New strategies in the assessment of psychological factors affecting medical conditions

In this article, we examine research that may lead to a better assessment of psychological factors affecting medical conditions. We performed a review of the psychosomatic literature using both Medline and manual searches. We selected papers that were judged to be relevant to new strategies of assessment, with particular reference to the use of the Diagnostic Criteria for Psychosomatic Research. We assessed 8 areas concerned with the assessment of psychological factors in the setting of medical disease: hypochondriasis, disease phobia, persistent somatization, conversion symptoms, illness denial, demoralization, irritable mood, and Type A behavior. A new subclassification of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (5th ed. [DSM-V]; not yet published) category of psychological factors affecting physical conditions appears to be feasible and may provide the clinician with better tools for identifying psychological distress.     

Politics and naturalism in the 20th century psychology of Alfred Binet

Alfred Binet is internationally recognized as the "father" of the first intelligence test as well as the most faithful French representative of laboratory experimentalism. A historical analysis of his work is therefore necessary to get to a thorough comprehension of 20th century psychology. The present article, starting from Binet's intellectual path and from the suggestions of the previous historical literature, aims at providing fresh insights into Binet's work by trying to capture the intersections between Binet, his naturalistic culture and the political context in which he worked in the early 20th century, when he actively tried to apply experimental psychology to the pedagogical area. In fact, it is possible to underline, with reference to those years, an evident turn towards applications in Binet's psychological production. The article reconstructs the political and institutional background of Binet's research and shows how the naturalism and experimentalism he promoted were complementary to the solidarist conceptions that were particularly prevalent among those who supported his work during the Third Republic.     

Singularity and consciousness: A neuropsychological contribution

In common sense experience based on introspection, consciousness is singular. There is only one ‘me’ and that is the one that is conscious. This means that ‘singularity’ is a defining aspect of ‘consciousness’. However, the three main theories of consciousness, Integrated Information, Global Workspace and Recurrent Processing theory, are generally not very clear on this issue. These theories have traditionally relied heavily on neuropsychological observations and have interpreted various disorders, such as anosognosia, neglect and split-brain as impairments in conscious awareness without any reference to ‘the singularity’. In this review, we will re-examine the theoretical implications of these impairments in conscious awareness and propose a new way how to conceptualize consciousness of singularity. We will argue that the subjective feeling of singularity can coexist with several disunified conscious experiences. Singularity awareness may only come into existence due to environmental response constraints. That is, perceptual, language, memory, attentional and motor processes may largely proceed unintegrated in parallel, whereas a sense of unity only arises when organisms need to respond coherently constrained by the affordances of the environment. Next, we examine from this perspective psychiatric disorders and psycho-active drugs. Finally, we present a first attempt to test this hypothesis with a resting state imaging experiment in a split-brain patient. The results suggest that there is substantial coherence of activation across the two hemispheres. These data show that a complete lesioning of the corpus callosum does not, in general, alter the resting state networks of the brain. Thus, we propose that we have separate systems in the brain that generate distributed conscious. The sense of singularity, the experience of a ‘Me-ness’, emerges in the interaction between the world and response-planning systems, and this leads to coherent activation in the different functional networks across the cortex.     

Assertability Conditions and the Investigations

Philosophia - Later Wittgenstein is famous for having related meaning and use. Nonetheless, thanks to Dummett and Kripke, and the debates they provoked, a conventional wisdom is nowadays available:...