Cognitive-Affective Neuroscience of Depersonalization

CNS Spectrums ◽  
2009 ◽  
Vol 14 (9) ◽  
pp. 467-471 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan J. Stein ◽  
Daphne Simeon

ABSTRACTDepersonalization disorder (DPD) is characterized by a subjective sense of detachment from one's own being and a sense of unreality. An examination of the psychobiology of depersonalization symptoms may be useful in understanding the cognitive-affective neuroscience of embodiment. DPD may be mediated by neurocircuitry and neurotransmitters involved in the integration of sensory processing and of the body schema, and in the mediation of emotional experience and the identification of feelings. For example, DPD has been found to involve autonomic blunting, deactivation of sub-cortical structures, and disturbances in molecular systems in such circuitry. An evolutionary perspective suggests that attenuation of emotional responses, mediated by deactivation of limbic structures, may sometimes be advantageous in response to inescapable stress.

2021 ◽  
pp. 229-243
Author(s):  
Jonathan Cole

In neurological illnesses, the body may present itself to perception in ways which allows insights into the concepts of body image and body schema. Three such conditions are explored. From those who live with spinal cord injury, paralysed and insentient from the neck down, aspects of the importance of the body in one’s sense of self are revealed. Some also describe a coming to terms with their altered bodies. When considering the body image, its adaptability and this reconciliation to a new normal should be considered. Studies on acquired severe sensory loss explore how conscious control, at the body image level, may partially replace the deafferented body schema. There is little evidence, however, for these subjects extending access to previously non-conscious motor schema. Lastly, some narratives from those with congenital absence of movement of facial muscles describe reduced emotional experience and felt embodiment as children. These can be developed as young adults, through shared social interactions. The importance of the social in elaboration of the body image is further implicit in a consideration of the stigma associated with facial disfigurement. Others’ responses to one’s body are crucial in developing our body image and sense of self.


2012 ◽  
Vol 55 (2) ◽  
pp. 475-495 ◽  
Author(s):  
HERA COOK

ABSTRACTThe history of emotion has focused on cognition and social construction, largely disregarding the centrality of the body to emotional experience. This case-study reveals that a focus on corporeal experience and emotion enables a deeper understanding of cultural mores and of transmission to the next generation, which is fundamental to the process of change. In 1914, parents in Dronfield, Derbyshire, attempted to get the headmistress of their school removed because she had taught their daughters sex education. Why did sex education arouse such intense distress in the mothers, born mainly in the 1870s? Examination of their embodied, sensory, and cognitive experience of reproduction and sexuality reveals the rational, experiential basis to their emotional responses. Their own socialization as children informed how they trained their ‘innocent’ children to be sexually reticent. Experience of birth and new ideas relating disease to hygiene reinforced their fears. The resulting negative conception of sexuality explains why the mothers embraced the suppression of sexuality and believed their children should be protected from sexual knowledge. As material pressures lessened, women's emotional responses lightened over decades. The focus on emotion reveals changes that are hard to trace in other evidence.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dmitry M. Davydov ◽  
Andrey Boev ◽  
Stas Gorbunov

AbstractSituational or persistent body fluid deficit (i.e., de- or hypo-hydration) is considered a significant health risk factor. Bioimpedance analysis (BIA) has been suggested as an alternative to less reliable subjective and biochemical indicators of hydration status. The present study aimed to compare various BIA models in the prediction of direct measures of body compartments associated with hydration/osmolality. Fish (n = 20) was selected as a biological model for physicochemically measuring proximate body compartments associated with hydration such as water, dissolved proteins, and non-osseous minerals as the references or criterion points. Whole-body and segmental/local impedance measures were used to investigate a pool of BIA models, which were compared by Akaike Information Criterion in their ability to accurately predict the body components. Statistical models showed that ‘volumetric-based’ BIA measures obtained in parallel, such as distance2/Rp, could be the best approach in predicting percent of body moisture, proteins, and minerals in the whole-body schema. However, serially-obtained BIA measures, such as the ratio of the reactance to resistance and the resistance adjusted for distance between electrodes, were the best fitting in predicting the compartments in the segmental schema. Validity of these results should be confirmed on humans before implementation in practice.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 48
Author(s):  
Philip Smith ◽  
Florian Stoll

This paper calls for a broad conception of sacrifice to be developed as a resource for cultural sociology. It argues the term was framed too narrowly in the classical work of Hubert and Mauss. The later approach of Bataille permits a maximal understanding of sacrifice as non-utilitarian expenditures of money, energy, passion and effort directed towards the experience of transcendence. From this perspective, pilgrimage can be understood as a specific modality of sacrificial activity. This paper applies this understanding of sacrifice and pilgrimage to the annual Bayreuth “Wagner” Festival in Germany. Drawing on a multi-year mixed-methods study involving ethnography, semi-structured interviews and historical research, the article traces sacrificial expenditures at the level of individual festival attendees. These include financial costs, arduous travel, dedicated research of the artworks, and disciplines of the body. Some are lucky enough to experience transcendence in the form of deep emotional experience, and a sense of contact with sacred spaces and forces. Our study is intended as an exemplary paradigm case that can be drawn upon analogically by scholars. We suggest that other aspects of social experience, including many that are more ‘everyday’, can be understood through a maximal model of sacrifice and that a rigorous, wider comparative sociology could be developed using this tool.


Sensors ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 21 (11) ◽  
pp. 3720
Author(s):  
Barbara Szymona ◽  
Marcin Maciejewski ◽  
Robert Karpiński ◽  
Kamil Jonak ◽  
Elżbieta Radzikowska-Büchner ◽  
...  

