Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Daily human touch varies in its forms, frequencies, and experiences. While some types of touch are pleasurable, others can be undesirable. The pleasure of affective touch relies on C-tactile afferents, a class of low-threshold mechanosensitive neurons that innervate the hairy skin. The affective aspect of touch is encoded by C-tactile afferents, and an interpersonal gentle touch is within the sensitive stimulus range of C-tactile, which is commonly applied to express or believed to transmit positive emotions such as love, care, and appreciation. Affective touch refers to these types of touching behaviors, and has positive impacts on individual mental health. Affective touch has the physiological capacity to monitor psychological stress by regulating the level of endogenous hormones such as oxytocin, β-endorphin, dopamine, and serotonin. Affective touch can also be seen psychologically as an adaptive social function that fosters relationships, brings about positive feelings, and enhances subjective well-being.Human has the inherent ability to experience the pleasure of touch, but the acquired environment also plays a critical role. Touch is a type of sensory experience that is closely tied to psychology and culture, and our perceptions of touch are influenced by our subjective cognitive processes. Early experiences of touch and sociocultural factors work together to shape an individual's internal pattern of touch processing. Individuals may interpret touch behaviors in a more prosocial way when they have a positive internal pattern of touch processing, and they can actively engage in affective touch to foster closeness and strengthen social bonds. On the contrary, individuals' subjective aversion and avoidance of touch behaviors are related to negative internal pattern of touch processing, which is shaped by adverse early experiences such as tactile deprivation and childhood abuse. A lack of pleasant touch experiences is related to insecure attachment and various mental disorders especially personality disorders and autism spectrum disorders. Individuals with inadequate functioning of affective touch or a negative internal pattern of touch processing may likely feel disgusted by and thus avoid touch activities, which can compromise the social benefits that come with touch, lead to chronic social withdrawal, and result in aberrant social development. Touch can aid the treatment of people with mental disorders in addition to safeguarding the mental health of the general population. It is likely that people's lifestyles lack affective touch, and the value of affective touch as an embodied social relationship may be underestimated in daily life. However, affective touch is barred from playing an appropriate significant role in treatment because of the ethical concerns with touching behaviors. Distinct from traditional types of touch, mediated touch and virtual touch elicit touch-like sensations through either other sensory information or other devices as the medium. They can be applied as a transitional or alternative intervention to help people avoidant to real touch correct their negative internal pattern of touch processing so that they can gradually adapt to and accept affective touch, and eventually use affective touch as an effective way to improve their interpersonal functioning and mental health.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-27 Cooperative journals: 《心理学报》
Abstract： Leary’s circumplex model of interpersonal behavior categorizes the manifestation of personality in interpersonal interactions into two dimensions: affiliation (i.e., hostile-friendly) and control (i.e., dominant-submissive). Interpersonal complementarity refers to mutually adjusted and complementary behaviors along the affiliation and control dimensions during dyadic interactions, such that greater dominance in one partner invites greater submissiveness in the other (i.e., reciprocity) and greater friendliness invites greater friendliness (i.e., correspondence). The first aim of the study was to develop an assessment manual to reliably measure interpersonal complementarity using the computer joystick method. Using this innovative measurement method, the study tested the high-low-high pattern of interpersonal complementarity in early, middle and late stages of therapy sessions, and examined the relationships between interpersonal complementarity and therapists’ experience, working alliance, session depth and therapeutic outcomes. Segments of early (first session), middle (sessions between first and last sessions), and late (last session) stages of session videos were selected from the “Directiveness Research” database from a university counseling center in central region of China. 48 selected segments were from 16 clients (5 male and 11 female) working with 13 therapists (3 male and 10 female) for 4 to 8 sessions (M = 5.8). Using the Interpersonal Complementarity Evaluation Manual of Counseling, two well-trained raters performed joystick assessments of interpersonal complementarity. In addition, therapists and clients filled out WAI-SR and SEQ after each session, and clients filled out OQ-45 at the start of treatment and one week after termination. The results showed that: (1) Therapists’ experience and counseling stage had an interactive effect on interpersonal complementarity. Specifically, experienced therapists (more than 3 years of experience) showed higher correspondence of affiliation in the early stage than that in the middle and late stages, and higher complementarity of dominance in the late stage than that in the early and middle stages. In contrast, novice therapists (less than 3 years of experience) showed no significant change in interpersonal complementarity over the three stages; (2) In the middle stage, the affiliation correspondence negatively predicted working alliance and interpersonal complementarity negatively predicted session depth; (3) The cases with a high-low-high pattern of affiliation correspondence tended to have better therapeutic outcomes. Results provided partial support for the three-stage high-low-high model of interpersonal complementarity in psychotherapy. Findings help shed light on the underlying mechanism of the three-stage model of interpersonal complementarity, because lower interpersonal complementarity uniquely predicted greater working alliance and session depth in the middle stage of therapy.
