Understanding Alexithymia, Motivation, and Human Development

Posted on Nov 23, 2024 in Psychology and Sociology

Psychology: Alexithymia

Alexithymia is the inability of individuals to identify and express their emotions verbally.

In 1972, Sifnos coined the term alexithymia to describe these features:

  • Difficulty in identifying emotions and feelings
  • Difficulty describing emotions and feelings
  • Difficulty differentiating feelings of bodily sensations that accompany emotional activity
  • Limited capabilities of symbolic thought
  • Attention to detail and external events

Ancillary features of alexithymia are:

  • A high degree of conformity that may be mistaken for normal behavior subject to rigid conventional rules. People with alexithymia are seemingly well-adjusted, but it is a pseudo-normal state because their behavior is rigid and dependent on social conventions.
  • Impulsivity, i.e., the tendency to externalize conflict in rash actions without the subject’s own awareness of the underlying emotions.
  • Stereotypical interpersonal relationships, either dependency or isolation.
  • A poor capacity for empathy in interpersonal relationships.
  • Difficulties with introspection, which explains the problems alexithymic subjects have in understanding what they feel and think.
  • The presence of physical symptoms associated with the inability to clearly characterize and utilize bodily sensations as signs of distress.
  • Low emotional reactivity, i.e., the difficulty of the individual experiencing emotional arousal to a moving scene.
  • A greater tendency for men to exhibit alexithymia.

Types:

  • Primary: Biological predominant source.
  • Secondary: Predominantly sociocultural source.

Motivation

Motivation consists of all the factors that cause, sustain, and direct behavior toward a goal. For example, if we are hungry, we have a motivation to eat, and the more motivation we have, the more we eat.

Motivation is also seen as the impetus that leads a person to choose and take action among alternatives presented in a particular situation. Motivation is related to momentum:

Momentum: Inner energy that urges the individual to perform a specific action.

  • The most intense pulse is pure survival when fighting for life.
  • Followed by motivations from the satisfaction of primary and secondary needs.

Motivation and Behavior

According to Chovenoto, there are three assumptions that explain the nature of human behavior:

  • Behavior is caused.
  • Behavior is motivated.
  • Behavior is goal-oriented.

Behavior is Caused

There is an internal or external cause of human behavior, a product of the influence of heredity.

Motivated Behavior

Impulses, desires, needs, and trends are the reasons for behavior.

Goal-Oriented Behavior

All behavior has a purpose, given for a reason and always to some end.

Motivational Cycle

The motivational cycle is the process of meeting needs. Its stages are:

  • Homeostasis: The body is in balance.
  • Stimulus: A stimulus generates a need.
  • Needs: This unmet need causes a state of tension.
  • Arousal State: The tension produces an impulse that gives rise to a behavior or action.
  • Behavior: When activated, the individual acts to meet the need and successfully reaches the goal.
  • Satisfaction: If the individual meets the need, they return to their equilibrium state until another stimulus is present. Satisfaction is essentially a release of tension that allows a return to the previous homeostatic balance.

Where needs are not satisfied within a reasonable time, it may lead to reactions such as:

  • Disorganized behavior (illogical and unexplained behavior).
  • Aggressiveness (physical, verbal, etc.).
  • Emotional reactions (anxiety, distress, nervousness, and other manifestations such as insomnia, circulatory and digestive problems).
  • Alienation, apathy, and disinterest.

Needs

  • Needs are what humans require at certain moments in their lives and have no precise definition.
  • Needs are the lack of something important for the body.
  • The needs of each person are psychosociological, swept under the establishment, level of culture, the surrounding environment, and so on.
Primary or Physiological Needs
  • Arise from physiology and include thirst, hunger, shelter, sleep, sex, breathing, etc.
  • Are important for the survival of the species and its preservation.
  • While these are universal needs, they vary from person to person and are conditioned by social practice.
Higher or Psychological Needs
  • Are represented by the needs of mind and spirit, not the body. These are self-esteem, assertiveness, receiving affection, the sense of learning, giving, membership, etc.
  • These requirements vary to an equal or greater degree than primary needs, depending on the person, time, and circumstances.
  • These needs are conditioned by experience:
    • Vary from person to person in intensity.
    • Are subject to change.
    • Are often not consciously recognized but logically influence behavior.
    • Are more often seen in groups than in isolated individuals.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs

The basic idea of this hierarchy is that the highest needs occupy our attention only when the lower needs of the pyramid have been satisfied.