Supporting the development of a child with autism is a multi-profile therapeutic work on disturbed areas, especially understanding and linguistic expression used in social communication and development of social contacts. Previous studies show that it is possible to perform some therapy using a robot. This article is a synthesis review of the literature on research with the use of robots in the therapy of children with the diagnosis of early childhood autism. The review includes scientific journals from 2005–2021. Using descriptors: ASD (Autism Spectrum Disorders), Social robots, and Robot-based interventions, an analysis of available research in PubMed, Scopus and Web of Science was done. The results showed that a robot seems to be a great tool that encourages contact and involvement in joint activities. The review of the literature indicates the potential value of the use of robots in the therapy of people with autism as a facilitator in social contacts. Robot-Assisted Autism Therapy (RAAT) can encourage child to talk or do exercises. In the second aspect (prompting during a conversation), a robot encourages eye contact and suggests possible answers, e.g., during free conversation with a peer. In the third aspect (teaching, entertainment), the robot could play with autistic children in games supporting the development of joint attention. These types of games stimulate the development of motor skills and orientation in the body schema. In future work, a validation test would be desirable to check whether children with ASD are able to do the same with a real person by learning distrust and cheating the robot.


Perception ◽  
10.1068/p5853 ◽  
2007 ◽  
Vol 36 (10) ◽  
pp. 1547-1554 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Pavani ◽  
Massimiliano Zampini

When a hand (either real or fake) is stimulated in synchrony with our own hand concealed from view, the felt position of our own hand can be biased toward the location of the seen hand. This intriguing phenomenon relies on the brain's ability to detect statistical correlations in the multisensory inputs (ie visual, tactile, and proprioceptive), but it is also modulated by the pre-existing representation of one's own body. Nonetheless, researchers appear to have accepted the assumption that the size of the seen hand does not matter for this illusion to occur. Here we used a real-time video image of the participant's own hand to elicit the illusion, but we varied the hand size in the video image so that the seen hand was either reduced, veridical, or enlarged in comparison to the participant's own hand. The results showed that visible-hand size modulated the illusion, which was present for veridical and enlarged images of the hand, but absent when the visible hand was reduced. These findings indicate that very specific aspects of our own body image (ie hand size) can constrain the multisensory modulation of the body schema highlighted by the fake-hand illusion paradigm. In addition, they suggest an asymmetric tendency to acknowledge enlarged (but not reduced) images of body parts within our body representation.


Body schema refers to the system of sensory-motor functions that enables control of the position of body parts in space, without conscious awareness of those parts. Body image refers to a conscious representation of the way the body appears—a set of conscious perceptions, affective attitudes, and beliefs pertaining to one’s own bodily image. In 2005, Shaun Gallagher published an influential book entitled ‘How the Body Shapes the Mind’. This book not only defined both body schema (BS) and body image (BI), but also explored the complicated relationship between the two. The book also established the idea that there is a double dissociation, whereby body schema and body image refer to two different, but closely related, systems. Given that many kinds of pathological cases can be described in terms of body schema and body image (phantom limbs, asomatognosia, apraxia, schizophrenia, anorexia, depersonalization, and body dysmorphic disorder, among others), we might expect to find a growing consensus about these concepts and the relevant neural activities connected to these systems. Instead, an examination of the scientific literature reveals continued ambiguity and disagreement. This volume brings together leading experts from the fields of philosophy, neuroscience, psychology, and psychiatry in a lively and productive dialogue. It explores fundamental questions about the relationship between body schema and body image, and addresses ongoing debates about the role of the brain and the role of social and cultural factors in our understanding of embodiment.


2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-38 ◽  
Author(s):  
Caruana Fausto

A common view in affective neuroscience considers emotions as a multifaceted phenomenon constituted by independent affective and motor components. Such dualistic connotation, obtained by rephrasing the classic Darwin and James’s theories of emotion, leads to the assumption that emotional expression is controlled by motor centers in the anterior cingulate, frontal operculum, and supplementary motor area, whereas emotional experience depends on interoceptive centers in the insula. Recent stimulation studies provide a different perspective. I will outline two sets of findings. First, affective experiences can be elicited also following the stimulation of motor centers. Second, emotional expressions can be elicited by stimulating interoceptive regions. Echoing the original pragmatist theories of emotion, I will make a case for the notion that emotional experience emerges from the integration of sensory and motor signals, encoded in the same functional network.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Max Davis

<p>In recent years, affective science has seen a shift in the understanding of emotion and its relationship to cognition. No longer is cognition viewed as the only significant factor in determining emotional experience, and as fundamentally distinct from bodily feeling. Rather than a linear causal relationship between one and the other, the philosophy and cognitive science of Enactivism suggests that the cognitive and emotional elements of experience, along with the body and surrounding environment, are constitutive of each other, and continuously influence each other in a dynamic, multidirectional manner to produce the experience of emotional patterns (Colombetti & Thompson, 2008). However, despite these advances in emotion theory, current rehabilitation programs such as the Reasoning and Rehabilitation (R&R, Ross et al., 2016) program continue to understand cognition and emotion as functionally distinct components of experience, with deficits conceptualised in mainly cognitive terms, and targeted through Cognitive Skills, which largely neglect the emotional elements of experience. This thesis explores how an enactivist understanding of emotion can be applied to offender rehabilitation programs, with specific reference to the R&R program. It is concluded that R&R and similar programs would benefit significantly from revisions to conceptualisations of cognitive deficits, and in treatment components, which should integrate emotional and cognitive techniques.</p>


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