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Walking meditation, sometimes known as kinhin, is a practice within several forms of Buddhism that involve movement and periods of walking between long periods of sitting meditation. In different forms, the practice is common in various traditions of both Theravada and in Mahayana Buddhism.
The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) is a standardized psychometric test of adult personality and psychopathology. Psychologists and other mental health professionals use various versions of the MMPI to help develop treatment plans, assist with differential diagnosis, help answer legal questions, screen job candidates during the personnel selection process, or as part of a therapeutic assessment procedure.
Alexithymia is a personality trait characterized by the inability to identify and describe emotions experienced by oneself. The core characteristic of alexithymia is marked dysfunction in emotional awareness, social attachment, and interpersonal relation. Furthermore, people with high levels of alexithymia can have difficulty distinguishing and appreciating the emotions of others, which is thought to lead to unempathic and ineffective emotional responses.
Affect, in psychology, refers to the underlying experience of feeling, emotion or mood. Affect is the outward expression of feelings and emotions. Affect can be a tone of voice, a smile, a frown, a laugh, a smirk, a tear, pressed lips, a crinkled forehead, a scrunched nose, furrowed eyebrows, or an eye gaze. It’s really any facial expression or body movement that indicates emotion. Affect is what people use in communication with each other to decipher the way another person feels about something.
Somatosensory amplification (SSA) is a tendency to perceive normal somatic and visceral sensations as being relatively intense, disturbing and noxious. It is a common feature of hypochondriasis and is commonly found with fibromyalgia, major depressive disorder, some anxiety disorders, Asperger syndrome, and alexithymia. One common clinical measure of SSA is the Somatosensory Amplification Scale (SSAS).
Amplification is used to describe a judged tendency of a person to amplify physical symptoms based on psychological factors such as anxiety or depression. Distinct interpretations of this type of presentation could be sensory processing disorder involving differences in the way a person reacts to sensory input which is regarded as a pervasive developmental disorder related to the autism spectrum; or there is an alternative psychological concept of 'innate sensitiveness' as a personality trait coined by Carl Jung later developed into the highly sensitive person trait. In one instance where amplification is used as a handle or point of reference or diagnosis it is said "somatosensory amplification refers to the tendency to experience somatic sensation as intense, noxious, and disturbing. What may be a minor 'twinge' or mild 'soreness' to the stoic, is a severe, consuming pain to the amplifier."
Robert Michael Bagby is a Canadian psychologist, senior clinician scientist and director of clinical research at the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH). He is a full professor in the Department of Psychiatry, University of Toronto. He became a full professor of psychology at the University of Toronto Scarborough campus in July 2011.
The Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI), created by Aaron T. Beck and other colleagues, is a 21-question multiple-choice self-report inventory that is used for measuring the severity of anxiety in adolescents and adults ages 17 and older. The questions used in this measure ask about common symptoms of anxiety that the subject has had during the past week. It is designed for individuals who are of 17 years of age or older and takes 5 to 10 minutes to complete. Several studies have found the Beck Anxiety Inventory to be an accurate measure of anxiety symptoms in children and adults.
Affect measures are used in the study of human affect, and refer to measures obtained from self-report studies asking participants to quantify their current feelings or average feelings over a longer period of time. Even though some affect measures contain variations that allow assessment of basic predispositions to experience a certain emotion, tests for such stable traits are usually considered to be personality tests.
Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) was originally developed by Zigmond and Snaith (1983) and is commonly used by doctors to determine the levels of anxiety and depression that a person is experiencing. The HADS is a fourteen item scale that generates: Seven of the items relate to anxiety and seven relate to depression. Zigmond and Snaith created this outcome measure specifically to avoid reliance on aspects of these conditions that are also common somatic symptoms of illness, for example fatigue and insomnia or hypersomnia. This, it was hoped, would create a tool for the detection of anxiety and depression in people with physical health problems.
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The Levenson Self-Report Psychopathy scale (LSRP) is a 26-item, 4-point Likert scale, self-report inventory to measure primary and secondary psychopathy in non-institutionalised populations. It was developed in 1995 by Michael R. Levenson, Kent A. Kiehl and Cory M. Fitzpatrick. The scale was created for the purpose of conducting a psychological study examining antisocial disposition among a sample of 487 undergraduate students attending psychology classes at the University of California, Davis.
In medicine, insomnia is widely measured using the Athens Insomnia Scale (AIS). AIS was first introduced in the year 2000 by a group of researchers from Athens, Greece to assess the insomnia symptoms in patients with sleep disorders.
