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Hi, everybody. Welcome to today's episode, the anxiety master key concepts, part three. We are going to continue learning about anxiety master key concepts. What we're going to focus on today is a model that is going to help us through the rest of the podcast. This is a model which is going to orient. And organize and direct the use of all of our anxiety management strategies from here on out. It's going to help us to know how to use them and when to use them. This is an excellent model developed by. Dr. James J. Gross who's a professor of psychology at Stanford. Now, first of all, let's talk about emotion regulation. I've used that term quite a few times. I mentioned briefly that when the emotion regulation refers to emotion management, but I'm going to give you a better definition from Dr. James Gross about what regulation is. Emotion regulation is "the processes by which individuals influence which emotions they have when they have them and how they experience and express these emotions." So regulation is about learning to influence the what the when and the how of your emotions. What emotions you're going to have when you're going to have them and how you're going to experience and express those emotions. Pretty fantastic. I think everybody would like to be able to have more influence, more choice, more autonomy in what, when and how of their emotions. So emotion regulation is Dr. Gross's specialty and he has come up with a model which really helps us to understand how this is done. Emotion regulation is a lot more powerful than just coping with your emotion. Coping with your anxiety is just going to help you to basically do damage control. But emotion regulation is going to help you to influence, as we said, what emotions you have when you have them and how you experience and express those emotions. But regulating emotions as we've talked about a couple episodes ago involves a couple of different things. It involves having a large toolbox of strategies, but then we have to actually know how to use those strategies. We can't just have them in hand. We have to know when certain tools are appropriate for different situations. Let me give you another quote. This one is from an article by Kashdan and Rottenberg in 2010 in Clinical Psychology Review. They talked about how emotion regulation involves the following: "awareness of what a situation requires and an ability to organize and prioritize strategies that fit the situation rather than relying on dominant default strategies." And we talked a couple episodes ago about how research shows that in general people don't use the wide range of strategies that are available in the research literature. But they tend to rely on a small handful of strategies that they know how to use. They have these dominant default strategies that Kashdan and Rottenberg talk about. But skillful emotion regulation involves being aware of what a situation requires and being able to prioritize and organize strategies that will actually fit this unique particular situation rather than just relying on this pat handful that we have have a few things that we do. If we stick to just a couple of default strategies, first of all, it's not going to work very well because it will only work in certain situations. There'll be a lot of situations that it doesn't work in. We'll be a little bit more like that sea anemone with it's reflexes that only has a certain a handful of things that it does rigidly In response to certain stimuli and we're not going to be able to really adapt to the real world, which is full of change. Change is the name of the game. So we need to learn how to perceive what is needed in this situation and perceive what tool will help us in this particular situation. Now studies have shown, this is important, that people who vary their coping strategies are first of all, they're more effective at handling stressors, and second of all, they show reduced anxiety and depression compared to those who use rigid coping approaches with just a few favored strategies. So we need to learn how to vary our strategies, and we need to learn how to have the wisdom to perceive which tool or combination of tools is appropriate for the situation that we're in.

So that's why we're going to use the process model, because it is a very useful guide in helping us to understand how to select which strategies to use in the situation that we're in, because it offers us an organization. It directs and makes clearer the choice of what strategies to use when and in what combination and what, in what sequence. It makes it easier to understand what's at stake, what's going on, what, what we're doing when we're selecting a strategy, because it helps us to understand the emotion generation process and where exactly we can interfere in this process. Where are the points of interference where we can influence a different outcome.

There have been various models that have been developed in the scientific community to explain what happens in the emotion generation process. But the model that we are going to focus on today, the process model that I already mentioned. Is perhaps the most widely used model to date. And it is one of the best known and empirically verified models of emotion generation. So it's, we can confidently use it because it has been tested so thoroughly in the scientific literature.

So it's called the process model developed, as I said by Dr. James Gross from Stanford. I'm going to show you on the screen, a diagram of this model, for those of you who are listening again, there's going to be a link in the show notes, where you can look at a PDF of this model afterwards, if you'd like to, but I'm also going to describe it in detail. So you should be able to imagine it as I describe it. This particular version of the model is a modified version of a diagram from a, an article by Yih et al in 2018, that was published in Cognition and Emotion. And the article's called Better Together: a Unified Perspective on Appraisal and Emotion Regulation. And I'll have a link to this article and other articles that I've referenced in the show notes as well. So that if you're curious, you can go directly to the source.