Physiological Needs

These are basic physiological needs to maintain homeostasis (concerning health). The most obvious of these are:

  • Breathing
  • Drinking water
  • Eating
  • Maintaining body temperature balance
  • Sleep, rest, and eliminating waste

Safety and Protection Needs

These arise when physiological needs are met.

  • Needs to feel secure and develop certain limits of order:
    • Physical safety and health
    • Job security, income, and resources
    • Moral security, family, and private property

Membership and Affection Needs

These are related to the affective development of the individual, the needs for partnership, participation, and acceptance. They are met through service functions and benefits, including sports, cultural, and recreational activities.

Esteem Needs

Maslow described two types of esteem needs: high and low.

  • High: Concerns the need to respect yourself and includes feelings such as confidence, competence, mastery, achievement, independence, and freedom.
  • Low: Concerns esteem from others: The need for attention, appreciation, recognition, reputation, status, dignity, fame, glory, and even dominance.

Self-Realization or Self-Actualization

Maslow used different terms to name this:

  • Growth-motivation
  • Need to be
  • Self-realization

The higher needs are at the top of the hierarchy, and through their satisfaction, one finds meaning in life through developing the potential of an activity. We reach this when all previous levels have been achieved, at least to some extent.

Life Cycle

Only recently have subsequent life stages of adolescence been included. It was thought that little change occurred at this stage. It is now important to study these stages, one reason being the increase in life expectancy.

Cycle: Seen as progressive developmental stages from birth to death.

Erikson: Stages survive because they create new demands and external masts to be met, which require new ways of coping and adapting to the environment.

  • Each synthesis stage is more complex and different from the previous one, which must be resolved to be replaced by a new one.
  • These stages come from the concept of crisis.
  • Each crisis leads to a successful outcome, which enables new developments.

Developmental Stages

1 -) PRENATAL: conception to birth: rapid physical growth of all body structures
2 -) NEONATAL: birth to 4 weeks adaptation period of the baby, learn to breathe, temperature, pressure, etc..
3 -) BREAST OR EARLY CHILDHOOD: first month to 2 years rapid growth where the child acquires basic cognitive and psychomotor skills and become independent

4 -) SECOND CHILDHOOD:
A-) Preschool: 2 to 6: is the symbolic function, significant changes in language, thought, socialization, emotions, self-regulation.
B-) SCHOOL: 6 to 9 years: consolidation in socialization, physical development of logical thinking.
C-) prepuberty: 9 to 12 or 13 years: TRANSITION: transition from being a boy to being a teenager, organizational, hormone changes, interests outside the home, etc..
5 -) PUBERTY and teenagers: 13 to 20 years: preparation for adult life search for identity, psychological maturity, definition of values, ways of being, needs, etc..
6 -) ADULT: 20 to 65 years.
A-) YOUNG ADULT: 20 to 30 or 35 years.
Consolidation phase, stability in all kinds: social, emotional, and vocational
B-) ELDERLY: 30 / 35 to 50 years.
Productive phase, this established family home therefore is dedicated to producing
C-) LATE ADULT: 50 to 65 years
Stage to accept the disease and old age
7 -) AGE: 65 YEARS AND OLDER: confronting death, unemployment, retirement.

RESI BORN
* Neonatal period: the first 4 weeks
* 50 cm. And 3500 gr.
* under the 2500 equivalent of malnutrition
* during the first days lost 10% of its weight
* on 10 to 14, and regained his weight and starts to rise

