Alterations of social attention in mental disorders: Phenomenology,scope, and future directions for research

Mental disorders often involve changes in the way subjects attend to other people. However, the nature of these modifications and how they unfold in different pathologies are not sufficiently clear. This article addresses these issues from the perspective of phenomenological psychopathology. The primary goal of the article is to suggest a new way of assessing and distinguishing the alterations of social attention in subjects with mental disorders. The first part of the article characterizes the essential properties of a capacity for social attention based on multidisciplinary evidence. This model is then used to examine anomalies in social attention in autism, schizophrenia, borderline personality disorder, and social anxiety disorder. The analysis of alterations in the way subjects with different types of pathologies attend to and with others is followed by a threefold typology, which clarifies the phenomenal nature of impairments of social attention in mental disorders.     

Intransitivity,Essential Comparativeness,and Objective Value

Building on Goldman 2008 and 2009, which argue that objective values would be strange in coming in degrees but in no determinate number of degrees, this paper argues that related properties having to do with degrees of value make a further case against objective values. The properties of giving rise to intransitive orderings and being essentially comparative are explained by Larry Temkin in Rethinking the Good. He shows that “better than” is intransitively ordered. Many subjective states are too. But similar arguments for the intransitive orderings of intrinsic objective properties fail. Furthermore, subjective properties and states can change without these changes being explained by changes in their objects. This is similar to the essentially comparative nature of goodness. Given the analogies to subjective states and lack of analogies to objective properties that the present article points out, it argues that we should infer, as Temkin does not, that values are subjective.