Emotion
Emotion, in everyday speech, is any relatively brief conscious experience characterized by intense mental activity and a high degree of pleasure or displeasure.
Scientific discourse has drifted to other meanings and there is no consensus on a definition. Emotion is often intertwined with mood, temperament, personality, disposition, and motivation.
In some theories, cognition is an important aspect of emotion. Those acting primarily on emotion may seem as if they are not thinking, but mental processes are still essential, particularly in the interpretation of events. For example, the realization of danger and subsequent arousal of the nervous system (e.g. rapid heartbeat and breathing, sweating, muscle tension) is integral to the experience of fear. Other theories, however, claim that emotion is separate from and can precede cognition.
Emotion is represented in limbic and prefrontal brain areas herein termed the Affective Salience Network (ASN). Within the ASN, there are substantial unknowns about how valence and emotional intensity are processed - specifically, which nodes are associated with affective bias (a phenomenon in which participants interpret emotions in a manner consistent with their own mood). A recently developed feature detection approach (“specparam”) was used to select dominant spectral features from human intracranial electrophysiological data, revealing affective specialization within specific nodes of the ASN. Spectral analysis of dominant features at the channel level suggests that dorsal anterior cingulate (dACC), anterior insula (aINS), and ventral-medial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) are sensitive to valence and intensity, while the amygdala is primarily sensitive to intensity. AIC model comparisons corroborated the spectral analysis findings, suggesting all four nodes are more sensitive to intensity than valence. The data also revealed that activity in dACC and vmPFC was predictive of the extent of affective bias in the ratings of facial expressions - a proxy measure of instantaneous mood. To examine the causality of the dACC in affective experience, 130 Hz continuous stimulation was applied to dACC while patients viewed and rated emotional faces. Faces were rated significantly happier during stimulation, even after accounting for differences in baseline ratings. Together the data suggest a causal role for dACC during the processing of external affective stimuli 1).
Quality of life (QoL) has been identified as one of the most important outcome measurements following cervical spine surgery. The contributing factors to post-operative QoL remain limited.
A study of Yang et al. aimed to prospectively examine the QoL and related pre-operative emotional factors in patients who underwent anterior cervical spine surgery.
A total of 124 patients who underwent anterior cervical spine surgery were recruited. All participants were prospectively evaluated for their QoL and 2 aspects of emotion, depression and anxiety, before and after surgery, respectively.
Pre-operatively, 13% of patients showed signs of depression and 31% of patients reported symptoms of anxiety. Post-operatively 14% of patients reported depression, but 41% reported symptoms of anxiety. A significant association between depression, anxiety and different domains of QoL were identified, and specific cut-off points of pre-operatively depressive and/or anxiety levels to predict unfavorable postoperative QoL was further established.
This prospective study demonstrated specific emotional factors, specifically depression and anxiety, influence patients' QoL following surgery. These results suggest clinicians should also monitor patients' emotional adjustments with their physical conditions 2).
Human emotions come from relationships with others, and emotional states can be transferred to others through emotional transfer, leading people to experience identical emotions unconsciously. Emotional transference is not a new concept; however, no concept analysis has been performed on emotional transference from parents to children.
A literature search was conducted of terms related to 'emotional transference', (e.g. 'emotional transfer' and 'affective transference') in the following databases: PubMed, CINAHL, ProQuest, RISS and DBPIA published between 1987 and 2016; documents were published in English or Korean.
Forty-four studies met the review criteria.
A review of Oh WO et al. from the Korea University College of Nursing, Seoul and Severance Hospital, Department of Pediatric Neurosurgery, Seodaemun-gu, Korea, highlighted an analysis of the concept of emotional transference from parent to child, a unidirectional process. The apparent attributes which are of importance to the child during parental interaction consist of parental expression (facial, voice, postural), the child's interpretation of parental emotional expression, and the child's emotional formation.
Understanding parental emotional transference to children is very important in effecting positive outcomes in the nursing environment.
Nurses need to be aware that parental emotional transference to children and its attributes are essential to assessment and intervention. Further study and education are needed to develop nursing care for children 3).