Fear of breakdown and the unlived life

Winnicott's Fear of breakdown is an unfinished work that requires that the reader be not only a reader, but also a writer of this work which often gestures toward meaning as opposed to presenting fully developed ideas. The author's understanding of the often confusing, sometimes opaque, argument of Winnicott's paper is as follows. In infancy there occurs a breakdown in the mother–infant tie that forces the infant to take on, by himself, emotional events that he is unable to manage. He short‐circuits his experience of primitive agony by generating defense organizations that are psychotic in nature, i.e. they substitute self‐created inner reality for external reality, thus foreclosing his actually experiencing critical life events. By not experiencing the breakdown of the mother–infant tie when it occurred in infancy, the individual creates a psychological state in which he lives in fear of a breakdown that has already happened, but which he did not experience. The author extends Winnicott's thinking by suggesting that the driving force of the patient's need to find the source of his fear is his feeling that parts of himself are missing and that he must find them if he is to become whole. What remains of his life feels to him like a life that is mostly an unlived life.     

‘I dreamt about it,just like this,exactly the way it is’: Haunting emotional geographies in Buenos Aires

This article deepens feminist scholarship on emotional geographies of fear via an engagement with haunting and memorialization in Buenos Aires, Argentina, during and after the 1976–1983 military dictatorship. I take the recuperated Space for Memory Virrey Cevallos as a case study of emotional geographies of fear to assess how fear becomes temporally and spatially fixed in the landscape. I argue that recuperation and memorialization disrupt the haunting of this emotional geography of fear, and that attention to everyday experiences of fear nuances broader discourses on justice. I develop my analysis with testimonies from neighbors of Virrey Cevallos to follow the endurance of fear leading up to the site's recuperation as a national Space for Memory. Tracing a timeline of this geography from the dictatorship to the present shows the haunting effects of fear, and asks how memorialization, as a material and temporal intervention in emotional geographies of fear, addresses the (dis)continuities of this geography. This research shows that everyday emotional geographies of fear are intertwined with the (dis)continuities of time. Further, this case study suggests that disrupting haunting requires an intervention that bridges the legacies of the past with reparative justice that attends to place.     

个人主义文化价值观对疫情控制效果的影响及其计算心理机制

COVID-19疫情是一场重大的全球健康危机, 一些国家在控制COVID-19感染和死亡率上存在明显困难。我们提出, 个人主义的文化价值观不利于对疫情的控制。跨文化分析结果显示, 个人主义文化价值观正向预测COVID-19死亡数、每百万死亡数和死亡率, 独立自我建构负向预测疫情前期控制速度。演化博弈模型和跨文化实验进一步提示, 个人主义文化通过增强个体在疫情背景下的死亡恐惧, 增加个体违反疫情管控的流动性倾向, 从而降低了整体疫情控制的效率。我们的结果支持自然-行为-文化协同进化的理论模型, 提示文化对COVID-19病毒传播管控和死亡可能性的影响, 为各国应对全球公共卫生危机提供了重要科学参考。     

Using Retrieval Cues to Attenuate Return of Fear in Individuals With Public Speaking Anxiety

Even after successful exposure, relapse is not uncommon. Based on the retrieval model of fear extinction (e.g., Vervliet, Craske, & Hermans, 2013), return of fear can occur after exposure due to an elapse of time (spontaneous recovery) or change in context (contextual renewal). The use of external salient stimuli presented throughout extinction (i.e., retrieval cues [RCs]) has been suggested as a potential solution to this problem (Bouton, 2002). The current study examined whether RCs attenuated return of fear in individuals with public speaking anxiety. Sixty-five participants completed a brief exposure while presented with two RC stimuli aimed at a variety of senses (visual, tactile, olfactory, and auditory). Later, half the participants were tested for return of fear in a context different from the exposure context, and the other half in the same context. Half of each context group were presented with the same cues as in exposure, while the other half were not. Return of fear due to an elapse of time, change in context, and effects of RCs were evaluated on subjective, behavioral, and physiological measures of anxiety. Although contextual renewal was not observed, results supported effects of RCs in reducing spontaneous recovery on behavioral and physiological measures of anxiety. There was also evidence that participants who were reminded of feeling anxious during exposure by the RCs benefited more from using them at follow-up, whereas those who perceived the cues as comforting (safety signals) benefited less. Clinical implications of the findings are discussed.     

A Review of Preclinical Studies to Understand Fear During Adolescence

The most rapid physical and psychological growth occurs during adolescence, a period of transition from childhood to adulthood when the incidence of anxiety disorder peaks in humans. Human and animal studies suggest that dramatic changes in prefrontal cortical areas during adolescence are responsible for such prevalence of anxiety. Only recently, however, has the relationship between prefrontal immaturity and differential fear processing across adolescence been directly and systematically examined. Such progress is largely due to the culmination of rodent studies that delineated the fear learning, expression, and inhibition neural circuitry, and preclinical studies that provided avenues for translation. This article summarises those initial findings on the circuitry of fear inhibition, and describes in detail the new findings on adolescent fear inhibition that highlight the prefrontal cortex as a key, unrefined brain region that may govern adolescent vulnerability to anxiety disorders. Specifically, adolescent rodents have been demonstrated to be impaired in inhibiting learned fear responses following fear extinction due to prefrontal immaturity, a discovery that was shortly after replicated in adolescent humans (at least the behavioural component). Our desire for this article is to acquaint both research and clinical psychologists with the neural circuitry of fear learning and extinction, turn the attention to developmental work, and facilitate translation of preclinical rodent findings in humans.     

