Abstract
Assuming that the human mind indeed consists of a non-conscious and a conscious part it makes sense to believe that consciousness at times may struggle to get access to non-conscious content, which seems rather logical. At the same time most of us are aware that affective processing underlying our emotions happens non-consciously due to limbic activity that is mostly sub-cortical. Thus, any explicit response to a question about one’s state of affect is inevitably prone to be inaccurate if not wrong. Therefore, any therapy, biological and/or psychological that is based on explicit responses is potentially misleading. With this opinion article we aim to generate awareness about potential discrepancies between self-reported versus objectively measured emotion-related states. There is more to emotion than just subjective feeling and we should start taking non-conscious emotion-related processes into account.
Highlights
Little has been made mention over the years of diagnostic practices currently employed in the behavioural sciences and the apparent drawbacks they may have
Current protocols in the diagnosis and subsequent treatment of behavioural disorders by clinicians largely stem from structured interviews whereby the clinician will follow guidelines for diagnosis and classification outlined in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual IV (DSM IV-TR) (APA, 2000) and/or International Classification of Diseases 10 (ICD 10) (WHO, 2004)
Many categories were created, whilst techniques to measure objective physiological processes such as Electroencephalography (EEG) and Startle Reflex Modulation (SRM) were still in their infancy and these measures lacked a biological basis in their diagnostic criteria (Insel & Cuthbert, 2009; Robbins et al, 2012)
Summary
Little has been made mention over the years of diagnostic practices currently employed in the behavioural sciences and the apparent drawbacks they may have. Many categories were created, whilst techniques to measure objective physiological processes such as Electroencephalography (EEG) and Startle Reflex Modulation (SRM) (both discussed later) were still in their infancy and these measures lacked a biological basis in their diagnostic criteria (Insel & Cuthbert, 2009; Robbins et al, 2012). As a result, it seems that the following question should be asked: why shouldn’t objective measures be used in the interpretation and diagnosis of the human psyche when they are ubiquitously used to aid the diagnosis and treatment of most other medical conditions? It seems that the following question should be asked: why shouldn’t objective measures be used in the interpretation and diagnosis of the human psyche when they are ubiquitously used to aid the diagnosis and treatment of most other medical conditions? Given this question, we need to formulate methods in order to firstly, ascertain whether physiological measures—which are more adept at revealing our non-conscious thoughts and feelings—are a more accurate representation of how a person feels, and secondly, whether this information once gathered will be useful in aiding clinicians in the diagnosis and treatment of behavioural disorders
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