Topic summary
Emotional disorder
Extracted from the Wikipedia article Emotional and behavioral disorders.
Effect in cognition
In recent years, many researchers have been interested in exploring the relationship between emotional disorders and cognition. Evidence has revealed that there is a relationship between the two. Strauman (1989) investigated how emotional disorders shape a person's cognitive structure, that is, the mental processes people utilize to make sense of the world around them. He recruited three groups of individuals: those with social phobias, those with depression, and controls with no emotional disorder diagnosis. He wanted to determine whether these groups had a cognitive structure showing an actual/ideal (AI) discrepancy (referring to an individual not believing that they have achieved their personal desires) or actual/own/other (AOO) discrepancy (referring to an individual's actions not living up to what their significant other believes that they need to be). He found that depressed individuals had the highest AI discrepancy and social phobics had the greatest AOO discrepancy, while the controls were lower or in between the two for both discrepancies.