Unconscious

In this paper we examine the nature of automatic cognitive processing in anxiety disorders and Major Depressive Disorder (MDD). Rather than viewing automaticity as a unitary construct, we follow a social cognition perspective that argues for four theoretically independent features of automaticity: unconscious (processing of emotional stimuli occurs outside awareness), efficient (processing emotional meaning uses minimal attentional resources), unintentional (no goal is needed to engage in processing emotional meaning), and uncontrollable (limited ability to avoid, alter or terminate processing emotional stimuli). Our review of the literature suggests that most anxiety disorders are characterized by uncontrollable, and likely also unconscious and unintentional, biased processing of threat-relevant information. In contrast, MDD is most clearly typified by uncontrollable, but not unconscious or unintentional, processing of negative information. For the anxiety disorders and for MDD, there is no sufficient evidence to draw firm conclusions about efficiency of processing, though early indications are that neither anxiety disorders nor MDD are characterized by this feature. Clinical and theoretical implications of these findings are discussed and directions for future research are offered. In particular, it is clear that paradigms that more directly delineate the different features of automaticity are required to gain a more comprehensive and systematic understanding of the importance of automatic processing in emotion dysregulation.

. This experiment provides brain event-related potential ERP evidence for differential processing of visually Ž . Ž . presented pleasant and unpleasant affectively valent words mood adjectives for both supraliminal 40 ms and Ž . subliminal unmasked, 1 ms stimulus durations. Unpleasant words elicited a more positive amplitude than pleasant Ž . words in both durations. ERP components P1, N1, P2, P3, and a late positive potential; LP were measured at six Ž . electrode sites F3, F4, P3, P4, CzPz, Oz . ERPs to subliminal stimuli demonstrated differences between pleasant and unpleasant words in the left hemisphere across all measured components. Supraliminal processing showed similar Ž . differences in the left hemisphere for early components P1 and N1 , but bilateral differences for late components Ž . P3 and LP . Activity in the P2 time window was associated with the divergence between supraliminal and subliminal affective responses. Implications for the study of affect and consciousness are discussed. ᮊ

1. Assistant professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin. Her research interests include parental involvement in adolescents' education and school transitions, the relationships between adolescents' sexual behavior and their school experiences and ...

Classic and contemporary research on person perception has demonstrated the paramount importance of
interpersonal warmth. Recent research on embodied cognition has shown that feelings of social warmth or coldness can be induced by experiences of physical warmth or coldness, and vice versa. Here we show that people tend to self-regulate their feelings of social warmth through applications of physical warmth,
apparently without explicit awareness of doing so. In Study 1, higher scores on a measure of chronic loneliness (social coldness) were associated with an increased tendency to take warm baths or showers.In Study 2, a physical coldness manipulation significantly increased feelings of loneliness. In Study 3, needs for social affiliation and for emotion regulation, triggered by recall of a past rejection experience, were subsequently eliminated by an interpolated physical warmth experience. Study 4 provided evidence that people are not explicitly aware of the relationship between physical and social warmth (coldness),as they do not consider a target person who often bathes to be any lonelier than one who does not, with all else being equal. Together, these findings suggest that physical and social warmth are to some extent substitutable in daily life and that this substitution reflects an unconscious self-regulatory mechanism.

Psychoanalysis, the science of unconscious processes, has recently undergone a significant transformation. Self psychology, derived from the work of Heinz Kohut, represents perhaps the most important revision of Freud's theory as it has shifted its basic core concepts from an intrapsychic to a relational unconscious and from a cognitive ego to an emotion-processing self. As a result of a common interest in the essential, rapid, bodily based, affective processes that lie beneath conscious awareness, a productive dialogue is now occurring between psychoanalysis and neuroscience. Here I apply this interdisciplinary perspective to a deeper understanding of the nonconscious brain/mind/body mechanisms that lie at the core of self psychology. I offer a neuropsychoanalytic conception of the development and structuralization of the self, focusing on the experience-dependent maturation of the emotion-processing right brain in infancy. I then articulate an interdisciplinary model of attachment trauma and pathological dissociation, an early forming defense against overwhelming affect that is a cardinal feature of self-psychopathologies. I end with some thoughts on the mechanism of the psychotherapeutic change process and suggest that self psychology is, in essence, a psychology of the unique functions of the right brain and that a rapprochement between psychoanalysis and neuroscience is now at hand.

Objective: To provide evidence that a P300 component can be elicited by subliminal stimuli in an oddball paradigm. Methods: The words LEFT and RIGHT were presented in a frequent-rare ratio (80±20%), counterbalanced between subjects. Stimuli were presented at the objective detection threshold (d H 0, via unmasked 1 ms presentations), a stringent measure for detecting any conscious perception.

