When positive emotions lead to feeling bad. The role of secondary evaluation and affect as information in hypomania and mania.

Abstract

In this article we focus on hypomania and mania in bipolar disorder and, in all probability, only in some types of bipolar disorder. We deal with positive emotions, whose psychopathogenic role still receives too little attention in experimental and clinical psychology. We propose a hypothesis with regard to the psychological mechanisms involved in hypomanic and manic decompensation that posits in primis the secondary problem or secondary evaluation, which in this case takes on peculiar content characteristics, and subordinately affect as information. We shall see how a certain way of managing the experience of positive affect is involved in the etiology and maintenance of the hypo-maniacal and maniacal pathology, so much so that in this pathology, decompensation is to be found in positive affectivity or better, in the relationship that the person entertains with such affectivity.