So what we have here on the screen, is a diagram of a cycle. This is the emotion generation process, and it is a cycle. Because it is a process and it continues to develop and evolve and iterate. It doesn't just stop and go once. It's not a state, as we talked about before. Emotions are processes. So it is a cycle that continuously revolves. And what we have down here at the bottom is an S representing the situation. This is where we start. When we have an emotion, it starts with a situation. It can be an internal or an external event. It's a situation. That situation, we're going to continue up the cycle on the left. Is going to be perceived according to the attention of the individual. So according to what aspects of the situation the individual is aware of it will be perceived. And that those aspects, that information that makes it through the filter of that person's particular attention, that information will then be, we have at the top of the cycle it will be appraised. So, so far we have three points in this emotion generation cycle. We have the situation at the bottom which is an external or internal event. It filters through the attention of the individual. We have attention next. It's perceived according to the attention of the individual. According to that filter certain information gets through to the appraising brain on the top. Situation, perception, and appraisal. Those are the three points that we have talked about. Appraisal, as we said, is where the person evaluates, what does this situation mean for my wellbeing? And then the cycle continues down. On the other side, we have the fourth point in the cycle, which is now the emotional response. So, this is how it goes. The situation is perceived according to the attention of the individual. It is appraised for its influence on the wellbeing of that individual. And then that produces an emotional response. And then we see that the arrow continues back to the situation. Why does it continue back? Well, Okay. We have a situation appraised, let's say that the appraisal produces an anxiety response in the body. That response, the emotional response is going to include more than just a feeling of anxiety is going to include also a motivational component, a behavioral component, physiological component. Maybe that physiological component might include that their heart rate would go up, their breathing would get shallower, maybe their hands would start sweating. These physiological responses are then going to influence the situation that is going to be appraised. So it'll continue to go around. The person is going to continue to have an evolving situation, which now includes the emotional response that they already generated. And then that is in turn, going to influence the situation, and the way that it's perceived, and that is going to influence a new appraisal, which may modify the response and it'll continue around. It keeps iterating. It keeps cycling around and it continues to evolve in this constant process. And so why is this model so particularly helpful in our conceptualizing emotion processes? Well, first of all, it helps us to see. That it is a process continually influx continually in evolution. And also it helps us to see that there are four key points in the emotion generation process: situation, perception, appraisal and response. And that if we want to influence the emotion generation process, we just need to interfere at one of these four key points and then it will change what comes after it in the cycle, influence what develops from there on. So we just need to learn how to interfere at one of these one or more of these four key points. And all of the strategies that we learn from here on out in this podcast are going to fit into one of these four families of emotion regulation strategies. The families correspond to the points on the diagram. So the strategies. May fit into the situation family. They might relate to selecting situations or modifying situations that we're in. Or they will fit into the perception family, where we are going to modify our attention: which things are noticed in that situation. Or they are going to work directly on the appraisal, the story that our brain is telling the way that it is answering those key questions that we talked about last time. How good or bad is this situation? Whose fault is it? And what should I do? Influencing the way that your brain answers those questions. That's working on the appraisal. Strategies that work on the appraisal are in that appraisal family of strategies. And the last family of strategies that we have is response oriented strategies. And these are strategies that after an emotional response has already developed, they're strategies that work directly on experiential or behavioral or physiological components of that response. And even though the response has already developed and already been generated, working directly on that response with this family of strategies, response oriented strategies will in turn influence the situation as the cycle continues around and it can end up indirectly changing the appraisal.

So it's important to notice that even though there are these four different points and four different families of strategies for emotion regulation, all of these families of strategies, essentially alter, they serve to alter the appraisal. Okay. So if we work on the situation, It will alter the appraisal because it's changing the world that's being appraised. If we work on the attention or the perception of the situation we're working on amplifying or suppressing information that the appraisal is going to be based on. If we're working on the appraisal, then it's a direct hit we're directly working on appraisal. If we're working on the emotional response, then that ends up modifying in turn the situation as it cycles around it, it modifies the situation, the world being appraised.

So next time we are actually going to get into these strategies. We're going to get into strategies to work on your anxiety. This is what you've been waiting for. But it's really important to have this process model as a foundation, before we start into those strategies, to help you to understand where they fit on this emotion generation cycle. Because this helps us to understand how every single strategy we use is either going to directly or indirectly influence our appraisal. And also it will help us to organize and direct and it will help, help make clearer the choice of what strategies we ought to use when. We'll talk more as we get into the specific strategies, about how the, how the process model helps us, orients us, to know what type of strategies to use at what point in the emotion generation process. But it's really important to have this visual model in your head of the process model, of your emotion generation so that you can understand that whenever you're using a strategy, it is interfering in one of these four points. And it is always either directly or indirectly influencing your appraisal of the situation. This is really important because we know that, you know, it would be nice if we could simply locate our appraisal and just change it because we want to, but we know we've all had this experience that simply because we wanted to change an emotion, we weren't able to. We weren't able to just stop feeling sad or stop feeling anxious or angry when we wanted to. And it's because we didn't understand the emotion generation process, what was actually happening, and how to interfere in these exact key points, and how that, how that influences the cycle as it continues to cycle around, as it continues to iterate. So understanding this model gives you the distant view from above of what's going on when you generate emotions, when you generate anxiety. And what your options are for influencing, what kind of emotions you're going to experience, when you're going to experience them, and how you're going to experience and express them.. So once again, In the show notes, we'll have a link to the diagram and to any articles that were referenced here. But please join me next week, where we're going to actually get into strategies now, but we're always going to be referring back to how these strategies fit into the process model so that it can help us to know when to use these tools. I'm not just giving you the tools, but I'm helping you to know how and when to use them. Thanks for listening.