VISTA: the optic nerve is underdeveloped. At first only difference bright light
* during the first year speeding up the hearing
* catch your eye red and bright yellow at 3 or 4 months old.
* they call attention more complex objects
HEARING: from prenatal
SMELL: distinguish different odors
TASTE: relatively insensitive
SENCIBILIDAD TEMPERATURE: regulates body temperature alone, not premature.
SENCIBILIDAD PAIN: every day is more sensitive to pain
REFLECTIONS:
* Hazar: touching the cheek or when searching for the nipple: Open your mouth and looking with nods and begins to suck. Disappears 2 to 3 months.
*Suction: disappears at 9 months after a learning event
* Moor sudden noise with open arms, straighten your legs and throwing her head arching back. Disappears after 3 months.
* Darwinian when you place a finger in the baby’s hand. Disappears 2 to 3 months.
* Swimming: finished at 6 months.
* tonic neck: when the lie turns: extend the arms and legs of his preferred side and the other side shrinks. Disappears after 2 to 3 months
* Babinski: the sole of the foot touching the fingers open and the foot bends inward. Disappears 6 to 9 months.
* walk: away from 4 to 8 months
* place: the baby puts his foot and it is withdrawn. Lost each month

* physical growth and development coordination are deeply related to their social and intellectual development
* Early stage:
-This stage lasts about a year and a half or two years approx.
-ends when the child begins to walk and join two words
-During this stage children learn to speak more and more and become more independent and able to move into their world.

How THIS DEVELOPMENT WILL BE PHYSICAL?
* Follows a predetermined course although there are apparent variations among children, for example, by the different activities
* even though the normal range is wide, almost all children thrive in a defined order
* Learn simple movements before the complicated

PRINCIPLE OF THE PHYSICAL DEVELOPMENT

* START cephalocaudal:
-states that development takes place in the direction of head – tail
-the upper body develops before the lower

* START proximodistal:
-the development is carried out in a near distance.
-the parts of his body near its center (spine) develops before the extremities.


* BODY GROWTH
-physical growth is fastest in the first three years
“As young children grow up the way your body changes
-the size of the rest of the body is provided with the head

* BODY GROWTH
-just before and immediately after birth, there is an increase in nerve cell
newly-formed cells are classified by function and cater to their positions and their positions arising associated either to the upper layers (cerebral cortex) or the lower layer (subcortex)

* in a newborn subcortical structures that regulate biological functions like breathing and digestion are the ones more fully developed

* cells in the cerebral cortex, where it originates thinking and problem solving are not well connected

* connections between cells in the cortex increases sharply as the baby matures and enables motor and intellectual functioning in the highest levels

* the average education of new cells under within two months following birth

* the newly formed cells that do not work well to have migrated to the wrong part of brain fade

* The birth of the Chandler has only 25% of the weight as an adult

* at the end of the first year reached nearly 70%

* the end of year 80%

* continues to grow more slowly until age 12 has virtually full size

* this neurological growth allows a corresponding development in motor activities and intellectual

SECOND CHILDHOOD
* Physical Changes:
-for 3 and 6 years take a look thinner, and athletic
-the trunk, arms and legs grow longer, reducing the typical belly that had previously
-the head is still relatively large
-body proportion gradually looks more to the adult
-children over three years are slightly larger and heavier than children with more muscle tissue unlike children who have more adipose tissue
-develop motor skills of long and short muscles
-respiratory and circulatory systems = more capacity
* Appears transitional object: An object that I use regularly as a child sleeping partner

* night terrors and nightmares begin at this stage

NIGHT TERROR: common sleep disorder during childhood, in which the child wakes suddenly from a deep sleep in a panic

NIGHTMARE: usually afraid to sleep in the morning praise and often recalls

* We can also find:
-night fears: fear of darkness
-enuresis: day / night
-encopresis: day / night

* at this stage make progress in motor development.

* Walks in 3 years straight line

* 4 year old can walk in a circle painted

* 5 years running adult style: hard, fast

ARTISTIC DISORDER:
1 -) scrawled: first form of drawing. About 2 years. The main distinctions are the nature and distinction of the line
2 -) STAGE METHOD: approx.3 years basic shapes: circles, squares, triangles and so on.
3 -) STAGE DESIGN: generally 3 years. Mix two basic forms in a complex pattern. They are more abstract representative
4 -) STAGE pictorial begins 4 to 5 years. They become less abstract and more representative

GAMES
* functions:
-grow
-learn to use their muscles
-acquire control of his body
-discover the world and how are they
-imitate adult roles
* The game can be approached in 2 different ways:
1 -) social phenomenon
2 -) aspect of growth

* social play: the one where they interact with other children.
* cognitive games: which reflects the child’s intellectual level