Subjects: Psychology >> Clinical and Counseling Psychology submitted time 2022-06-24
Abstract：
Affective touch refers to touch behaviors that are used to express or believed to transmit feelings of love, care, appreciation, and so on. C-tactile (CT) afferents, a type of low-threshold mechanosensitive neurons that innervate the hairy skin, are responsible for the pleasure of affective touch. An individual’s internal pattern of touch processing is shaped by a combination of early touch experiences and sociocultural variables. A positive internal pattern of touch processing can strengthen social bonding and promote closeness, while touch avoidance is commonly related to psychological disorders. Although affective touch has therapeutic benefits, its application to psychotherapy practices involves ethical issues. Mediated touch and virtual touch can be novel approaches to treat touch avoidance and address ethical issues.
Peer Review Status:
Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Clinical and Counseling Psychology submitted time 2020-12-09
Abstract： Mental health literacy is a very important issue in the field of mental health research, but the concept of mental health literacy still has defects, and lack of comprehensive measurement tools of mental health literacy.Based on the reconstruction of the theoretical model of mental health literacy, this study developed a measurement tool based on this model, the Mental health literacy Questionnaire, which can evaluate all components of mental health literacy.The development of mental health literacy questionnaire has gone through four main stages: the theoretical construction of mental health literacy, the development of measurement tools, project testing and psychometrics index evaluation.The final questionnaire contains six subscales corresponding to six components of mental health literacy: knowledge and concept of mental illness;Knowledge and concepts of mental health;Attitudes and habits to deal with mental illness;Maintain and promote mental health attitudes and habits;Attitudes and habits in dealing with other people's mental illness;Attitudes and habits that maintain and promote the mental health of others.There are 60 items in the questionnaire.The results show that the mental health literacy scale has good internal consistency reliability, retest reliability, content validity, convergent validity and predictive validity.The mental health literacy scale can be used to assess individual and group levels of various components of mental health literacy.
Peer Review Status:Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Applied Psychology submitted time 2020-11-11
Abstract： Based on a new conceptual frame of mental health literacy (MHL), which refers to two structural dimensions including “coping with mental illness–mental health promotion” and “self–others” and three aspects including knowledge, attitude, and behavior tendency, a systematic nationwide sampling survey was conducted for the purpose of understanding the mental health literacy profile of the Chinese. This study further explored the influences of four group variables (geographical and gross domestic product (GDP) distribution, basic demographic variables, socio-economic status, and mental health background) on mental health literacy. Another aim of this study was to provide some strategies for improving mental health literacy more effectively. The Chinese Mental Health Literacy Questionnaire and Basic Background Information Questionnaire were used to assess the mental health literacy levels of the Chinese and their influencing factors. The Chinese Mental Health Literacy Questionnaire contains six sub-scales (knowledge and concepts related to mental health, knowledge and concepts related to mental illness, attitudes and behavior tendency to maintain and promote one’s mental health, attitudes and behavior tendency to cope with one's mental illness, attitudes and behavior tendency to maintain and promote the mental health of others, and attitudes and behavior tendency to cope with the mental illness of others). The questionnaires were administered to 8866 Chinese adults in nine cities (Beijing, Wuhan, Chengdu, Lishui, Kaifeng, Guilin, Zhangye, Baoding, and Linfen), which covered the well-developed, developing, and less-developed regions in China. With a balanced development considering geographical and GDP distribution, the results indicated that the mental health literacy levels among adults in different cities were low to moderate. Their influences on mental health literacy were small but significant with respect to geographical distribution, gender, age, familiarity with professional mental health service, and the frequency of contact with psychiatric patients. Regarding the structure of mental health literacy, the results of the development of national mental health literacy demonstrated that mental health maintenance and promotion literacy was better than mental illness coping literacy, and self-help literacy was better than helping others literacy. The survey found that the knowledge had relatively high individual differences, whereas attitudes and behaviors had relatively low individual differences concerning the contents of the mental health literacy. In addition, among the social influencing factors of mental health literacy this research tested, the socio-economic status was the most effective one, which showed large effect size in the knowledge and small to medium effect size in the attitudes and behavior tendency. These findings implicate that (1) improving mental health literacy is an arduous task; (2) improving the literacy of coping with mental illness should be the focus and breakthrough point of the current practice of mental health literacy promotion; (3) socio-ecological perspective should be adopted when developing a mental health literacy promotion policy; and (4) the mechanism of the attitude and behavior tendency change needs to be explored and clarified. "
Hits
Hits
Downloads
Comment