Executive disorders and perceived socio‐emotional changes after traumatic brain injury

Although socio‐emotional changes are very frequently encountered after traumatic brain injury (TBI), the psychological mechanisms underlying these disorders are still poorly understood. This study aimed to explore the relationships between dysexecutive syndrome (assessed with the Behavioural Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome [BADS]) and socio‐emotional changes assessed by the Iowa scales of personality change (ISPC) in patients with TBI. The BADS was thus administered to 25 patients with TBI and to 25 healthy controls. Simultaneously, a close relative of each patient was given the ISPC in order to assess socio‐emotional changes. Results indicated that patients displayed significantly lower executive performances than controls and experimented significant socio‐emotional changes. The Modified Six Elements Test was the only subtask of the BADS to be significantly related to behavioural changes, and more specifically to externalizing disorders. It is concluded that executive functions, and especially multitasking, encompass processes whereby one can consciously control one's emotional reactions and behaviours.     

Music and melancholy: Marsilio Ficino's archetypal music therapy

Melancholy, to Ficino, is a state in which the mind, the realm of deep, abstract thinking, is cut off from the supply of the spirit. His concept of spirit corresponds to a kind of universal life-energy (libido, in Jungian terms). Individually, as the spirit of man, it appears as projected into the blood of the human body, collectively, as spirit of the world, into the spheres of the planets.
The spirit of man corresponds to the spirit of the world and can receive from it a great deal through the rays of the planets. To attract the 'spiritual' influence of a particular planet you may use animals, plants, food, scents, talismans. But music is what is recommended most strongly.
Ficino's intention is to temper the melancholic influence of Saturn. Consequently, his astrological songs are addressed to the compensating benign planets, the Sun, Jupiter and Venus. In modern terms it is an attempt, consciously, by active imagination, to re-establish the emotional relatedness with the archetypal realms of the planets from which Saturn has cut us off.
Ficino's ideas are related to Jung's rehabilitation of the feeling-function