Psychological Defense Mechanisms: A New Perspective

Approaching psychological defense mechanisms from the perspective of an evolved strategy, it is proposed that there are two basic templates-dissociation and cognitive distortions. Frequently conceived of as pathological, these psychological phenomena actually constitute overlapping spectrums with milder manifestations being common and highly functional, and more severe variants less common and typically dysfunctional. Dissociation provides the capacity to adaptively detach from disturbing emotional states, and cognitive distortions place a positive ego-enhancing spin on experience. Most of the classical defense mechanisms described in the psychoanalytic literature represent a form of cognitive distortion with some containing strong elements of dissociation.     

Reflections on trauma,symbolization and psychic pain in a case of neurosis and a case of psychosis

This paper seeks to advance some considerations on trauma, historical reality, its symbolization and the psychic pain generated by the investigation of unconscious processes in psychoanalytic treatment. These themes will be explored by demonstrating the differences arising between traumatic experiences and their expression in phantasy, as they occurred in a case of neurosis and another of psychosis. In each case, the differences in the features of the symbolization and the processes of working through shall also be taken into consideration. Particular attention shall be paid to the specific difficulties encountered by the analyst in the interpretative treatment of the trauma resulting from the amount of psychic pain induced in the patient, which at times proves to be an insurmountable barrier and a destructive distortion of the process.     

REVISING PSYCHOANALYTIC INTERPRETATIONS OF THE PAST

The author reviews a contemporary cognitive psychology perspective on memory that views memory as being composed of multiple separate systems. Most researchers draw a fundamental distinction between declarative/explicit and non-declarative/implicit forms of memory. Declarative memory is responsible for the conscious recollection of facts and events - what is typically meant by the everyday and the common psychoanalytic use of the word 'memory'. Non-declarative forms of memory, in contrast, are specialised processes that influence experience and behaviour without representing the past in terms of any consciously accessible content. They operate outside of an individual's awareness, but are not repressed or otherwise dynamically unconscious. Using this theoretical framework, the question of how childhood relationship experiences are carried forward from the past to influence the present is examined. It is argued that incorporating a conceptualisation of non-declarative memory processing into psychoanalytic theory is essential. Non-declarative memory processes are capable of forming complex and sophisticated representations of the interpersonal world. These non-declarative memory processes exert a major impact on interpersonal experience and behaviour that needs to be analysed on its own terms and not mistakenly viewed as a form of resistance.     

The consciousness continuum: from “qualia” to “free will”

The consciousness continuum is seen as extending from simple sensory experiences to complex subjective constructions resulting in the apparent exercise of conscious will. The phenomena between these two extremes include spontaneously occurring mental contents, unintended perceptual experiences, memory retrievals, and problem solving including feedback of conscious contents. Two factors describe this continuum: The presence or absence of intention (psychologically defined) and the complexity of the cognitive construction involved. Among other benefits, such an analysis is intended to provide an alternative to metaphysical and vague concepts such as qualia, free will, and intentionality.     

Anxiety as a primary symptom in cycloid psychosis

Psychotic anxiety has not been systematically included in standard psychopathologic and diagnostic literature, presumably because anxiety is implicitly perceived to be an emphatically comprehensible consequence of the cognitive symptoms of psychosis. This review gives an overview of neurophysiologic studies that indicate different pathogenic mechanisms for different types of psychosis. Convergent and complementary structural and functional imaging findings, biochemical and neuropsychological data allow conjecture as to neurophysiologic-psychopathologic links in cycloid psychosis. Intriguing results suggest that in cycloid psychosis, a generalized hyperasousal related to the tonus of the noradrenergic system may be the basic disturbance causing the delusionary and perceptual psychotic distortions. The findings are specific for cycloid psychoses, which are diagnosed as polymorphous psychosis in the International Classification of Diseases and Related Health Problems, 10th Edition. Furthermore, these findings are consistent with the author's hypothesis that the emotional derailment is the primary disturbance in cycloid psychosis (anxiety-elation). In contrast, cognitive disturbances are secondary and remit after the exceptional emotional state is rebalanced.     

Perceptual congruency of audio-visual speech affects ventriloquism with bilateral visual stimuli

Many studies on multisensory processes have focused on performance in simplified experimental situations, with a single stimulus in each sensory modality. However, these results cannot necessarily be applied to explain our perceptual behavior in natural scenes where various signals exist within one sensory modality. We investigated the role of audio-visual syllable congruency on participants' auditory localization bias or the ventriloquism effect using spoken utterances and two videos of a talking face. Salience of facial movements was also manipulated. Results indicated that more salient visual utterances attracted participants' auditory localization. Congruent pairing of audio-visual utterances elicited greater localization bias than incongruent pairing, while previous studies have reported little dependency on the reality of stimuli in ventriloquism. Moreover, audio-visual illusory congruency, owing to the McGurk effect, caused substantial visual interference on auditory localization. Multisensory performance appears more flexible and adaptive in this complex environment than in previous studies.     

