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Nursing Research Paper

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Being confronted by a threat like a life-threatening disease commonly yields psychological stress and isolation. LSD increases the ability to feel emotions, so patients were forced to deal with the negative emotions they had repressed. Patients responses included having a break-through in accessing emotions, being encouraged to free themselves or their minds, to let emotions flow, and to let go of fear. In regard to de-schematizing, or changing one’s perspective of oneself and others, patients said judgements of “good” and “bad” experiments were expelled; and that life and death are not all that different, and that familiarizing the self with this was priceless. One notable response focused on looking at one’s self as more than one’s …show more content…

It has been reported that the benefits of LSD psychotherapy are seen most often when the patient has “peak” or “spiritual” experiences, defined as pure positivity and happiness with all fears, doubts, and tensions banished and feeling one with the world (Gasser et al, 2014b). Kaelen et al. (2015) decided to test whether listening to music under the influence of LSD would enhance emotions felt and what emotions were most enhanced. Each patient underwent two study days with at least five days in between one another. The participants received a saline placebo on the first day and intravenously received doses of LSD varying from 40 g to 80 g on the second day. Over the course of the day, participants listened to five carefully selected neo-classical and ambient tracks. They were asked how “emotionally affected” they were to each track and given a measure to test for the categories of emotion felt in response to the music that consisted of wonder, transcendence, power, tenderness, nostalgia, peacefulness, joy, sadness, and tension (Kaelen et al., 2015).
Consistent with predictions, LSD significantly increased how emotionally affected participants were to music. Further supporting this prediction, the reported intensity of the LSD was positively correlated with emotional arousal. In regard to emotional categories, transcendence, wonder, power, and tenderness were are reported

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