood, temperament, personality, disposition, or creativity.
Social cognition is a topic within psychology that focuses on how people process, store, and apply information about other people and social situations. It focuses on the role that cognitive processes play in social interactions.
Physiological psychology is a subdivision of behavioral neuroscience that studies the neural mechanisms of perception and behavior through direct manipulation of the brains of nonhuman animal subjects in controlled experiments. This field of psychology takes an empirical and practical approach when studying the brain and human behavior. Most scientists in this field believe that the mind is a phenomenon that stems from the nervous system. By studying and gaining knowledge about the mechanisms of the nervous system, physiological psychologists can uncover many truths about human behavior. Unlike other subdivisions within biological psychology, the main focus of psychological research is the development of theories that describe brain-behavior relationships.
Mind-blindness, mindblindness or mind blindness is a theory initially proposed in 1990 that claims that all autistic people have a lack or developmental delay of theory of mind (ToM), meaning they are unable to attribute mental states to others. According to the theory, a lack of ToM is considered equivalent to a lack of both cognitive and affective empathy. In the context of the theory, mind-blindness implies being unable to predict behavior and attribute mental states including beliefs, desires, emotions, or intentions of other people. The mind-blindness theory asserts that children who delay in this development will often develop autism.
Allan N. Schore is an American psychologist and researcher in the field of neuropsychology.
A broken heart is a metaphor for the intense emotional stress or pain one feels at experiencing great loss or deep longing. The concept is cross-cultural, often cited with reference to unreciprocated or lost love.
Daniel J. Siegel is a clinical professor of psychiatry at the UCLA School of Medicine and executive director of the Mindsight Institute.
Emotionally focused therapy and emotion-focused therapy (EFT) are a family of related approaches to psychotherapy with individuals, couples, or families. EFT approaches include elements of experiential therapy, systemic therapy, and attachment theory. EFT is usually a short-term treatment. EFT approaches are based on the premise that human emotions are connected to human needs, and therefore emotions have an innately adaptive potential that, if activated and worked through, can help people change problematic emotional states and interpersonal relationships. Emotion-focused therapy for individuals was originally known as process-experiential therapy, and it is still sometimes called by that name.
Polyvagal theory is a collection of unproven, evolutionary, neuroscientific, and psychological constructs pertaining to the role of the vagus nerve in emotion regulation, social connection and fear response, introduced in 1994 by Stephen Porges.
Stephen W. Porges is an American psychologist and neuroscientist. He is the Professor of Psychiatry at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Porges is also currently Director of the Kinsey Institute Traumatic Stress Research Consortium at Indiana University Bloomington, which studies trauma. He was previously a professor at the University of Illinois, Chicago, where he was director of the Brain-Body Center at the College of Medicine, and at the University of Maryland.
The neuroanatomy of memory encompasses a wide variety of anatomical structures in the brain.
Limbic resonance is the idea that the capacity for sharing deep emotional states arises from the limbic system of the brain. These states include the dopamine circuit-promoted feelings of empathic harmony, and the norepinephrine circuit-originated emotional states of fear, anxiety and anger.
Emotional lateralization is the asymmetrical representation of emotional control and processing in the brain. There is evidence for the lateralization of other brain functions as well.
The neuroscience of sex differences is the study of characteristics that separate the male and female brains. Psychological sex differences are thought by some to reflect the interaction of genes, hormones, and social learning on brain development throughout the lifespan.
A neurological look at race is multifaceted. The cross-race effect has been neurologically explained by there being differences in brain processing while viewing same-race and other-race faces. There is a debate over the cause of the cross-race effect.
Stan Tatkin, PsyD, MFT, is a clinician, researcher, teacher, and developer of A Psychobiological Approach to Couple Therapy (PACT).
Emotional abandonment is a subjective emotional state in which people feel undesired, left behind, insecure, or discarded. People experiencing emotional abandonment may feel at a loss. They may feel like they have been cut off from a crucial source of sustenance or feel withdrawn, either suddenly or through a process of erosion. Emotional abandonment can manifest through loss or separation from a loved one.
Diana Foșha is a Romanian-American psychologist, known for developing accelerated experiential dynamic psychotherapy (AEDP), and for her work on the psychotherapy of adults suffering the effects of childhood attachment trauma and abuse.
Social cognitive neuroscience is the scientific study of the biological processes underpinning social cognition. Specifically, it uses the tools of neuroscience to study "the mental mechanisms that create, frame, regulate, and respond to our experience of the social world". Social cognitive neuroscience uses the epistemological foundations of cognitive neuroscience, and is closely related to social neuroscience. Social cognitive neuroscience employs human neuroimaging, typically using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). Human brain stimulation techniques such as transcranial magnetic stimulation and transcranial direct-current stimulation are also used. In nonhuman animals, direct electrophysiological recordings and electrical stimulation of single cells and neuronal populations are utilized for investigating lower-level social cognitive processes.
Interpersonal neurobiology (IPNB) or relational neurobiology is an interdisciplinary framework that was developed in the 1990s by Daniel J. Siegel, who sought to bring together scientific disciplines to demonstrate how the mind, brain, and relationships integrate. IPNB views the mind as a process that regulates the flow of energy and information through its neurocircuitry, which is then shared and regulated between people through engagement, connection, and communication. Drawing on systems theory, Siegel proposed that these processes within interpersonal relationships can shape nervous system maturation. Siegel claimed that the mind has an irreducible quality which informs this approach.