Dreaming: cognitive processes during cortical activation and high afferent thresholds

The concepts of nonlocal, or distributed, cortical and cognitive activation are examined for their usefulness in describing the relations between sleep and waking neurocognitive processes. Changes in the pattern of distributed activation and inhibition of selected portions of sensory, cognitive, and motor decision modules account for the differences in imagery and thought across sleep and waking states in comparable environments. The massive inhibition of sensory and proprioceptive input to perceptual modules in Stage 1 REM sleep leaves the perceptual and cognitive modules, by default, with their own output as their sole input. Given this constraint, the activation of portions of the cortical structures that execute waking perceptual, cognitive and motor responses is necessary and sufficient to produce the imagery and thought of dreaming sleep. Connectionist models are introduced so that neurophysiological and cognitive concepts of distributed and local activation and inhibition can be translated into a common language, and in so doing, are used to simulate several processes fundamental to the production of imaginal thought and dreaming.     

Autistic phenomena in The Adventures of Pinocchio

This paper seeks to demonstrate that the protagonist of Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio illustrates numerous autistic phenomena such as communication difficulties, sensory and perceptual distortions and mindblindness. While Pinocchio is viewed as a literary construct with contraindications of autism, it will be argued that his autistic traits are sufficient to suggest the possibility that Collodi had a partial intuition of the syndrome 60 years before it was identified by Leo Kanner. Approaching Collodi's text in this manner is taken as an opportunity to survey and reflect upon the psychoanalytic literature on autism and to position it in relation to contemporary theories from cognitive neuroscience.     

Daydreaming, Consciousness, and Self-Representations: Empirical Approaches to Theories of William James and Sigmund Freud

In honor of Saul Rosenzweig's lifelong efforts to provide empirical tests of psychoanalytic theories, this paper has focused on a series of research approaches to examining the concepts of William James and Sigmund Freud relating to waking fantasy, ongoing thought, and beliefs about the self. Studies involving projective methods, psychometric analyses of self-report questionnaires, laboratory tests of daydreaming during signal-detection tasks, thought-sampling during natural daily activities and psychological correlates of actual-self and ideal-self discrepancies are described. Clinical applications of these methods are also presented. The findings in general point to the value of James's conception of conscious thought as an important basis along with cognitive unconscious processes for studying clinical phenomena, personality, and even the metaphors of dreams. Rosenzweig's emphasis on formal research testing of psychoanalytic processes is supported.     

Inhibition,unusual perceptual experiences and psychoticism

The dimensional approach to psychosis suggests that research should focus on the performance of psychiatrically normal individuals on measures derived from the study of psychosis. Recent theories of schizophrenia postulate a defect at the interface of preconscious/conscious processes. Such a defect could occur as a result of some disturbance in inhibitory attentional mechanisms. A group of normal S's were assessed on three measures; (a) a priming task measuring inhibition, (b) a perceptual task, the verbal transformation effect, and (c) a number of questionnaires of relevance to the psychoticism dimension. As predicted low inhibition was correlated with unusual experiences on the perceptual task. Each of these measures correlated with a questionnaire measure of predisposition to hallucinations, but not with the other measures of psychoticism. No correlations with other personality variables as assessed by the EPQ were found.     

The effect of reward on orienting and reorienting in exogenous cuing

It is thought that reward-induced motivation influences perceptual, attentional, and cognitive control processes to facilitate behavioral performance. In this study, we investigated the effect of reward-induced motivation on exogenous attention orienting and inhibition of return (IOR). Attention was captured by peripheral onset cues that were nonpredictive for the target location. Participants performed a target discrimination task at short (170 ms) and long (960 ms) cue–target stimulus onset asynchronies. Reward-induced motivation was manipulated by exposing participants to low- and high-reward blocks. Typical cue facilitation effects on initial orienting were observed for both the low- and high-reward conditions. However, IOR was found only for the high-reward condition. This indicates that reward-induced motivation has a clear effect on reorienting and inhibitory processes following the initial capture of attention, but not on initial exogenous orienting that is considered to be exclusively automatic and stimulus-driven. We suggest that initial orienting is completely data-driven, not affected by top-down motivational processes, while reorienting and the accompanying IOR effect involve motivational top-down processes. To support this, we showed that reward-induced motivational processes and top-down control processes co-act in order to improve behavioral performance: High-reward-induced motivation caused an increase in top-down cognitive control, as signified by posterror slowing. Moreover, we show that personality trait propensity to reward-driven behavior (BAS-Drive scale) was related to reward-triggered behavioral changes in top-down reorienting, but not to changes in automatic orienting.     