Relationships Between Physical Symptoms,Emotional Distress,and Pain Appraisal in Fibromyalgia: The Moderator Effect of Alexithymia

Alexithymia is a personality construct that is frequently identified in fibromyalgia (FM). Previous studies have explored the relationship between alexithymia and emotional distress in this disease. Yet, the additional link with factors of pain appraisal is unknown. This study examined the moderating effect of alexithymia in the relationship between emotional distress and pain appraisal in 97 FM women. A control group of 100 healthy women also participated in the study. All participants completed several self-reports about pain experience, sleep quality, impairment, emotional distress, pain appraisal, and alexithymia. FM women showed significantly more difficulty in identifying and describing feelings, but less externally oriented thinking than healthy women. In the clinical group, difficulty in identifying feelings and difficulty in describing feelings significantly correlated with lower sleep quality, higher anxiety and depression, and increased pain catastrophizing and fear of pain. Difficulty in describing feelings significantly correlated with higher pain experience and vigilance to pain. Externally oriented thinking was not correlated with any of the clinical variables. Difficulty in identifying feelings moderated the relationship between anxiety and pain catastrophizing, and difficulty in describing feelings moderated the relationship between anxiety and fear of pain. Implications of the findings for the optimization of care of FM patients are discussed.     

DISORGANIZATION,FEAR AND ATTACHMENT: WORKING TOWARDS CLARIFICATION

In 1990, M. Main and J. Solomon introduced the procedures for coding a new “disorganized” infant attachment classification for the Ainsworth Strange Situation procedure (M.D.S. Ainsworth, M. Blehar, E. Waters, & S. Wall, 1978). This classification has received a high degree of interest, both from researchers and from child welfare and clinical practitioners. Disorganized attachment has primarily been understood through the lens of E. Hesse and M. Main's concept of “fright without solution,” taken to mean that an infant experiences a conflict between a desire to approach and flee from a frightening parent when confronted by the Strange Situation. Yet, looking back, it can be observed that the way Hesse and Main's texts were formulated and read has generated confusion; there have been repeated calls in recent years for renewed theory and clarification about the relationship between disorganization and fear. Responding to these calls, this article revisits the texts that introduced the idea of fright without solution, clarifying their claims through articulating more precisely the different meanings of the term fear. This clarified account will then be applied to consideration of pathways to infant disorganized behaviors.     

Enhanced recall of disgusting relative to frightening photographs is not due to organisation

Previous research has shown that disgusting photographs are better remembered than frightening photographs, even when the two image types have equivalent valence and arousal. However, this work did not control for potential differences in organisation between the disgusting and frightening stimuli that could account for enhanced memory for disgusting photographs. The current research therefore tested whether differences in recall between disgusting and frightening photographs persist when differences in organisation are eliminated. Using a set of disgusting and frightening photographs matched for interrelatedness, Study 1 found that participants recalled more disgusting photographs than frightening photographs. This effect was mediated by increased attention to the disgusting photographs. Study 2 used Latent Semantic Analysis to further interrogate the relatedness of the photographs, providing converging evidence that organisation does not account for enhanced recall of disgusting photographs. Taken together, these results suggest that dimensional models of emotion cannot fully account for emotion’s effects on episodic memory. Instead, disgust appears to enhance recall via a distinctive, attention-mediated mechanism.     

Obstacles to development – reflections on Eugene O'Neill's play “A Moon for the Misbegotten.” Special reference to Banter,Fear and Suspicion

Obstacles for development are discussed with Eugene O'Neills play “A moon for the misbegotten as starting point” and with special reference to banter, fear and suspicion The dead mother is used to understand the characters as well as the oidipal situation and the fear of the stranger.     

Motivated Closed‐Mindedness Mediates the Effect of Threat on Political Conservatism

In this article we synthesize theory and research from several areas of psychology and political science to propose and test a causal model of the effects of threat on political attitudes. Based in part on prior research showing that fear, threat, and anxiety decrease cognitive capacity and motivation, we hypothesize that under high (vs. low) threat, people will seek to curtail open‐ended information searches and exhibit motivated closed‐mindedness (one aspect of the need for cognitive closure). The subjective desire for certainty, control, and closure, in turn, is expected to increase the individual's affinity for political conservatism, insofar as resistance to change and adherence to authority figures and conventional forms of morality are assumed to satisfy these epistemic motives more successfully than their ideological opposites. Consistent with this account, we find in Studies 1a and 1b that putting people into a highly threatened mindset leads them to exhibit an increase in motivated closed‐mindedness and to perceive the world as more dangerous. Furthermore, in Study 2 we demonstrate that a subtle threat manipulation increases self‐reported conservatism (or decreases self‐reported liberalism), and this effect is mediated by closed‐mindedness. In Study 3, we manipulated closed‐mindedness directly and found that high (vs. low) cognitive load results in a greater affinity for the Republican (vs. Democratic) party. Finally, in Study 4 we conducted an experiment involving political elites in Iceland and found that three different types of threat (to the self, group, and system) all led center‐right politicians to score higher on closed‐mindedness and issue‐based political conservatism. Implications for society and for the theory of ideology as motivated social cognition are discussed.