There’s no denying that the weeks before Christmas are stressful: planning, crowds, last minute shopping…. You’d expect that this would lead to poor mental health. Actually, it is the post-holiday period that is usually busiest for clinical psychologists and therapists; cases of depression and suicide attempts increase after the holidays are over. The Solomon & Corbit’s (1974) theory of emotional habituation can help explain this.
This theory assumes that there are opposing processes that act to maintain emotional balance. When you think about it, emotions seem to have an opposite: happy vs. sad, joy vs. anger. Solomon & Corbit propose that the initial emotion (called the “primary reaction”) produced by some stimulus will, by necessity, be an opposite emotion state that follows it (called the “after reaction”). According to Solomon & Corbit, the strength of the primary and after reactions will change with experience; the primary reaction will gradually weaken, but the after reaction will become stronger.
By way of an example, consider a young boy, Mark, who grew up in a family that celebrates Christmas. We can easily imagine that in the weeks leading up to Christmas Mark’s excitement steadily grows, enhanced by a series of events, such as the baking of cookies, the decorating of the tree, visiting the ubiquitous “mall Santa”, until by Christmas Eve sleep is an unlikely event. Christmas morning arrives and the boy is a bubbly bundle of joy (e.g., “I’m so excited I could die!”). Mark calms a bit after a few rounds of present opening, but stays pretty happy. Sure, after all the cookies are eaten and the tree is taken down, Mark is a little sad, but this doesn’t last long and he quickly returns to normal; he even looks forward to going back to school to see friends and show off his new toys. Let’s fast forward through the years. As Christmases come and go our growing boy is less excited by the holidays, the end of the season is a little sadder, and the return to school not as easy or as anticipated. By the time Mark has grown to an adult the weeks leading up to Christmas are probably pleasant, although undoubtedly busy and active, but there is a greater feeling of regret and often a distinct loathing of the return to the regular work or university schedule. In some people this becomes true clinical depression. In this example the positive emotional state leading up to Christmas is the primary reaction and the post-Christmas negative emotions the after reaction. As we can see, the primary reaction gradually lessens and the after reaction strengthens with subsequent Christmas experiences.
The figures below show hypothetical graphs of the emotional responses just described in the example. In the figures “1” represents the peak level of the primary reaction (e.g., the intense excitement on Christmas morning), “2” shows a slight reduction in the excitement (e.g., later on Christmas day after some presents have been opened), and “3” depicts the after reaction (e.g., sadness once Christmas is over). The yellow line at the bottom indicates the beginning and end of the stimulus that produces the primary reaction (e.g., the Christmas season). From the figures you can see how the pattern of emotional reaction changes with experience: the peak level of the primary reaction decreases and the intensity of the after reaction has increased markedly and lasts longer.
As a description of the behaviour, this is fine. But the real question here is what produces this pattern of emotional response? Solomon & Corbit’s explanatory theory is based upon the underlying principle of homeostasis. It is generally understood that our bodies are well designed to maintain a physiological balance. For example, if you eat a bunch of salty chips you get thirsty; drinking water restores the osmotic balance, reducing the increased salt concentrations to a normal level. However, the same homeostatic balancing of bodily systems can be applied to psychological states, including emotions. From a physiological perspective, consider that being in a heightened emotional state of, for example, excitement for long periods of time is going to increase your heart rate, blood pressure, interfere with digestion, and a whole suite of other things. In the long run, this is going to put a lot of stress on your body. As such, your body needs to try and get back into emotional homeostatic balance. According to Solomon and Corbit, any emotion-eliciting stimulus pushes the emotional state out of stability. Based upon the principle of homeostasis, you will try to compensate by generating an opposing emotional state to counter the one produced by the emotion-arousing stimulus. And your body gets better at this with experience (i.e., you learn). The more times the initial emotion-arousing stimulus is experienced, the better you get at “recognizing” what’s coming, and the faster you respond by generating the opposing emotional state.
In Solomon and Corbit’s terminology, the emotion-arousing event produces the “primary process,” the quality of emotion directly produced by the stimulus itself. In contrast, the body’s response is called the “opponent process.” The opponent process is actually elicited by the primary process. The primary process will end when the emotion-arousing stimulus is over, but the opponent process won’t end until after the primary process is finished.
So how does this explain the change in emotion over time and higher incidences of depression following holidays? The idea is that the primary process never changes, but with repeated exposure to the stimulus that initiates it, the opponent process increases in strength and occurs earlier. The “net result” of the two underlying opponent processes is the actual pattern of emotion that is experienced. Because the opponent process is opposite in form to the primary process, we can treat the former as a negative number and the latter as a positive number. Adding the two processes values together gives the net emotional result. In the figure below, green lines represent the primary process, red lines the opponent process, and blue lines the net emotion (i.e., the primary and after reactions); the yellow line represents the duration of the emotion-arousing stimulus. As can be seen in the graphs, when only the primary process is present, it completely controls the emotional response. However, once the body produces the opponent process, this counters the primary process, so the actual emotional response decreases. Once the emotion-eliciting stimulus is over the primary process ends, but the opponent process doesn’t begin to decrease in strength until after the primary process is finished. Consequently, even after the primary process is gone there is still a lingering opponent process, resulting in the emotional after reaction. If you look at the graphs on the right, after many experiences with the emotion-eliciting event the primary process is unchanged, but the opponent process begins sooner and is much stronger. The result is what I’ve described in the Christmas example: a lower level of the positive emotional primary reaction, and a much larger and longer negative emotional after reaction. While the overall emotion levels produced by the emotion-arousing event have been brought down (i.e., are closer to homeostatic balance), unfortunately, for some people, once the primary process ends, the opponent process is so strong that it results in full clinical depression, thus explaining why clinicians are often seeing more patients after the holidays than before.
To avoid concluding this blog on a negative note, I would like to point out that if Solomon and Corbit’s interpretation is correct, you really haven’t lost the innocent excitement and joyful exuberance of Christmas that you had back when you were five or six years old. Yes, you really are still so excited on Christmas morning that you could just die! Your body, in a effort to maintain a nice emotional homeostatic balance, just does a better job of hiding it.
References
Solomon, R. L. & Corbit, J. D. (1974). An opponent-process theory of motivation: I. Temporal dynamics of affect. Psychological Review, 81, 119-145.
