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THE CLINICAL IMPORTANCE OF LEVELS OF EMOTIONAL AWARENESS | |
| Contact: Richard D. Lane, MD, PhD Phone: 520-626-3272 Email: lane@email.arizona.edu Embargoed until: March 3, 2004 |
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Vancouver, BC, Canada - The ability to be aware of one's own emotional responses may be the foundation for emotional intelligence, the ability to understand and use emotion information to promote adaptive behavior. New research presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Psychosomatic Society in Vancouver, B.C. shows that emotional awareness is related to important health outcomes. Dr. Jeffrey Lackner at the State University of New York at Buffalo reported that greater emotional awareness is associated with less pain and less emotional distress in patients with irritable bowel syndrome. Dr. Silla Consoli from Paris, France reported that obese individuals were less emotionally aware than their normal weight counterparts, but that among the obese individuals greater emotional awareness was associated with greater anxiety in social situations. Dr. Claudia Subic-Wrana from Cologne, Germany reported that patients who have somatic complaints for which no organic basis can be found have lower emotional awareness than healthy volunteers or patients with mental disorders such as depression, and that emotional awareness improved after 3 months of intensive multi-modal treatment. According to Dr. Richard Lane, Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Arizona whose Levels of Emotional Awareness Scale was used in each of these studies, emotional awareness is a skill that can be developed. According to Dr. Lane, "These studies suggest that not being aware of your own emotions can be associated with physical symptoms and maladaptive behaviors such as overeating. A question for future research is how to use such awareness in the most health-promoting way possible." | |
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Psychosomatic Medicine is the official peer-reviewed journal of the American Psychosomatic Society, published bimonthly. For information about the journal, contact Vicki White, Managing Editor for Manuscript Production,
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