A qualitative analysis of sensory phenomena induced by perceptual deprivation

Previous studies have shown that misperceptions and illusory experiences can occur if sensory stimulation is withdrawn or becomes invariant even for short periods of time. Using a perceptual deprivation paradigm, we created a monotonous audiovisual environment and asked participants to verbally report any auditory, visual or body-related phenomena they experienced. The data (analysed using a variant of interpretative phenomenological analysis) revealed two main themes: (1) reported sensory phenomena have different spatial characteristics ranging from simple percepts to the feeling of immersion in a complex multisensory environment and (2) the active contribution of the perceiver where participants report engaging in exploratory processes even when there is nothing to find. Detailed analysis of the qualitative data further showed that participants who reported more perceptual phenomena were more likely to report internal bodily sensations, move more during the experiment and score higher on the Revised Hallucination Scale than those reporting fewer percepts explicitly linking perceptual deprivation to somatic phenomena. The results demonstrate how the variety of sensory experiences induced by perceptual deprivation can give further insight into the factors mediating conscious awareness and may suggest ways in which the brain imposes meaning on the environment under invariant sensory conditions.     

Why do Qualia and the Mind Seem Nonphysical?

In this article, I discuss several of the factors that jeopardize our understanding of the nature of qualitative experiences and the mind. I incorporate the view from neuroscience to clarify the naïve view from the first person perspective. I suggest that the most misleading factor in the understanding the nature of the mind and conscious processes is the transparency of experiences and the imperceptibility of the neurobiological processes that realize them. Transparency reflects the biological advantages provided to organisms by avoiding the proliferation of superfluous sensing and the regress implied in sensing the sensors and analyzers ad infinitum. The downside of simplicity and the price for biological efficiency is that through introspection, we cannot perceive the inner workings of the brain. Thus, the view from the first person perspective creates the pervasive illusion that the mind is nonphysical. Sensing the environment requires encoding information into neural surrogates, which I conceive as contingent processes that when incorporated into conscious processes become qualitative experiences. They are cognitive shortcuts with a variable degree of isomorphism, which partially falsify reality. Thus, the what-it-is-like is not the what-it-is. The first person perspective seemings should be corrected by the objective approach provided by neuroscience. To compensate for the contingency of experiences, organisms learn to rely on the aboutness of associated phenomenal concepts. Experiences have high biological value, because even in the absence of language, they allow organisms to make intelligent choices. Qualia are also necessary to ground words and language, which are essential to develop higher forms of cognition.     

Size and orientation of objects in explicit and implicit memory: A reversal of the dissociation between perceptual similarity and type of test

Memory of size and orientation of objects was tested in explicit and implicit memory tests. Explicit memory was tested by object recognition and by recognition of the congruency of the changed sensory features. Implicit memory was tested by size assessment (Exps. 1 and 2), orientation judgement (Exps. 4 and 5), picture-fragment naming (Exp. 6), and classification (Exps. 3 and 7). Memory of sensory features was investigated by the comparison of performances of test-congruent with test-incongruent stimuli (i.e., same size or orientation vs. different size or orientation). The main result was a dissociation between these two tasks pertaining to the influence of sensory congruency on performance. However, it was in opposition to the usual relationship between the type of test and the perceptual similarity from study to test. In this study explicit, but not implicit, memory depended on sensory congruency. In the explicit tests performances were better when the stimuli were congruent than when they were incongruent. In the implicit test this variation had no influence. To get a repetition effect, it was important only that the object was repeated, and the size of this effect did not depend on sensory congruency. However, a change in another sensory feature — distortions of shape — strongly influenced the size of the repetition effect in the implicit test. Neither transfer-appropriate processing nor a system approach can easily explain this pattern of results. A multi-level, multi-token model is proposed to account for the different effects of sensory features in explicit and implicit memory.     

The Unconscious Mind

ABSTRACT— The unconscious mind is still viewed by many psychological scientists as the shadow of a "real" conscious mind, though there now exists substantial evidence that the unconscious is not identifiably less flexible, complex, controlling, deliberative, or action-oriented than is its counterpart. This "conscious-centric" bias is due in part to the operational definition within cognitive psychology that equates unconscious with subliminal . We review the evidence challenging this restricted view of the unconscious emerging from contemporary social cognition research, which has traditionally defined the unconscious in terms of its unintentional nature; this research has demonstrated the existence of several independent unconscious behavioral guidance systems: perceptual, evaluative, and motivational. From this perspective, it is concluded that in both phylogeny and ontogeny, actions of an unconscious mind precede the arrival of a conscious mind—that action precedes reflection.     

