After the group meeting on Tuesday 6th October 2009, key areas of research were identified and each group member was assigned an area to study. I was tasked with summarising parts of the book, “Cognitive Therapy for Delusions, Voices and Paranoia” by Paul Chadwick, Max Birchwood and Peter Trower. I managed to take note of a large amount of introductory information on the subject in the first chapter alone, and so Robert Lambert, my teammate tasked with the same assignment chose to summarise the rest of the relevant chapters. Here is a Cmap of my research on Chapter 1 along with a summary of the information including my opinions on the matter which will hopefully strive to define the characteristics of Paranoia so that we might be able to identify and acknowledge its presence. The full document of my research can be found on our forums, here: http://teammercury.phpbbhosts.co.uk/viewtopic.php?f=3&t=6.
Essentially then, my research of chapter 1 seems to be based off of very brief summaries of previous studies and research. The foundation of paranoia seems to have been agreed upon the ABC Model (Ellis, 1962) where A stands for Activating event, B stands for belief and C stands for emotional or behavioural Consequence. The As, Bs and Cs usually occur as one unified experience so beliefs on their own do not cause feelings/emotional distress. The predominant beliefs that are found to inflict most people are the beliefs about a psychological of physical threat, a belief about loss or a belief about the infringement of rights. If Team Mercury could incorporate these beliefs into experiments within a game, and by even directly implementing the ABC Model itself if possible acknowledging our need to consider ethics, we may be able to use these as milestones for our project.
To define B within the ABC Model, "in our cognitive therapy we include four cognitions: Images, Inferences, Evaluations and Dysfunctional assumptions."
Images – “a man who has trouble speaking in public imagines himself fainting when giving a speech.” Public speaking is a common fear, if Team Mercury could prompt negative foreboding images of common fears within an experiment, this may prove informative.
Inferences – “hypotheses which can be true or false and occur in abbreviated, often crude language. E.g. he hates me, I'll fail, the bastards are at it again. All inferences go beyond the factual evidence. One way of making an inference is by means of an attribution.”
Unstable attribution - will only happen once
Stable attribution - will always happen
Specific attribution - the failure was just a deficiency in [the area e.g maths]
Global attribution - a general failing
Mood can affect inferences, causing six identifiable errors:
1. Arbitrary inference – “a specific conclusion is drawn quite arbitrarily.”
2. Selective abstraction – “client focuses on a detail taken out of context, ignoring other salient features and conceptualising the whole experience on the basis of this fragment.”
3. Overgeneralisation – “the pattern of drawing a general rule or conclusion on the basis of one or more isolated incidents and applying the conclusion to virtually all situations.”
4. Magnification and minimisation – “gross errors in evaluating the significance of an event.”
5. Personalisation – “client's tendency to relate external events to himself, blames himself.”
6. Absolutistic, dichotomous or black-and-white thinking – “tendency to place everything into one of two opposite categories. An error is a catastrophe; a failure is a complete failure.”
These inferences are generally made by the individual, whilst Team Mercury may not be able to provoke specific inferences, we may be able to predict them through use of gestalt awareness exercises.
Evaluation – “a good-bad judgement, or a preference as opposed to an inference (Zajonc, 1980) e.g. I prefer John to David, John did a bad thing.”
Different evaluation = different behaviour e.g. Failing a driving test, of I condemn myself as a failure I will experience depression, if I regret the outcome and resolve to become better I will experience disappointment, and blaming the instructor as a fool will make me experience anger.
Person evaluations – “stable, global and total condemnations of an entire person, made in one of three ways - 'other to self', 'self to self' and 'self to other'. It is not behaviour being judged but the entire person.”
The authors of the book have developed their own self-report measure of person evaluations, the Evaluative Beliefs Scale (EBScale – Chadwick and Trower, 1993). This measures the three directions of person evaluations (other-self, self-self, self-other) and covers the major areas of interpersonal concern, namely: unlovability, failure, inferiority, badness, weakness."
If Team Mercury could incorporate the EBScale into testing then this would help us to measure certain evaluations, as we have little control over initiating a specific evaluation within an individual as it is. Creating tests that focus on interpersonal concerns would likely be informative however we must consider the ethics of involving such aspects.
Dysfunctional assumptions – “fundamental rules or principles which guide behaviour. They are thought to have their origins in childhood and are therefore usually implicit but may be deduced from an individual's interpersonal behaviour. E.g. a depressed woman devotes her life to pleasing others and subjugates her own wishes and feelings. When she 'inferred' she had upset someone, she would feel despairing and empty, believe she would always be alone and unlovable, a 'non-person'. Her dysfunctional assumption might be - 'In order to be a complete person I must have others around me.' Following from this, she never risked upsetting others from fear of rejection. Through cognitive therapy, she linked this with her childhood and her parents neglecting her and had slowly grown to care for them and others to avoid those painful feelings.”
Five Fundamental Principles of the ABC Model
1. All clinical psychological problems are Cs.
2. Problems arise from Bs, not As.
"The cognitive model asserts that Cs are not products of events (As), but reflect the personal meaning (Bs) the event has had for the individual. In other words people's actions and feelings (C) arise from their interpretations of events, and are not inevitable consequences of those events."
“A cognition (B) cant cause cause a behaviour (C) because it is not an entity” (Searle, 1983)
3. There are predictable connections between Bs and Cs.
4. Core Bs arise from early experience
One important conclusion – “early relationships have a profound impact and for the majority of patients it is here that the origin of their problem lies.”
“We believe the most fundamental Bs (dysfunctional assumptions and person-evaluations) are laid down in early life and reflect the amount of attachment (closeness) and autonomy (self-definition) the child has.”
Whilst we have no power in affecting the dysfunctional assumptions in those we test, we can maybe create our own temporary ones by having something occur early on within a test to make the individual aware of it, and create a belief of threat within the individual from the game that it may return anytime throughout the duration of the test.
5. Weakening beliefs weakens associated distress and disturbance. This is something Team Mercury must avoid if we are to identify what areas of the game environment create Paranoia. Immersion is a highly important factor for a game to create fear and paranoia.
References
- Chadwick, P. Birchwood, M. & Trower, P., 1996. Cognitive Therapy for Delusions, Voices and Paranoia. West Sussex: John Wiley & Sons Ltd.
No comments:
Post a Comment