Self-Regulatory Dysfunctions in Personality Disorders: The Role of Poor Self-Monitoring and Mindreading

To understand how persons self-regulate, we need, as Cervone, Shadel, Smith, and Fiori (2006 ) assert, to refer to personality science, with which it is possible to identify the multifarious psychological elements and processes helping or hindering action programming, overcoming difficulties, and error correction. Personality disorder research and personality science itself demonstrate that dysfunctions in two skills—self-monitoring and mindreading—worsen self-regulation and lead individuals to fail chronically to achieve goals in the social domain. Here we describe how poor self-reflection and biased mindreading impair self-regulation in personality disorders and other clinical conditions and make some suggestions about how to tackle them in psychotherapy.     

Multisensory integration affects visuo-spatial working memory

In the present study, we investigate how spatial attention, driven by unisensory and multisensory cues, can bias the access of information into visuo-spatial working memory (VSWM). In a series of four experiments, we compared the effectiveness of spatially-nonpredictive visual, auditory, or audiovisual cues in capturing participants' spatial attention towards a location where to-be-remembered visual stimuli were or were not presented (cued/uncued trials, respectively). The results suggest that the effect of peripheral visual cues in biasing the access of information into VSWM depend on the size of the attentional focus, while auditory cues did not have direct effects in biasing VSWM. Finally, spatially congruent multisensory cues showed an enlarged attentional effect in VSWM as compared to unimodal visual cues, as a likely consequence of multisensory integration. This latter result sheds new light on the interplay between spatial attention and VSWM, pointing to the special role exerted by multisensory (audiovisual) cues.     

Sequential congruency effects: disentangling priming and conflict adaptation

Responding to the color of a word is slower and less accurate if the word refers to a different color (incongruent condition) than if it refers to the same color (congruent condition). This phenomenon, known as the Stroop effect, is modulated by sequential effects: it is bigger when the current trial is preceded by a congruent condition than by an incongruent one in the previous trial. Whether this phenomenon is due to priming mechanisms or to cognitive control is still debated. To disentangle the contribution of priming with respect to conflict adaptation mechanisms in determining sequential effects, two experiments were designed here with a four-alternative forced choice (4-AFC) Stroop task: in the first one only trials with complete alternations of features were used, while in the second experiment all possible types of repetitions were presented. Both response times (RTs) and errors were evaluated. Conflict adaptation effects on RTs were limited to congruent trials and were exclusively due to priming: they disappeared in the priming-free experiment and, in the second experiment, they occurred in sequences with feature repetitions but not in complete alternation sequences. Error results, instead, support the presence of conflict adaptation effects in incongruent trials. In priming-free sequences (Experiment 1 and complete alternation sequences of Experiment 2) with incongruent previous trials there was no error Stroop effect, while this effect was significant with congruent previous trials. These results indicate that cognitive control may modulate performance above and beyond priming effects.     

A global workspace model for phenomenal and access consciousness

Both the global workspace theory and Block’s distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness, are central in the current debates about consciousness and the neural correlates of consciousness. In this article, a unifying global workspace model for phenomenal and access consciousness is proposed. In the model, recurrent neural interactions take place in distinct yet interacting access and phenomenal brain loops. The effectiveness of feedback signaling onto sensory cortical maps is emphasized for the neural correlates of phenomenal consciousness. Two forms of top-down attention, attention for perception and attention for access, play differential roles for phenomenal and access consciousness. The model is implemented in a neural network form, with the simulation of single and multiple visual object processing, and of the attentional blink.     

Cultural modulations of space–time compatibility effects

The representation of elapsing time may require spatial attention. In certain circumstances, this spatial representation develops from left to right. This is suggested by a performance advantage in responding short with the left hand and long with the right hand (spatial–temporal association between response codes [STEARC]). The present study tests whether one possible determinant of the directionality of the STEARC effect is cultural. In particular, we investigated whether reading/writing habits can affect STEARC direction by administering a visual time judgment task to Italian participants, who were exposed to a left-to-right reading/writing system, and Israeli participants, who mainly used a right-to-left system. The Italian participants showed a left-to-right STEARC effect, while this effect was not present in the Israeli group. The study demonstrates that cultural habits can influence the way in which spatial attention supports the representation of time, similar to the pattern found in other nonspatial domains such as numbers.     

Toward a model of self pathology underlying personality disorders: narratives, metacognition, interpersonal cycles and decision-making processes

If we want to explain the links between the various and heterogeneous elements--symptoms, dysfunctional forms of behavior and poor social functioning--making up personality disorders, we need model a self pathology that portrays dysfunctions, the links among them, and how their interactions maintain disorders over time. In our view, the most likely elements of self pathology are: a. problematic contents (thoughts and emotions)--experienced subjectively as states of mind and organized in the form of narratives; b. shortfalls in the ability, termed meta-cognition, to reflect on mental states, both of oneself and of others; c. pathogenic interpersonal schemas; and d. maladaptive decision-making processes. These elements get altered in the various personality disorders and interact to form typical pathological organizations. This article seeks to describe a model of self pathology in personality disorders and discuss its current scientific status based on a literature review that spans several disciplines. The model is illustrated with an example of how the pathogenic elements can interact to form personality disorder. Lastly, the limitations and advantages of the model are discussed.     

Which reality in the psychoanalytic session?

The author discusses how the analyst's theory influences what happens in the psychoanalytic session, and, in particular, how it determines which of several possible realities become the focus of attention. An overview of Bionian thought and how it informs the author's way of working is provided. In elaborating his use of the narrative level in the session and other key concepts, the author presents three brief clinical vignettes.     

Marcella: the transition from explosive sensoriality to the ability to think

The author discusses an analytic case in which it was necessary to first address the patient's need for containment of her protoemotions--her sensoriality--before the analysis could proceed along more standard lines, with interpretation of the transference, work on displacement and aspects of her childhood history, and so forth. Prior to treatment, the patient had resorted to a sort of affective autism in order not to experience dangerously overwhelming emotions, and her emotional lethargy in sessions at first engendered similar feelings in the analyst, making progress impossible until a container was established for her projective identifications.     

Coherence and recurrency: maintenance,control and integration in working memory

Working memory (WM), including a ‘central executive’, is used to guide behavior by internal goals or intentions. We suggest that WM is best described as a set of three interdependent functions which are implemented in the prefrontal cortex (PFC). These functions are maintenance, control of attention and integration. A model for the maintenance function is presented, and we will argue that this model can be extended to incorporate the other functions as well. Maintenance is the capacity to briefly maintain information in the absence of corresponding input, and even in the face of distracting information. We will argue that maintenance is based on recurrent loops between PFC and posterior parts of the brain, and probably within PFC as well. In these loops information can be held temporarily in an active form. We show that a model based on these structural ideas is capable of maintaining a limited number of neural patterns. Not the size, but the coherence of patterns (i.e., a chunking principle based on synchronous firing of interconnected cell assemblies) determines the maintenance capacity. A mechanism that optimizes coherent pattern segregation, also poses a limit to the number of assemblies (about four) that can concurrently reverberate. Top-down attentional control (in perception, action and memory retrieval) can be modelled by the modulation and re-entry of top-down information to posterior parts of the brain. Hierarchically organized modules in PFC create the possibility for information integration. We argue that large-scale multimodal integration of information creates an ‘episodic buffer’, and may even suffice for implementing a central executive.