A hard deadline from your boss

Aspects of communication that are irrelevant (that is, peripheral) to the true merits of the person, object, or position advocated in the message (eg, a speaker's physical attractiveness when attractiveness is irrelevant to the position). Whether people follow the central route or the peripheral route does not necessarily lead them to have more positive or more negative attitudes. In our example, a person who is diligently considering the candidate's arguments, and another person who is wowed by the surrounding articleantry, may both report the same increase or decrease in liking for the candidate. Rather, which route people follow determines which aspects of the persuasive message have the strongest influence on their attitudes. The Elaboration Likelihood Model The central and peripheral routes represent two distinct pathways of persuasion. An illustration of likelihood model shows a colored photograph of a lady sitting on table of a board room, with her hands folded, listening to a man standing in front of her, both dressed in formals. Below the colored photograph a flowchart is shown. The typical length of a CBT session varies from country to country. In Germany, it's usually exactly 50 minutes. Since new patients arrive at every full hour, there are only 10 minutes left for therapists to write a protocol, prepare the next session, and take a short deep breath in their POANG chair. What makes things even more complicated: there is the mysterious phenomenon, that patients, in the very last minute of a session, like to bring up a topic of enormous magnitude that overshadows anything of the previous 49 minutes. Maybe you have a psychological theory to identify the reason for this. Diagnostics In the first sessions of CBT, a therapist is looking for specific information, and will ask many questions. A very important aspect to identify is which symptoms are there. A symptom is a single, specific, problematic entity, such as inability to experience pleasure or strong fear of being in locations where no hospitals are in range. Symptoms have such a relevance to a behavioral therapist, because he or she intends to make a diagnosis. Personalizing: Personalizing sucks. This is that little trick your brain does where you attribute a personal meaning to things that actually have absolutely nothing to do with you.

Example: Mom comes home. You ask how her day was and you notice a strange inflection in her voice. You assume that it obviously has something to do with you and are left wondering for the rest of the night what the heck you did to make her so annoyed at you. In reality, her boss chewed her out right before she left work about something that was someone else's fault. That's about enough of those for now. Like I said before, if you found that you have engaged in a few or even all of those patterns of thinking, you are not alone. I'm sure you can start to see how engaging in these messed up thoughts a little bit too much could lead you down some stressful roads. There is something you can start doing right now that will help you grab negative thinking by the balls. The first step is Persuasive message, followed by a downward arrow leading to another box which reads text, Is the audience route motivated and able to elaborate on the message? The illustration is further followed by a large rectangular box titled The central and peripheral routes to persuasion, divided into two parts- Processing ellipses (left) and Persuaded by ellipses (right). A rightward arrow from Yes leads to processing presenting a bullet list, which includes Effortful, Comparing arguments with prior knowledge, Generating thoughts, which is further followed by a rightward arrow to persuaded by box, which reads text strong arguments. Another rightward arrow from No leads to processing presenting a bullet list, which includes Automatic and effortless, Use peripheral cues and heuristics, which is further followed by a rightward arrow to persuaded by box, which reads text Presence of peripheral cues. Both strong arguments and Presence of peripheral cues are followed by a rightward arrow to a common box, which reads Response. Response above the response box is read as She made good points. I'll agree with her while response below the response box is read as She is popular around here. I'll agree with her. Why do people take one or the other route? According to the ELM, the key factors are the individual's motivation and ability to think deeply about the message. These have unique names and letter-number-codes, such as F32. The good thing about diagnoses is that they summarize complex symptom combinations into a single word.