Using a lexical decision task, the authors investigated whether brain asymmetries in the detection of emotionally negative semantic associations arise only at a perceptually discriminative stage at which lexical analysis is accurate or can already be found at crude and incomplete levels of perceptual representation at which word-nonword discrimination is based solely on guessing. Emotionally negative and neutral items were presented near perceptual threshold in the left and right visual hemifields. Word-nonword discrimination performance as well as the bias to classify a stimulus as a ''word'' (whether or not it actually is a word) were assessed for a normal, horizontal stimulus presentation format (Experiment 1) and for an unusual, vertical presentation format (Experiment 2). Results show that while the two hemispheres are equally able to detect affective semantic associations at a prelexical processing stage (both experiments), the right hemisphere is superior at a postlexical, perceptually discriminative stage (Experiment 2). Moreover, the findings suggest that only an unusual, nonoverlearned stimulus presentation format allows adequate assessment of the right hemisphere's lexical-semantic skills. © 2002 Elsevier Science (USA)

This article proposes a new model to interpret seemingly conflicting evidence concerning the correlation of consciousness and neural processes. Based on an analysis of research of blindsight and subliminal perception, the reorganization of elementary functions and consciousness framework suggests that mental representations consist of functions at several different levels of analysis, including truly localized perceptual elementary functions and perceptual algorithmic modules, which are interconnections of the elementary functions. We suggest that conscious content relates to the 'top level' of analysis in a 'situational algorithmic strategy' that reflects the general state of an individual. We argue that conscious experience is intrinsically related to representations that are available to guide behaviour. From this perspective, we find that blindsight and subliminal perception can be explained partly by too coarse-grained methodology, and partly by top-down enhanci...

The psychoanalytic movement is experiencing a serious crisis: its scientific consensus, social standing, and impact on practice in mental health have all been steadily declining over the last decades. This unfortunate process has been variously explained in terms of prevailing hedonistic social values, the political influence of drug companies, and cuts in health-related expenditures. Following a suggestion by Garza Guerrero, we rather believe that the sources of the contemporary crisis in psychoanalysis are to be searched for within its own development and current social and cultural life. Specifically, we think psychoanalysis has failed to bring the revolutionary contribution of interpersonal and intersubjective paradigms to its fuller consequences. Here, we review five core dimensions in which such failure is particularly apparent: (1) an unwitting reliance on the medical model of mental illness; (2) an ontological, concrete understanding of unconscious processes; (3) a manifest failure to fully appreciate the role of extratransference relationships in the patient’s life; (4) a naive and idealized view of the psychoanalyst’s person and role; and (5) a marginal awareness of the impact of group-level unconscious phenomena on the social life of psychoanalytic institutions.

The paper compares psychoanalysis and non-cooperative Game Theory and asks if the concepts used in Game Theory are compatible with and add to the knowledge about human thinking and human actions provided by psychoanalysis. We propose a common and novel ground in which this interdisciplinary comparison can be articulated: both Game Theory and the unconscious posit a Law. Our main result is that the law of satisfaction describing the Freudian unconscious and the law of strategic interaction implied by Game Theory are not simply incompatible but in frontal opposition to each other; they create a crossroad at which the imputable individual has the possibility to choose either one law or the other.

In a time characterized by wars, students and employees being shot at their desks, and corporate executives raiding pension funds, aggression has taken on considerable prominence in our society. Aggressive people capture our interest because they are the ones who desire to harm others. Considerable progress has been made in recent years in understanding the aggressive personality. Psychology now has a much better idea of the defensive cognitive processes that aggressive people use to create a false sense of rationality for their aggressive acts. This knowledge of defensive processes was used to design a new measurement system to identify aggressive individuals. The new measurement system is based on a ‘‘cover’’ task in the form of an inductive reasoning problem. The use of reasoning to cover the measurement of aggression is made possible because aggressive people use the illusion of rational analyses to create defenses for their harming of others. The measurement system builds on this process by constructing answers to inductive reasoning problems that are grounded in the same defensive, self-illusionary thinking that aggressive people use to rationalize harming others. Aggressive people tend to be drawn to these answers (the answers in the previous sentence). This is because people who habitually engage in creating falsely rational defenses find reasoning based on the same types of protective thinking to be logically compelling.