The Somatic Symptom Scale - 8 (SSS-8) is a brief self-report questionnaire used to assess somatic symptom burden. It measures the perceived burden of common somatic symptoms. These symptoms were originally chosen to reflect common symptoms in primary care but they are relevant for a large number of diseases and mental disorders. The SSS-8 is a brief version of the popular Patient Health Questionnaire - 15 (PHQ-15).
The General Behavior Inventory (GBI) is a 73-question psychological self-report assessment tool designed by Richard Depue and colleagues to identify the presence and severity of manic and depressive moods in adults, as well as to assess for cyclothymia. It is one of the most widely used psychometric tests for measuring the severity of bipolar disorder and the fluctuation of symptoms over time. The GBI is intended to be administered for adult populations; however, it has been adapted into versions that allow for juvenile populations, as well as a short version that allows for it to be used as a screening test.
Emotional approach coping is a psychological construct that involves the use of emotional processing and emotional expression in response to a stressful situation. As opposed to emotional avoidance, in which emotions are experienced as a negative, undesired reaction to a stressful situation, emotional approach coping involves the conscious use of emotional expression and processing to better deal with a stressful situation. The construct was developed to explain an inconsistency in the stress and coping literature: emotion-focused coping was associated with largely maladaptive outcomes while emotional processing and expression was demonstrated to be beneficial.
The Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) is a self-report questionnaire that consists of two 10-item scales to measure both positive and negative affect. Each item is rated on a 5-point scale of 1 (not at all) to 5 (very much). The measure has been used mainly as a research tool in group studies, but can be utilized within clinical and non-clinical populations as well. Shortened, elongated, and children's versions of the PANAS have been developed, taking approximately 5–10 minutes to complete. Clinical and non-clinical studies have found the PANAS to be a reliable and valid instrument in the assessment of positive and negative affect.
The Cook-Medley Hostility Scale (Ho) is a standard in psychology designed to measure an individual's personality and temperament, specifically degrees of hostility. Initially developed as a scale for the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI), scores from the hostility scale represent the individual's disposition towards cynicism and chronic hate. Scores from the scale have been used by studies as a predictor of the measured individual's risk of developing certain health problems as well as the success of their interpersonal relationships.
In the field of personality psychology, Machiavellianism is a personality trait centered on manipulativeness, callousness, and indifference to morality. Though it has nothing to do with the historical figure or his political thought, the trait is named after the political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli, as psychologists Richard Christie and Florence Geis used edited and truncated statements inspired by his works to study variations in human behaviors. Their Mach IV test, a 20-question, Likert-scale personality survey, became the standard self-assessment tool and scale of the Machiavellianism construct. Those who score high on the scale are more likely to have a high level of deceitfulness and a cynical, unempathetic temperament.
The Shift-and-persist model has emerged in order to account for unintuitive, positive health outcomes in some individuals of low socioeconomic status. A large body of research has previously linked low socioeconomic status to poor physical and mental health outcomes, including early mortality. Low socioeconomic status is hypothesized to get "under the skin" by producing chronic activation of the sympathetic nervous system and hypothalamic–pituitary–adrenal axis, which increases allostatic load, leading to the pathogenesis of chronic disease. However, some individuals of low socioeconomic status do not appear to experience the expected, negative health effects associated with growing up in poverty. To account for this, the Shift-and-Persist Model proposes that, as children, some individuals of low socioeconomic status learn adaptive strategies for regulating their emotions ("shifting") and focusing on their goals ("persisting") in the face of chronic adversity. According to this model, the use of shift-and-persist strategies diminishes the typical negative effects of adversity on health by leading to more adaptive biological, cognitive, and behavioral responses to daily stressors.
References
- ↑ Ciarrochi, J.; Bilich, L. (2006). "Process measures of potential relevance to ACT".
- ↑ Taylor, Graeme J.; Ryan, David; Bagby, R. Michael (1986). "Toward the development of a new self-report alexithymia scale". Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics. 44 (4): 191–199. doi:10.1159/000287912. PMID 3837277.
- ↑ Bagby, R.Michael; Parker, James D.A.; Taylor, Graeme J. (1994). "The twenty-item Toronto Alexithymia scale—I. Item selection and cross-validation of the factor structure". Journal of Psychosomatic Research. 38 (1): 23–32. doi:10.1016/0022-3999(94)90005-1. ISSN 0022-3999. PMID 8126686.
- ↑ Taylor, Graeme J.; Bagby, R. Michael; Yyan, David P.; Parker, James D. A.; Doody, Kenneth F.; Keefe, Peter (1988). "Criterion Validity of the Toronto Alexithymia Scale". Psychosomatic Medicine. 50 (5): 500–509. doi:10.1097/00006842-198809000-00006. PMID 3186893. S2CID 1123413.
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