Psychologists’ Evaluation of Bariatric Surgery Candidates Influenced by Patients’ Attachment Representations and Symptoms of Depression and Anxiety

This study examines whether patients self-reported attachment representations and levels of depression and anxiety influenced psychologists’ evaluations of morbidly obese patients applying for bariatric surgery. A sample of 250 patients (mean age 44, 84 % female) who were referred for bariatric surgery completed questionnaires to measure adult attachment and levels of depression and anxiety. Psychologists rated patients’ suitability for bariatric surgery using the Cleveland Clinic Behavioural Rating System (CCBRS), unaware of the results of the completed questionnaires. Attachment anxiety (OR = 2.50, p = .01) and attachment avoidance (OR = 3.13, p = .001) were found to be associated with less positive evaluations on the CCBRS by the psychologists, and symptoms of depression and anxiety mediated this association. This study strongly supports the notion that patients’ attachment representations influence a psychologist’s evaluation in an indirect way by influencing the symptoms of depression and anxiety patients report during an assessment interview. The clinical implications of these findings are discussed.     

The messianic temporality of theatre in I. L. Peretz’s At Night in the Old Marketplace

Theatre, as an art form that unfolds through time and moulds temporal experience, engages with its surrounding culture’s temporal imagination, the ways in which society conceives time, its movement, structures, and meaning. I. L. Peretz’s enigmatic and avant-garde Yiddish drama, At Night in the Old Marketplace, utilizes this potential of the theatre to tackle the question of messianic time and the ways in which it can be realized on the stage. By evoking Jewish traditions regarding the Messiah, religious nocturnal rituals, and the dynamics of Carnival, Peretz reconfigures messianic time as a radical, recurring yet fleeting, temporal experience. Theatrical temporality has affinities with messianic time because both are transitory and charged, condensed and ephemeral, and disjointed from the experience of time in everyday life. Rather than imagining messianic time as an eternal future to be awaited, Peretz’s play invites us to ponder in the theatre about the possibility of a messianically charged, albeit always fleeting, present.     

The role of text representation in students' ability to identify fallacious arguments

Informal reasoning fallacies are arguments that, though they may seem persuasive, are not valid. The psychological aspect of informal reasoning fallacies, specifically the identification of factors that influence students' ability to identify fallacies, has not been the subject of empirical study. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that subjects' ability to identify fallacious arguments is associated with the representation of the argumentative text in the cognitive system. In the first experiment, we tested the hypothesis through a recall task. In the second experiment, we tested the hypothesis through a classification task. The results of the experiments confirm the research hypothesis and point to the role of argumentative structures in argumentation tasks.     

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.