In spite of extensive research on theory of mind, lay theories about the unconscious have scarcely been investigated. Three questionnaire studies totaling 689 participants, examined to what extent they thought that a range of psychological processes could be unconscious. It was found that people are less willing to countenance unconscious processes in themselves than in others, regardless of the time period considered --present, past or future. This is especially true when specific experience-like situations are envisioned, as opposed to considering the question in abstract or generic terms. In addition, the notion of unconscious psychological processes is resisted for certain domains in particular: intending, sensing, believing, and thinking. We interpret this pattern by positing the existence of two conceptions about the unconscious that are differentially applied according to circumstances: one originating in prevalent social representations about the unconscious, the other based on self-model of the person as an intentional actor.

It has long been known that electroencephalogram (EEG) signals generate chaotic strange attractors and the shape of these attractors correlate with depth of anesthesia. We applied chaos analysis to frontal cortical and hippocampal micro-EEG signals from implanted microelectrodes (layer 4 and CA1, respectively). Rats were taken to and from loss of righting reflex (LORR) with isoflurane and behavioral measures were compared to attractor shape. Resting EEG signals at LORR differed markedly from awake signals, more similar to slow wave sleep signals, and easily discerned in raw recordings (high amplitude slow waves), and in fast Fourier transform analysis (FFT; increased delta power), in good agreement with previous studies. EEG activation stimulated by turning rats on their side, to test righting, produced signals quite similar to awake resting state EEG signals. That is, the high amplitude slow wave activity changed to low amplitude fast activity that lasted for several seconds, befor...

Since an automobile accident in 2005, patient FL has reported difficulty retaining information from one day to the next. During the course of any given day, she describes her memory as normal. However, memory for each day disappears during a night of sleep. She reports good memory for events that occurred before the accident. Although this pattern of memory impairment is, to our knowledge, unique to the medical literature, it was depicted in the fictional film "50 First Dates". On formal testing, FL performed moderately well when trying to remember material that she had learned during the same day, but she exhibited no memory at all for material that she knew had been presented on a previous day. For some tests, unbeknownst to FL, material learned on the previous day was intermixed with material learned on the same day as the test. On these occasions, FL's memory was good. Thus, she was able to remember events from earlier days when memory was tested covertly. FL performed differently in a number of ways from individuals who were instructed to consciously feign her pattern of memory impairment. It was also the impression of those who worked with FL that she believed she had the memory impairment that she described and that she was not intentionally feigning amnesia. On the basis of her neuropsychological findings, together with a normal neurological exam, normal MRI findings, and psychiatric evaluation, we suggest that FL exhibits a unique form of functional amnesia and that its characterization may have been influenced by knowledge of how amnesia was depicted in a popular film. She subsequently improved (and began retaining day-today memory) at Johns Hopkins University where she was in a supportive in-patient environment and was shown how to take control of her condition by interrupting her sleep at 4-hour intervals.

[AMAZON LINK BELOW TO BOOK ITSELF -- TOC and book intro in downloadable .pdf] 

"It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it." --John Steinbeck Scientific research confirms what people have always known: answers, ideas, and inspiration do come to us in dreams. Harvard psychologist and world-renowned dream specialist Deirdre Barrett, Ph.D., offers this rich collection of examples of how the world's most creative practitioners in art, music, film, science, literature and other fields have used the revelations of their dream life to inform their work. Dr. Barrett offers insights showing us how to encourage lucid, meaningful dreaming, and how to apply the meanings of our dreams to solving problems--from the everyday to the extraordinary. This is the stuff dreams are made of. In the visual arts, Jasper Johns couldn't find his unique artistic vision until he dreamed it in the form of a large American flag. Salvador Dali and his colleagues built the startling new genre of surrealism out of dreams. Kubla Kahn dreamed the design for his stately pleasure dome; thousands of years later, Lucy Davis, chief architect at a major firm, continues the tradition of dreaming designs into life in her extraordinary buildings. Film is a fertile avenue for dreams: "Twice I have transferred dreams to film exactly as I had dreamed them," confides director Ingmar Bergman, as have Federico Fellini, Orson Welles, Akira Kurosawa, Robert Altman, and John Sayles. From Mary Shelley's terrible nightmare, which became Frankenstein, to Stephen King's haunting dream as a little boy, which led to his first bestseller, countless writers have consulted the Committee. Musicians from Beethoven to Billy Joel and Paul McCartney have whistled the Committee's tunes. In science, physiologist Otto Loewi dreamed the medical experiment that earned him the Nobel Prize. In sports, Marion Jones dreamed she'd broken a world record, then brought the dream to life. Gandhi translated his dream of resistance into a movement that changed the world. Since Freud, we take it for granted that our dreams reflect our past. In The Committee of Sleep, Barrett reveals how dreams can also tell us about our future potential--and how to reach it.