Self-Transformation at the Boundary of Religious Conversion and Psychosis

The relationship between religious conversion, as a form of spiritual emergency, and psychosis is one of the fundamental issues at the meeting point of theology and clinical psychology. In the present study, we assessed 53 individuals referred to a psychiatry center with the initial diagnosis of a psychotic episode by focusing on the clinical diagnosis (psychosis vs. spiritual emergency), subjective experiences (basic symptoms), and neuropsychological functions. Twenty-nine individuals meet the diagnosis of schizophrenia-spectrum disorders, but 24 persons experienced only religious and spiritual problems (religious conversion). Both groups reported similar levels of perplexity (e.g., ambivalence, inability to discriminate between own feelings, and hyperreflectivity) and self-disorder (e.g., depersonalization, impression of a change in one’s mirror image, and experience of discontinuity in own action). Diminished affectivity, disturbed contact, and perceptual/cognitive disorders were pronounced in psychosis, whereas anxiety and depressive symptoms were more severe in people with spiritual and religious problems. These results indicate that perplexity, self-disorder, and emotional turmoil are common features of turbulent religious conversion and psychosis, but a broader emergence of anomalous subjective experiences and cognitive deficits are detectable only in psychosis.

     

Towards a New Feeling Theory of Emotion

According to the old feeling theory of emotion, an emotion is just a feeling: a conscious experience with a characteristic phenomenal character. This theory is widely dismissed in contemporary discussions of emotion as hopelessly naïve. In particular, it is thought to suffer from two fatal drawbacks: its inability to account for the cognitive dimension of emotion (which is thought to go beyond the phenomenal dimension), and its inability to accommodate unconscious emotions (which, of course, lack any phenomenal character). In this paper, I argue that the old feeling theory is in reality only a pair of modifications removed from a highly plausible account of the nature of emotion that retains the essential connection between emotion and feeling. These modifications are, moreover, motivated by recent developments in work on phenomenal consciousness. The first development is the rising recognition of a phenomenal character proper to cognition—so‐called cognitive phenomenology. The second is the gathering momentum behind various ‘connection principles’ that specify some connection that a given state must bear to phenomenally conscious states in order to qualify as mental. These developments make it possible to formulate a new feeling theory of emotion, which would overcome the two fatal drawbacks of the old feeling theory. According to the new feeling theory, an emotion is a mental state that bears the right connection to conscious experiences with the right phenomenal character (involving, among other elements, a cognitive phenomenology).     

Toward the Clarification of the Construct of Depersonalization and its Association With Affective and Cognitive Dysfunctions

Little consensus or systematic research exists regarding the symptoms that constitute depersonalization and its association with affective and perceptual dysfunctions. A scale was constructed to measure depersonalization experiences reported in the literature and four items representing psychotic symptoms. Five factors representing different types of depersonalization emerged: Inauthenticity, Self-Negation, Self-Objectification, Derealization, and Body Detachment. Based on the factors, scales were constructed; these scales have internal consistency ranging from .78 to .84. Each of these factor scales was factorially distinguishable from psychosis and correlated between .48 and .58 with the Jackson and Messick (1972) Feelings of Unreality Scale, suggesting divergent and convergent validity. Inauthenticity, the most frequent and pervasive form of depersonalization experience, was best predicted by a cognitive style featuring intense, critical examination of self and others. In contrast, Self-Objectification was best predicted by thought disorganization and perceptual distortion and was experienced somewhat infrequently by relatively few subjects. All forms of depersonalization were associated with depression, except Inauthenticity.     

Toward the clarification of the construct of depersonalization and its association with affective and cognitive dysfunctions.

Little consensus or systematic research exists regarding the symptoms that constitute depersonalization and its association with affective and perceptual dysfunctions. A scale was constructed to measure depersonalization experiences reported in the literature and four items representing psychotic symptoms. Five factors representing different types of depersonalization emerged: Inauthenticity, Self-Negation, Self-Objectification, Derealization, and Body Detachment. Based on the factors, scales were constructed; these scales have internal consistency ranging from .78 to .84. Each of these factor scales was factorially distinguishable from psychosis and correlated between .48 and .58 with the Jackson and Messick (1972) Feelings of Unreality Scale, suggesting divergent and convergent validity. Inauthenticity, the most frequent and pervasive form of depersonalization experience, was best predicted by a cognitive style featuring intense, critical examination of self and others. In contrast, Self-Objectification was best predicted by thought disorganization and perceptual distortion and was experienced somewhat infrequently by relatively few subjects. All forms of depersonalization were associated with depression, except Inauthenticity.