Guilt and focusing in decision-making

In this paper we examined the impact of a specific emotion, guilt, on focusing in decision-making. Through the focusing mechanism, when making decisions, individuals tend to restrict their thoughts to what is explicitly represented in the decisional task, disregarding alternatives. In this paper, three experiments are performed to investigate whether an emotional state of guilt can critically guide individuals' focusing, and even prevailing over the focusing mechanism. Guilty emotional state was induced by asking participants to write about a guilty related life event. The emotional state was thus neither generated by nor related to the tasks used in the experiments. Results of the first two studies show that guilt affects focusing in decision-making in the case of only one explicitly specified option (a positive or a negative one). Guilty participants, when presented with a stated option that has predominantly positive characteristics, prefer other, unspecified options over the positive one. Guilty participants faced with a stated option that has predominantly negative features tend to prefer it to other, unspecified, options, instead. Finally, experiment 3 shows that guilty participants presented with two different options (a negative vs. a positive one) having different degrees of explicitness (i.e. they are not equally represented in the decision frame), focus on the negative option, even though the latter was not explicitly represented but only hinted at the end of the text. Overall, these results suggest that guilt emotion state can play a crucial role in either strengthening or reducing the focusing mechanism. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Self-projection in middle childhood: a study on the relationship between theory of mind and episodic future thinking

Cognitive Processing - Growing evidence suggests that theory of mind (ToM) and episodic future thinking (EFT) are closely related at both brain and functional level. This study explored the...     

Research off the couch: Re-visiting the transsexual conundrum

This paper outlines the findings of a qualitative study involving interviews with eight transsexual individuals who had volunteered to take part in a television (TV) documentary about transsexuality. The participants were interviewed before taking part in the documentary and after its screening on national TV. The author proposes that for either biological and/or psychological reasons, some transsexual individuals experience early on a profound and disturbing incongruence at the level of the bodily self. In turn, this experience of incongruity is not contingently mirrored by primary attachment figures and remains unmentalized, thus disrupting self-coherence. In an attempt to restore self-coherence, the individual searches for the ‘right’ body that is anticipated to relieve the felt incongruity. The way this modified body relieves the incongruity is through the certainty it imparts that the image in the ‘mirror’ will match the subjective experience of the body. In this study, the experience of being mirrored through the group process during filming and the audience's response to the TV series, which was very positive, appeared to be associated with an attenuation in the urgency with which planned body modifications were being discussed post-TV screenings.     

On receiving what has gone astray, on finding what has got lost

Disturbing emotions that act as bodily cryptograms waiting to be deciphered are currently understood as intra-psychic trauma. The author briefly discusses Fordham's concepts of deintegration and primitive identity, as well as early patterns of mother-infant attunement to describe how the empathic capacity of the analyst is dramatically challenged in helping patients to give birth to unbearable emotions that remain an undifferentiated entity. Referring to Ogden's understanding of the mechanism of projective identification, the author will explore how unconscious mental processes in the analyst and the patient can work at re-activating failures in the deintegrative process. Clinical material is presented to show how unconscious psychic events that affect the patient but cannot be known consciously can be born into mind by the analytic couple.     

Visual distortion of body size modulates pain perception

Pain is a complex subjective experience that is shaped by numerous contextual factors. For example, simply viewing the body reduces the reported intensity of acute physical pain. In this study, we investigated whether this visually induced analgesia is modulated by the visual size of the stimulated body part. We measured contact heat-pain thresholds while participants viewed either their own hand or a neutral object in three size conditions: reduced, actual size, or enlarged. Vision of the body was analgesic, increasing heat-pain thresholds by an average of 3.2 °C. We further found that visual enlargement of the viewed hand enhanced analgesia, whereas visual reduction of the hand decreased analgesia. These results demonstrate that pain perception depends on multisensory representations of the body and that visual distortions of body size modulate sensory components of pain.     

Transgenerational transmission of indigestible facts: from trauma,deadly ghosts and mental voids to meaning‐making interpretations

Abstract: In this paper¹ I will discuss clinical material and make some hypotheses on how to work with patients for whom trans‐generational transmission of trauma is an issue. Basing my hypothesis on two clinical cases, I will propose a way of dealing with undigested facts, the fabric of trauma, which generate deadly ghosts and mental voids that are transmitted from one generation to the next. I will propose a way of formulating interpretations for the unthinkable to become thinkable and find a representation in the mind of patients who suffer from transgenerationally transmitted trauma. Some thoughts will be given to the maternal and the paternal transmitters of trauma in relation to child development issues.     

Coparenting interactions observed by the prenatal lausanne trilogue play: An Italian replication study

The infant–parent interaction is the focus of interest on early interactive relational models in the triadic perspective. This approach considers the mother–father–child interaction as the matrix of early competences, which start to develop well before delivery. This theoretical approach has generated an observation paradigm, the Lausanne Trilogue Play (LTP; E. Fivaz‐Depeursinge & A. Corboz‐Warnery, 1999). The aim of the study was to investigate (a) the psychometric characteristics of coding of the prenatal LTP procedure and their comparison with the Lausanne validation studies and (b) the characteristics of triadic interactions during pregnancy. Ninety‐eight nonreferred, primiparous families were recruited at childbirth courses. In addition to validated questionnaires, observational data were collected at the seventh month of pregnancy in the prenatal LTP. The collected data show good reliability of the LTP coding and a consistent factorial structure in line with the Lausanne validation studies (C. Carneiro, A. Corboz‐Warnery, & E. Fivaz‐Depeursinge, 2006; N. Favez et al., 2006). The Structure of the Play and the Intuitive Parenting Behaviors Scales seem the most representative dimensions in the prenatal period. Coparental abilities during pregnancy represent an interactive matrix for the construction of early family relations and may be considered as protective factors in the child's development of early triadic interactive abilities.     

Grafting Modalities onto Substructural Implication Systems

We investigate the semantics of the logical systems obtained by introducing the modalities and into the family of substructural implication logics (including relevant, linear and intuitionistic implication). Then, in the spirit of the LDS (Labelled Deductive Systems) methodology, we "import" this semantics into the classical proof system KE. This leads to the formulation of a uniform labelled refutation system for the new logics which is a natural extension of a system for substructural implication developed by the first two authors in a previous paper.