Question

1. Identity a time when you used “critic’s math” in evaluating others’ messages about you. Explain the situation and how you felt

2. Reappraise the situation you just described, developing a more balanced response to the criticism. Provide that reappraisal here.

3. How does this reappraisal affect your emotions and your subsequent behavior? Please explain.

Answer 1

Critic'd math= 1 insult +1000 compliments= 1 insult

Jon Acuff (author of Stuff Christians Like and Quitter) wrote in a recent blog about “critic’s math,” as he called it.

Cognitive reappraisal effect on emotion and behavior

We assume that monitoring of emotions and monitoring of visual attention processes are linked in the Machiavellians’ affective responses. The elevated activation in the cuneus may be due to participants’ attending to the emotional content of the pictures. In addition, it may be relevant that we presented social scenes that included depictions of one or more people wearing different emotional facial expressions and using different gestures. Participants may have focused on these social signals (faces and actions of people in the pictures) and interpreted them in light of the title, thus constructing different interpretations of the same scene in response to different contextual cues. Machiavellians seemed to mobilize the visual associative cortical regions (including the cuneus) to analyze social contextual–emotional information contained in the pictures, regardless of the direction of reappraisal.

All 16 sessions for each client were digitally recorded and rated using the Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for Social Anxiety Disorder: Therapist Adherence Scale32 by research team members who had clinical training and extensive familiarity with the CBT treatment adherence. They rated each session according to various criteria, using a 5-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (ineffective) to 5 (extremely effective). Average adherence ratings had to be greater than 4 to be considered “in protocol.” All 4 study therapists achieved this standard for each therapy case (overall mean , 4.61 ).

In contrast to this debate regarding the neural underpinnings of reappraisal, there is greater agreement concerning what brain regions are modulated by reappraisal. Extensive work in animals and humans has implicated the amygdala in the detection, encoding, and organization of responses to arousing, goal-relevant stimuli (Anderson et al. 2003; Phelps and LeDoux 2005; Cunningham and Brosch 2012; Wilson-Mendenhall et al. forthcoming). Given that negative stimuli are commonly perceived as highly arousing, and that the majority of reappraisal studies to date utilize aversive stimuli (of 48 studies in the present meta-analysis, 34 used aversive stimuli, 5 used positive/appetitive stimuli, and 9 used both; see Table 1 for a summary), it is perhaps unsurprising that changes in amygdala activity are among the most consistent findings in the reappraisal literature. However, many other regions are involved in emotion (Kober et al. 2008; Vytal and Hamann 2010; Lindquist et al. 2012). Indeed, individual reappraisal studies sometimes show modulation of other emotion-related regions in association with particular kinds of stimuli and emotions. Such regions include, but are not limited to, the ventral striatum, a structure strongly linked to reward processing (Schultz et al. 1992), the insula, which supports integration of affective and viscerosensory information (Craig 2009; Chang et al. 2012; Zaki et al. 2012), and brainstem regions such as the periaqueductal gray, which is involved in the coordination of behavioral and physiological emotional responses (Buhle et al. 2012).