Paratymy Symptoms of this affective disorder

Humans interact with the environment and with the events that happen to us, showing feelings and emotions about it, which they add affective value to the situations we live in and the people with whom we interact. We express our affections through laughter, crying, gestures, attitudes.

Affectivity has the function of guiding our actions and behaviors towards different objectives, influencing our state of mind.

The way we experience the events that happen to us varies from one person to another according to their personality, affecting our thinking, perceptions, our behavior and the way of living.

Although we are aware of the emotions we experience, we have no control over them, since they appear spontaneously and immediately; they are impulses that appear naturally. Nevertheless, we do have the option to decide what attitudes we adopt in this regard.

The adequate expression of affections has special relevance in the developmental development of children, since it favors self-esteem, self-confidence, personal acceptance and the consolidation of affectivity. The family nucleus confers emotional security through expressions of affection, physical contact and appreciation.

Affectivity is interactive, since the emotions and feelings we have towards someone are usually reciprocal, they are rarely generated towards someone who does not feel anything for us or to whom we are indifferent.

Concepts related to affectivity

Affectivity comprises different concepts that reflect different functions:

• Emotions: They are reactions that occur suddenly to maintain or eliminate the event that triggered them. They are triggered quickly and are usually short-lived.

Emotions have a biological and adaptive function, they allow us to communicate how we feel and facilitate social interactions and adaptation to the environment. In turn, they affect psychological processes such as perception, attention and memory, generating physiological and psychological changes. They are related to mood, personality and motivation.

The basic emotions that exist are: fear, disgust, joy, anger, sadness and surprise. There are secondary emotions, which are made up of the primary ones: pride, pleasure, satisfaction, contempt ... and they are linked to culture and social context.

Emotions are experienced subjectively, as they have distinctive thoughts, memories, and images. Normally we pay attention to events that correspond and are congruent with our emotional state.

• Feelings: They are complex affective states, longer lasting and less intense than emotions, despite the fact that they are generated from them. They arise from the thoughts we have of our emotional experiences, from the fact of becoming aware of the emotions we experience. It is the perception of what happens in our body and in our mind.
• Affections: they are the feelings that accompany our ideas, the conscious and subjective aspects of emotion. They generate a whole series of observable behaviors, which correspond to the experimentation of emotion.

They have more fluctuating changes and are in tune with the thoughts and language that accompany it.

Affects vary in different cultures, since they have an important social component.

• Humor: it corresponds to the state of mind and is defined as the way of presenting, judging or commenting on reality. They are persistent emotions that are maintained and experienced subjectively, although they can also be observed by others.

They appear more slowly and progressively, prevail over time and can appear spontaneously (without a preceding stimulus) or after the appearance of certain stimuli.

Parathymy

Parathymia is a affectivity disorder characterized by inadequate emotional expression of a person in a certain situation, that is, the affection shown is incongruous with the context in which it occurs. Also called "inappropriate affect" or "affective inadequacy".

Inappropriateness can refer to both the meaning and the intensity of the affective component that accompanies the experience. The reactions of the subject do not correspond in a natural way with the content of their experiences, nor with the awareness of themselves or their environment.

An example of parathymia would be: smiling while we are telling something that worries us (hospitalization of a relative, some bad news ...) or while we are crying.

It is frequently seen in schizophrenic patients (especially in cases of negative schizophrenia) and in organic-cerebral syndromes, being unusual its appearance in primary affective syndromes such as depressive or manic pictures.

Psychopathology of affectivity

There are various alterations in the expression of emotions, in addition to parathymia, which correspond to different affective disorders. They are samples of emotions that are inappropriate for the moment, or of inappropriate intensity or duration.

Pathological happiness and sadness would be, for example, too intense and extreme samples of a basic and healthy emotion, and therefore they would suppose an inappropriate expression of them.

Other affectivity disorders would be:

• Affective indifference or coldness: inability or absence of emotional sensations experimentation. They show very few emotional reactions.
• Anhedonia: inability to experience pleasure.
• Emotional or affective lability: sudden changes in affect and no control of emotions.
• Dysthymia: long-lasting low mood.
• Dysphoria: feeling of general emotional distress with depressed mood, anxiety, and cognitive restlessness.
• Aprosodia: alteration in the use of affective language.
• Alexithymia: inability to identify and express emotions and feelings.
• Affective stiffness: loss of ability to regulate and modify emotions.
• Ambivalence: simultaneous experimentation of opposite emotions on the same object or phenomenon.
• Neothymia: feeling of new appearance that the patient cannot recognize since he has not previously experienced it.
• Apathy: lack of motivation, lack of desire to do things and indifference to stimuli.
• Abulia: inability to take any action voluntarily, lack of energy to respond behaviorally.