Describe your mood with numbers.

In the consulting room, when applying Baker's cognitive therapy to horizontally conceptualize patients (scene-automatic thinking-emotion mode), psychological counselors identify the emotions experienced by patients in specific situations. The counselor and the patient had this conversation:

Consultant: Have you had this situation recently?

Patient: Last Saturday, the school entrance examination math exam appeared.

Consultant: What was that? Can you describe it for me?

Patient: The examination room is arranged according to the requirements of the college entrance examination. There are 30 people in one examination room. This examination room is the classroom of senior one. The math exam will be held in the afternoon. The exam requires me to enter the school 30 minutes in advance. I walked out of the classroom at about 2: 20, and then went to the examination room. It took about ten minutes in the middle. On the way to the examination room, I can obviously feel my heart beating faster and my breathing is not calm. I sat in the examination room, my heart was not calm, and other students were talking beside me, so I ignored them. Later, the teacher handed out papers and asked me to fill in my name and test number. I picked up the pen and found my hands shaking.

Consultant: What was your mood at that time?

Patient: I think it is nervousness.

In Baker's cognitive therapy, the counselor will identify the emotions experienced by the patient in this situation and then evaluate the intensity of the emotions. This requires emotional assessment techniques.

1. What is emotional assessment technology?

The so-called emotional evaluation technology is to describe the intensity of a certain emotion with numbers and express the intensity of emotion with a certain range of numbers. In cognitive therapy, a certain percentage in the range of 0- 100% is usually used to describe the intensity of a certain emotion.

Psychology believes that people's emotions have three characteristics: motivation, excitement and intensity, and each characteristic can be divided into two extremes. Emotional evaluation technology is a technology to evaluate emotional intensity. Judging from the emotional intensity, there are strong and weak poles, such as from pleasure to ecstasy, from mild temperature to rage. There are different intensities between the strength of emotions, such as anger, rage, rage and other different degrees of anger. The intensity of emotions depends on the significance of emotional events to individuals.

In daily life, we use different words to describe the intensity of emotions, but in psychological counseling, we all use a noun to describe the emotions of the same nature, and then use the figures of emotional degree to explain them. For example, happiness and ecstasy mentioned above, for someone, the word happiness is used to describe this emotion, happiness is described by 25%, and ecstasy is described by 100%.

In addition, there is another purpose of evaluating emotions in cognitive therapy, which is to evaluate the effect of psychological counseling. Patients will feel 80% nervous when facing the scene of a speech. After psychological counselors apply certain counseling skills, patients feel only 40% nervous when faced with the same scene. The tension is reduced from 80% to 40%, which shows that psychological counseling has achieved quite good results.

2. Application examples of emotion assessment technology

We still use the example at the beginning of the article to actually explain how to conduct emotional assessment. After determining the patient's automatic thinking, the counselor began to evaluate the mood:

Counselor: We just mentioned that when you took the math exam, you had the idea that "I can't fail math any more. If I fail, there is no hope for the college entrance examination", and then you became nervous.

Patient: Yes.

Counselor: Next, we will use the scale of 0- 100% to evaluate the degree of your thoughts and emotions, so that you can score one point for your thoughts and emotions. Let's talk about emotions first.

Patient (nods)

Counselor: (Draw an emotional scale) We use a number 0- 100% to describe the emotional level, where 0% means there is no such emotion at all, and 100% means there is an extreme emotion. Between 0- 100%, indicating different levels of emotions. For example, moderate means 50%, slightly larger means 25%, and very large means 75%.

Patient: Oh.

Counselor: What was your nervous score in the last math exam?

Patient: I don't know how much. 50%、60%、70%?

Consultant: Let's imagine 100% first. Can you imagine the most tense moment?

Patient: I bought the grand prize, and I will win it soon. I wonder if I can win the prize.

Consultant: Good. How nervous are you in the math exam compared with him? Do you feel your heartbeat, breathing and other reactions?

Patient: I think it may be 80%.

Consultant: OK, we will give him 80%. We will often rate our emotions in the future. Please remember the feelings of 100% and 80%, and compare the feelings at that time with those in the future, so that it is easy to give a more objective evaluation.

Patient: Yes.