The less good thing about diagnoses is that they sometimes suggest being the causation of a problem, instead of a word that describes it. This is a more difficult matter than it may appear at first glance. Do I fear the height because I suffer from height phobia? Or do I fear the height, and this phenomenon goes under the name height phobia? The assessment of mental disorders is based on 2 articles which basically every behavioral therapist has in his office: International Classification of Diseases (ICD-10) of the World Health Organization (WHO), and Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-5) of the American Psychiatric Association (APA). Anyone can buy these articles - so grab one yourself and tell your family and friends what signs of mental illnesses you can identify in them. Your social environment will love you for this. One thing should never be forgotten when talking about psychiatric diagnoses: the differentiation into pathologic and normal is just a decision made by psychiatrists and psychologists. It's as easy as ABC. You might be reading this on a Kindle or whatever, but you should probably grab a piece of paper for this next part. Or you can just use your laptop, tablet, etc, which is probably sitting right next to you as well. You technojunkie. I am going to take you through an exercise that is mega simple, but super effective. It's helped a great deal of my clients and friends who have been patient enough to put up with me. It's called an ABC thought log and it basically takes that cognitive triangle and uses it to break down a situation into its component parts, so that you can see where you shooting yourself in the foot. Grasping the concept is simple. Mastering it takes a little practice. Start off by drawing a little grid like this: When motivation and ability to process the message are high, the person will usually take the central route. But when the person lacks either the motivation or the ability to process the message, he or she will be more likely to take the peripheral route.

Next we'll look at research testing these hypotheses. Motivation to Think How often do we think deeply about the everyday decisions we make? Imagine the following couple. Jill is highly motivated to eat healthy food, whereas her husband, Bill, is less health conscious. Jill asks Bill to pick up a healthy cereal for the family when he is at the store. He sees that both Kellogg's Raisin Bran and a new Scooby-Doo themed cereal are on sale. Which to choose? It is based on research as well as the zeitgeist. Until 1974, for example, homosexuality was considered as a mental disorder, and the diagnosis was part of the DSM-II. As a response to public pressure, it was taken out in a later version of the DSM-III. The current version of DSM-5 is under criticism because, here, some new diagnoses seem to pathologize normal things in human life [23]. Examples are the disruptive mood dysregulation disorder for kids with irrational outbursts of temper, or the mild neurocognitive disorder for elders with slight difficulties in memory and concentration, but no dementia. Based on the ICD-10, diagnosing a depression would be as follows. First, the presence of depressive symptoms is checked, which are divided into 3 core symptoms and 7 additional symptoms. At least 4 of the 10 symptoms must have been present almost constantly over the last 14 days, and 2 or more of them must be core symptoms. CORE SYMPTOMS Depressed mood to a degree that is definitely abnormal for the individual, present for most of the day and almost every day, largely uninfluenced by circumstances, and sustained for at least 2 weeks. Now I want you to think for a bit about a situation recently that made you anxious. So go ahead and put the event that happened up in the A box.

I will play along with you here and fill in my own situation in my thought log. So in the A section of the box, I will put that my friend texted me and said that we needed to talk. That's it, just the event that caused the stress in the first place. Next, you're going to hop down to the C portion because you're a rebel and sod the alphabet anyways. The C part is for you to write down what you felt in that situation. Try to avoid using thinking words, and instead just describe how it made you feel. In my case I felt worried, scared, and frantic. You're probably wondering how I hopped from my A all the way to my very dramatic C. Because he's been asked to grab a healthy choice, Bill assumes that the bran means all-natural nutrition and that the kids' cereal will be empty calories. But such a decision would likely reflect more heuristic processing, as it certainly did not come from closely examining the nutritional data (presented in FIGURE 8. Making the Healthy Choice Looking at these two cereal boxes, which would you expect to be healthier? Take a closer look at the nutritional information, and you might never again judge a cereal by its name alone. An image shows comparison of two varieties of cereal from Kellogg's based on serving size, calories, protein, carbohydrates, fats, and vitamins. The data presented on the two cereal boxes can be summarized in the file attached. Nutritional Facts Kellogg's Scooby-Doo Cereal Serving Size 1 cup (32 grams) Amount per serving Cereal With half cup skim milk Loss of interest or pleasure in activities that are normally pleasurable. Decreased energy or increased fatiguability.