Emotions beyond brain and body

The emerging consensus in the philosophy of cognition is that cognition is situated, i.e., dependent upon or co-constituted by the body, the environment, and/or the embodied interaction with it. But what about emotions? If the brain alone cannot do much thinking, can the brain alone do some emoting? If not, what else is needed? Do (some) emotions (sometimes) cross an individual's boundary? If so, what kinds of supra-individual systems can be bearers of affective states, and why? And does that make emotions “embedded” or “extended” in the sense cognition is said to be embedded and extended? Section 2 shows why it is important to understand in which sense body, environment, and our embodied interaction with the world contribute to our affective life. Section 3 introduces some key concepts of the debate about situated cognition. Section 4 draws attention to an important disanalogy between cognition and emotion with regard to the role of the body. Section 5 shows under which conditions a contribution by the environment results in non-trivial cases of “embedded” emotions. Section 6 is concerned with affective phenomena that seem to cross the organismic boundaries of an individual, in particular with the idea that emotions are “extended” or “distributed.”     

Justification Incorporated: a Discursive Approach to Corporate Responsibility

Contrasting two standard models of corporate responsibility—the so-called “collectivist” and “individualist” model—this essay proposes a third option, namely, a discursive conception of responsibility and examines whether and how this conception can be applied to the corporate level. It does so by taking a careful look at one of the preconditions of individual discursive responsibility, i.e. discursive practical reason, and discussing how corporate agents can meet this precondition. Building on this new concept, the essay also offers a novel approach to justifying corporate responsibility by referring to an argument advanced by Rainer Forst stating that a fundamental human right to justification is the normative core of any kind of responsibility and combining it, in a second step, with an argument recently proposed by Philip Pettit and Christian List showing the impossibility of forming consistent group attitudes and beliefs as a function of the attitudes and beliefs of individual group members. Finally, this essay outlines certain preliminary conclusions about the incorporation of responsibility in a corporate context.     

New variations of intrahemispheric and interhemispheric processing indexed by the dimond paradigm

We report 2 experiments designed to demonstrate that unilateral tachistoscopic stimulation would yield a response time (RT) advantage over bilateral stimulation in a simple experiment, whereas the opposite pattern would occur in a complex version of the same task, as predicted by the intrahemispheric resource limitation model of Banich and colleagues. Experiment 1 was a go/no-go task in which participants had to press a key when two shapes (circles or squares) were identical on the computer screen. A unilateral field advantage was obtained that was accentuated in several task conditions that yielded overall longer RTs, mostly in the bilateral condition. Experiment 2 was similar but required a more complex judgment: The go trials were to 2 stimuli identical on 1 dimension (shape or color) but not both or neither. The RTs were significantly and substantially longer than in Experiment 1 and exhibited a nonsignificant bilateral field advantage, which differed significantly from the unilateral field advantage obtained in Experiment 1. These results support the intrahemispheric resource limitation model of Banich and colleagues. However, several within-experiment effects are in direct opposition to this model and are best explained as limitations of commissural relay of perceptual information.     

Mentalisierungsdefizite bei stationären Patienten

Background

Fonagy (2009) considers the improvement of mentalization, understood as an element of structural change, as a global goal of psychotherapeutic treatment. Yet until now there is little knowledge about the mentalizing skills in clinical populations.

Material and methods

We examined the mentalizing skills in 201 patients on admission for complex psychotherapeutic inpatient treatment with the “Reading the mind in the eyes”-Test (RMET). We explored if there are diagnosis-related differences in the RMET and compared our findings to published data on the RMET in clinical and normal populations.

Results

Compared to normal populations our sample scored significantly lower in the RMET, however, no diagnosis-related differences were found.

Conclusions

Although our data are preliminary, psychotherapeutic inpatient treatment should consider the patients reduced mentalizing skills.     

Moving arms: the effects of sensorimotor information on the problem-solving process

Embodied cognition postulates a bi-directional link between the human body and its cognitive functions. Whether this holds for higher cognitive functions such as problem solving is unknown. We predicted that arm movement manipulations performed by the participants could affect the problem-solving solutions. We tested this prediction in quantitative reasoning tasks that allowed two solutions to each problem (addition or subtraction). In two studies with healthy adults (N?=?53 and N?=?50), we found an effect of problem-congruent movements on problem solutions. Consistent with embodied cognition, sensorimotor information gained via right or left arm movements affects the solution in different types of problem-solving tasks.     

Understanding neuropathic pain

Neuropathic pain is defined as a chronic pain condition that occurs or persists after a primary lesion or dysfunction of the peripheral or central nervous system. Traumatic injury of peripheral nerves also increases the excitability of nociceptors in and around nerve trunks and involves components released from nerve terminals (neurogenic inflammation) and immunological and vascular components from cells resident within or recruited into the affected area. Action potentials generated in nociceptors and injured nerve fibers release excitatory neurotransmitters at their synaptic terminals such as L-glutamate and substance P and trigger cellular events in the central nervous system that extend over different time frames. Short-term alterations of neuronal excitability, reflected for example in rapid changes of neuronal discharge activity, are sensitive to conventional analgesics, and do not commonly involve alterations in activity-dependent gene expression. Novel compounds and new regimens for drug treatment to influence activity-dependent long-term changes in pain transducing and suppressive systems (pain matrix) are emerging.     

Frontal and striatal brain lesions increase susceptibility to masking in perceptual decisions

Recent data suggest that perceptual decisions on masked stimuli involve neural activity in frontal cortex. We examined the effect of damage to frontal and striatal brain regions in man on the susceptibility to backward masking in rapid stimulus streams. Patients with unilateral frontal excisions and patients with early Huntington's disease were compared to controls in the identification of a brief white letter embedded in short streams of black letters at two presentation rates: (a) 9 letters/s; (b) 12.5 letters/s and also in a control condition in which the first post-target masking letter was absent. Patients could identify the target when the post-target mask was absent, but reducing the delay between stimuli significantly increased the error rates in patients. Intrusion errors often involved reporting post-target or pre-target distractors instead of the target. These results suggest that fronto-striatal lesions increase the period during which perceptual decisions are susceptible to perturbation. This deficit is compatible with a functional role of frontal systems in the cognitive control of brief perceptual decisions.