Depression, Anxiety and Stress Management

In the last years, the interest in clinical psychology in the scientific research about mind has shifted from a focus on mental contents centrality to cognitive process analysis. At present, interests, motivations and aims represent the fulcrum of the mental working models, based on the analysis of feed-forward psychological processes. The cognitive perspective offers a further version of functional analysis (increasing it from 3 to 7 columns) and of downward arrow technique (causal analysis technique) dedicated to highlighting the motivational aspects of the observed behaviour. This new technique is used in the assessment phase as a necessary tool in understanding the deep levels of structure the personality and the dynamics, which produces the psychological disease. The basic hypothesis is that there is present in a person a multilevel motivational structure capable of explaining the origin, the meaning and the role of a person’s each and every behaviours. The assessment aim is to specify the different motivational levels related to several aspects, in which the individual fulfils himself: oneself area, relational area, self-efficacy, area of the psychophysiological wellbeing, area of control or vital wish the world has particular characteristics, considered absolutely necessary. Defining the structure starts with the purpose of the action and the causal analysis is used to ask the subjects why it is important to achieve that goal and then, resuming its response, continue to ask what it wants to achieve as long as it expresses the desired condition, the priority interest, which explains the personological operation in the area investigated. These five areas of motivational structure levels are chained by a syllogism between motivational area of control and wellbeing until area of self.

Knowledge of the individual’s motivational structure improves the diagnostic work and allows a more incisive therapeutic plan.