I advance a phenomenology of forgetting based on Husserl’s accounts of time-consciousness and passive synthesis. This theory of forgetting is crucial for understanding the transcendental constitution of the past. I argue that without forgetting, neither memory nor retention suffice for a consciousness of the past as past, since both are irreducibly connected to the Living Present. After an initial survey of the challenges that confront a phenomenology of forgetting (i.e. the “forgotten” is defined by its lack of phenomenality), I provide a descriptive analysis of forgetting as a complex process that integrates an accomplishment of retention that Husserl called “temporal contraction” with an accomplishment of passive synthesis that Husserl called “affective fusion.” Temporal contraction is the accomplishment that creates a qualitative (not quantitative) distinction between near-retentions and far-retentions. Affective fusion enables us to provide a positive (not privative) phenomenological description of the withdrawal of egoic investment in intentional experiences. Taken together, these two syntheses generate a double concealment in which consciousness both forgets its object and forgets that it has forgotten it, thereby constituting it as part of the truly absent past.

The amygdala has a key role in automatic non-conscious processing of emotions. Highly salient emotional stimuli elicit amygdala activity, and happy faces are among the most rapidly perceived facial expressions. In backward masking paradigms, an image is presented briefl y and then masked by another stimulus. However, reports of amygdala responses to masked happy faces have been mixed. In the present study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine amygdala activation to masked happy, sad, and neutral facial expressions. Masked happy faces elicited greater amygdala activation bilaterally as compared to masked sad faces. Our fi ndings indicate that the amygdala is highly responsive to non-consciously perceived happy facial expressions. ( JINS , 2010, 16 , 1-5)

The question of this study has to do with the underlying fantasy behind the Israeli pattern of encounter with Palestinians. In other words, does Israel create that which it claims to fear most, i.e. terrorism? This paper is based on my research in Israel and the United States. It is an attempt to decipher some of the collective unconscious wishes as well as the myth that motivates the Israeli political behavior vis-àvis the Palestinians. To get to this fantasy, I conducted focus groups and interviews out of which I drew the common narratives, and repeated phrases. I also looked at the Israeli political actions as a form of enactment of unconscious wishes.

This paper explores the content of the somniloquies of Dion McGregor, the most extensive sleep talker ever recorded, and compares these with dream content from normative male dreams on the Hall and van de Castle Content Scales (1966) and Hobson (et al., 1987) Bizarreness Scales. On the Hall and van de Castle Scales, the somniloquies contained significantly more female characters relative to males than for the norms, more familiar characters and friends, but fewer family members. The dreamer-as-character was much likelier to be either a befriender or an aggressor than in the normative dreams but much less likely to engage in physical aggression specifically.  There was less aggression, friendliness, or sex per character in McGregor’s narratives, as well as less of all three of these types of interaction total than for the norms, but much more self negativity.  There was a lower percentage of negative emotions, good fortune, and success, but the somniloquies were similar to the norms in their levels of misfortune and failure.    On the Hobson Bizarreness Scales, the McGregor somniloquies were not differentiated from dreams on 3 of 6 scales—having similar levels of discontinuity of plot, characters, object, or actions but had slightly fewer incongruities of plot, and many fewer instances of incongruity or  uncertainly of thought. These findings are discussed in terms of presumed brain activation differences—more frontal activation--and also in terms of McGregor’s (1964) personal idiosyncrasies.

'Definition of Heterology' illuminates sacred, heterogeneous experiences Bataille never stopped interrogating, in their throbbing movement of emergence. Furthering orthodox disciplines in the sciences of man, Bataille accounts for the ambivalent feelings of 'attraction and repulsion' at the heart of inner experiences that constitute the heart of his thought. In this paper, I further a mimetic line of inquiry in Bataille studies and argue that the laws of attraction and repulsion that animate heterology find their polarized foundations in the laws of the socius, which are also the laws of imitation understood in its heterogeneous – anthropological, ontological and psychological – manifestations. Paradoxically, heterology, while being the 'science' (logos) of the 'totally other' (hetero), may point toward an abyssal experience of a communicative homology that has the power to transform impure matters into pure spirits, angelic souls into material bodies.

We present an extension of Kansei mediated communication in the field of entertainment. We propose to do so by implementing Cultural Computing concept and enriching it with Kansei Mediated Interaction. We present some inspiration for our approach in terms of culture and then discuss them. We relate our work to the Western and to the Eastern world. Thus we use cultural examples from England, France, Japan and China. Finally, we propose as a new direction for HCI, cultural computing with its related paradigm we call Kansei Mediated Interaction. Finally we propose Kansei Mediated Entertainment as a direction merging of Kansei and entertainment.

