Developmental aspects of consciousness: how much theory of mind do you need to be consciously aware?

When do children become consciously aware of events in the world? Five possible strategies are considered for their usefulness in determining the age in question. Three of these strategies ask when children show signs of engaging in activities for which conscious awareness seems necessary in adults (verbal communication, executive control, explicit memory), and two of the strategies consider when children have the ability to have the minimal form of higher-order thought necessary for access consciousness and phenomenal consciousness, respectively. The tentative answer to the guiding question is that children become consciously aware between 12 and 15 months (+/-3 months).     

The "minimal self" in psychopathology: re-examining the self-disorders in the schizophrenia spectrum

The notion of minimal, basic, pre-reflective or core self is currently debated in the philosophy of mind, cognitive sciences and developmental psychology. However, it is not clear which experiential features such a self is believed to possess. Studying the schizophrenic experience may help exploring the following aspects of the minimal self: the notion of perspective and first person perspective, the 'mineness' of the phenomenal field, the questions of transparency, embodiment of point of view, and the issues of agency and ownership, considered as different and less fundamental than the feeling of mineness. Two clinical vignettes of patients with the diagnosis of schizophrenia will be presented: the first one, illustrating early illness stages, and the second case, of chronic schizophrenia, symptomatically marked by persistent hallucinations. Through their analysis, we will discuss the experiential dimensions of minimal self.     

Affect development and its assessment in infancy

Affects are defined as both biobehavioral states and signals of social and intrapsychic communication. Discrete (differentiated) affects can reliably be identified, and their intensities scored, from at least three months of age on. Until recently, no comprehensive quantitative methods have been available for the assessment of discrete affects in clinical settings. Two such methods are reviewed. The clinical application of the Michigan Infant Affect Scales (MIAS) is illustrated. Affects are thought to play a central role in organizing, regulating, and motivating the infant's behaviors and social object relationships. A concept of “affective system” is proposed that integrates the modalities of affect expression and the mechanisms of affect regulation. Within this conceptualization, attachment behaviors are seen as part of the expression and/or regulation of affect states during social interactions.     

Activating Semantic Knowledge During Spoken Words and Environmental Sounds: Evidence From the Visual World Paradigm

Two visual world experiments investigated the activation of semantically related concepts during the processing of environmental sounds and spoken words. Participants heard environmental sounds such as barking or spoken words such as “puppy” while viewing visual arrays with objects such as a bone (semantically related competitor) and candle (unrelated distractor). In Experiment 1, a puppy (target) was also included in the visual array; in Experiment 2, it was not. During both types of auditory stimuli, competitors were fixated significantly more than distractors, supporting the coactivation of semantically related concepts in both cases; comparisons of the two types of auditory stimuli also revealed significantly larger effects with environmental sounds than spoken words. We discuss implications of these results for theories of semantic knowledge.     

Mental health consultation in infant day care: A new frontier of prevention

This paper deals with the mental health aspects of infant day care emphasizing that mental health input into the design, implementation and ongoing supervision/evaluation of the majority of day care programs is minimal at the present time. The author proposes the following three criteria by which the adequacy of mental health input in a day care program could be judged: 1) ongoing mental health consultation to the caregiver staff on a weekly basis and by the same clinician(s), 2) assignment of primary caregivers to the infants, 3) periodic naturalistic observations of the infants to be recorded and discussed by the caregivers. The author postulates that consultation to the caregiver staff of infant day care programs represents the opportunity to establish a new frontier of prevention. Therefore, the mental health profession should consider it a goal that every infant day care setting would have a mental health clinician as a consultant. The methods, preventive functions and manpower aspects of such consultation work is discussed.