Two Reasoning Strategies in Patients With Psychological Illnesses

Abstract

Hyper-emotion theory states that psychological disorders are conditions in which individuals experience emotions that are appropriate to the situation but inappropriate in their intensity. When these individuals experience such an emotion, they are inevitably compelled to reason about its cause. They therefore develop characteristic strategies of reasoning depending on the particular hyper-emotion they experience. In anxiety disorders (e.g., panic attack, social phobia), the perception of a disorder-related threat leads to hyper-anxiety; here, individuals’ reasoning is corroboratory, adducing evidence that confirms the risk (corroboratory strategy). In obsessive-compulsive disorders, the threat of having acted in an irresponsible way leads to both hyper-anxiety and guilt; here, individuals’ reasoning is refutatory, adducing only evidence disconfirming the risk of being guilty (refutatory strategy). We report three empirical studies corroborating these hypotheses. They demonstrate that patients themselves recognize the two strategies and spontaneously use them in therapeutic sessions and in evaluating scenarios in an experiment.

Cognitive–Behavioral Treatment of Obsessive–Compulsive Disorder: The Results of a Naturalistic Outcomes Study

“…For example, accepting the risk of having left a gas tap open implies a lower focus on the possibility of a gas leak and an explosion and a greater focus on reassuring possibilities, such as having closed the tap securely and that the safety valves are activated. Furthermore, it also involves information processing that is less corroboratory and more refutatory than focusing on negative possibilities [ 51 ], thus providing reassuring information. This is achieved through the modification of four different patient assumptions: belief in the power to reduce threat, contamination, NJRE, doubt and uncertainty; that it is advantageous to invest in this direction; that this is morally necessary; and that, if not adhered to, suffering will increase, last a very long time, and create obstacles to normal daily activities [ 49 ].…”

Different negative biases of anxiety in discrimination and reasoning

“…And in an anxious situation, compared with obsessive-compulsive individuals, anxious individuals with excessive anxiety showed greater con rmatory reasoning in reasoning about events (Gangemi et al, 2019), which also suggested that individuals with high anxiety would be more cautious in the face of negative information in the environment, expanding the generalization of negative information.…”

“…However, even in cases where negative preferences are present in normal, low-anxiety populations, studies still show that high-anxiety individuals tend to show a greater cognitive preference for negative emotional stimuli (Gangemi et al, 2013;Gangemi et al, 2019;Penninx et al, 2021;Reichenberger et al, 2015;Xun et al, 2021); for example, in a visual search task, high-anxiety people searched for negative stimuli faster than low-anxiety people (Byrne & Eysenck, 1995), and in the sentence judgment task, the implicit memory of threat words in high-anxiety group was much stronger than that in neutral words, but this phenomenon was not found in low-anxiety group (Lang & Craske, 1997). However, research on positive emotions has had mixed results.…”

An Observational Study of OCD Patients Treated With Cognitive Behavioral Therapy During the COVID-19 Pandemic

“…The first is to facilitate the acceptance of ERP exercises and increase the motivation to implement them. The second is justified by the fact that if a threat is accepted, the protective investment is reduced and, within this, the hyperprudent cognitive orientation, thus increasing the possibility that corrective information of the threat perception can really be taken into consideration by the patient (76,77). At the same time ERP is introduced.…”