Rethinking How We Engage with Our Emotions
What if the solution to navigating your emotional difficulties was not just about better understanding our own emotions? This question is addressed in the new study published in Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews, "Development and application of the propensity/ability framework in alexithymia: 'Do you” versus “Can you” engage with your emotions?" by Nathan Torunsky, a graduate student, in collaboration with faculty, Iris Donga Vilares and Wilma Koutstaal.
Torunsky’s research focuses on “alexithymia”, a trait linked to difficulty identifying, expressing, and attending to emotions. In pursuing this line of research, Torunsky wants to dig deeper, suspecting that individual differences in emotional cognition stem not only from a collection of cognitive abilities, but also from a person’s behavioral tendencies, preferences, and habits about which of these cognitive functions they choose to attend to or engage.
In the article, the researchers emphasize that much of the current research on alexithymia does not clearly differentiate between abilities (“can you?)” versus propensities (“do you?”) in emotional cognition, making it difficult to disentangle which functions contribute to the presentation of alexithymia. They argue that research methods that more intentionally differentiate abilities from propensities are needed to better examine cognition, attention, and expression in relation to emotional capacity, with a goal to improve the assessment of and interventions for the challenges to wellbeing alexithymia can pose.
Nathan Torunsky, Graduate student, Candidate in Psychology at the University of Minnesota. He is a researcher in the Vilares Decision-Making Lab.
Iris Donga Vilares, PhD, assistant professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Minnesota and director of the Decision Making Lab.
Wilma Koutstaal, PhD, is a professor of Psychology at the University of Minnesota, whose work explores the cognitive and neural foundations of creativity, mental agility, and memory.
Composed by Nguyen Kiet Pham, communications assistant.