Neurons and synapses have long been the dominant focus of neuroscience, thus the pathophysiology of psychiatric disorders has come to be understood within the neuronal doctrine. However, the majority of cells in the brain are not neurons but glial cells including astrocytes, oligodendrocytes, and microglia. Traditionally, neuroscientists regarded glial functions as simply providing physical support and maintenance for neurons. Thus, in this limited role glia had been long ignored. Recently, glial functions have been gradually investigated, and increasing evidence has suggested that glial cells perform important roles in various brain functions. Digging up the glial functions and further understanding of these crucial cells, and the interaction between neurons and glia may shed new light on clarifying many unknown aspects including the mind-brain gap, and conscious-unconscious relationships. We briefly review the current situation of glial research in the field, and propose a novel t...

The present paper explores the psychoanalytical aspects of the complex bond of mother-daughter relationship through the central characters of the movie Autumn Sonata by Ingmar Bergman. The bond between the mother and the daughter is considered to be the most influential, yet the most difficult and intricate. On one hand, it is strong and deep and on the other, fragile and complicated. The paper analyses the dynamics of Mother-Complex and its effects on the mother and her two daughters. It delves deeper into their ambivalent conflicted state, disorientated Anima and Animus, and its consequences. It shows how fears, insecurities, and dissatisfaction percolate from one generation to another as if the umbilical cord has never been cut. It investigates the crippling effects of a controlling mother and the reactions and responses of the daughters. We observe the different images of the mother and the daughter while they try to connect and disconnect with each other.

The article is a guided tour to Alfred LORENZER's proposal for an "in-depth hermeneutic" cultural analysis methodology which was launched in an environment with an almost complete split between social sciences and psychology/psychoanalysis. It presents the background in his materialist socialization theory, which combines a social reinterpretation of the core insights in classical psychoanalysis-the unconscious, the drives-with a theory of language acquisition. His methodology is based on a transformation of the "scenic understanding" from a clinical to a text interpretation, which seeks to understand collective unconscious meaning in text, and is presented with an illustration of the interpretation procedure from social research. Then follows a brief systematic account of key concepts and ideas-interaction forms, engrams, experience, symbolization, language game, utopian imagination-with an outlook to the social theory connections to the Frankfurt School. The practical interpretation procedure in a LORENZER-based psycho-societal research is briefly summarized, emphasizing the role of the researcher subjects in discovering socially unconscious meaning in social interaction. Finally an outlook to contemporary epistemological issues. LORENZER's approach to theorize and research the subject as a socially produced entity appears as a psycho-societal alternative to mainstream social constructivism.

The objective of this article is to think the task of teaching under the focus of the vicissitudes to which the teacher-student relationship is subjected, which steer pupils and teachers away from the ideals of order and harmony. With the purpose of analyzing the intersubjective flows in the classroom, aspects of group psychodynamics are investigated with the use of the psychoanalytic notions of basic assumption group and of projective identification. With this procedure, we want at the same time to probe to which extent notions that are efficacious in psychoanalytic clinic can be useful to analyze and to understand situations that belong to the field of education, and in particular the classroom, seen here as a space for the production of psychic inter-occurrences. We try to think the intersubjective space according to a logic that considers the creation of a third party in teaching and learning. We introduce the notion of a "third voice" (Ogden) to denote the creation and re-creation of the intersubjective other with various effects on the subjective constitutions. The identitary stiffening, along with the attending disdain and intolerance to difference, can be a form of reacting to that which escapes from control and predictability, thereby weakening the transformational movements implicated in the process of learning.

This paper argues that self-deception cannot be explained without employing a depthpsychological ("psychodynamic") notion of the unconscious, and therefore that mainstream academic psychology must make space for such approaches. The paper begins by explicating the notion of a dynamic unconscious. Then a brief account is given of the "paradoxes" of self-deception. It is shown that a depth-psychological self of parts and subceptive agency removes any such paradoxes. Next, several competing accounts of self-deception are considered: an attentional account, a constructivist account, and a neo-Sartrean account. Such accounts are shown to face a general dilemma: either they are able only to explain unmotivated errors of self-perception-in which case they are inadequate for their intended purpose-or they are able to explain motivated self-deception, but do so only by being instantiation mechanisms for depth-psychological processes. The major challenge to this argument comes from the claim that self-deception has a "logic" different to other-deception-the position of Alfred Mele. In an extended discussion it is shown that any such account is explanatorily adequate only for some cases of self-deception-not by any means all. Concluding remarks leave open to further empirical work the scope and importance of depth-psychological approaches.