Borderline We-Space? The Phenomenology of the Background of Safety in Borderline Personality Disorder

Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is a severe psychiatric condition characterized by instability in identity, relationships, and affect. Individuals, with BPD typically lack a coherent sense of self, are highly sensitive to interpersonal stressors, experience intense fluctuations in mood, and frequently engage in impulsive and self-destructive behaviors. Although both empirical research and development of effective psychotherapy have evidently progressed over the past years, many aspects regarding the structure of experience and the life-world typical for persons with BPD are not yet fully understood. Somewhat surprisingly, phenomenological psychopathology has only recently started to pay more attention to the disorder. A comprehensive elaboration of the phenomenology of BPD is therefore still lacking. This article aimed to contribute to such a phenomenological understanding by focusing on what we think is an essential aspect that has yet not been sufficiently addressed: the background of safety. To clarify what this means, we depart from Sandler’s [<i>Int J Psychoan</i>. 1960;41:352–6] psychoanalytic concept and elaborate on it phenomenologically. This leads us to argue that the development of a background of safety requires a particular embodied presence of others, which, in turn, contributes to the constitution of a safe we-space, a shared and familiar environment providing a matrix for the experience of a stable world. However, even when established, the background of safety remains in need of a continuous reconfirmation through corresponding experiences within a sufficiently reliable and controllable environment. The background of safety is vulnerable and open to (interpersonal) disruptions like trauma or neglect. In BPD, we suggest 3 aspects regarding the phenomenology of the background of the safety need to be considered: first, typically, patients with BPD did not develop a robust background of safety in infancy; second, weakening of the background of safety gives rise to symptoms and dynamics typical for BPD; third, these symptoms and dynamics further undermine the possible development of a background of safety in adult life and thus gravitate toward a petrification of the borderline condition, a “stable instability.” To conclude, we examine whether this concept should be understood as a <i>trouble générateur</i> and, last, consider its clinical implications.

CONFLICTS IN THE PROCESS OF ADAPTATION AMONG FRESHMEN IN HIGHER EDUCATIONAL INSTITUTIONS

The purpose of the study is to identify the level of conflict during the adaptation period and to determine possible factors of increased conflict among first-year undergraduate students. For two years, the authors conducted a survey in Moscow universities. Adaptation for students is related to an increase in anxiety, changes in responsibility for their actions. With the online start of the first year freshmen studied in their familiar environment, thus the adaptation process smoothed out, the conflict level decreased. The relevance of conflict prevention during the adaptation period becomes important when introducing a change in specialty after the second year and working out individual learning paths.

Lateral entorhinal cortex suppresses drift in cortical memory representations.

Memory retrieval is thought to depend on the reinstatement of cortical memory representations guided by pattern completion processes in the hippocampus. The lateral entorhinal cortex (LEC) is one of the intermediary regions supporting hippocampal-cortical interactions and houses neurons that prospectively signal past events in a familiar environment. To investigate the functional relevance of the LEC's activity for cortical reinstatement, we pharmacologically inhibited the LEC and examined its impact on the stability of ensemble firing patterns in one of the LEC's efferent targets, the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). When male rats underwent multiple epochs of identical stimulus sequences in the same environment, the mPFC maintained a stable ensemble firing pattern across repetitions, particularly when the sequence included pairings of neutral and aversive stimuli. With LEC inhibition, the mPFC still formed an ensemble pattern that accurately captured stimuli and their associations within each epoch. However, LEC inhibition markedly disrupted its consistency across the epochs by decreasing the proportion of mPFC neurons that stably maintained firing selectivity for stimulus associations. Thus, the LEC stabilizes cortical representations of learned stimulus associations, thereby facilitating the recovery of the original memory trace without generating a new, redundant trace for familiar experiences. Failure of this process might underlie retrieval deficits in conditions associated with degeneration of the LEC, such as normal aging and Alzheimer's disease.

Effects of exploring a novel environment on memory across the lifespan

Exploration is a crucial aspect of mammalian behavior, and new environments provide unique opportunities to learn. Exploration of a novel environment has been shown to promote memory formation in healthy adults, even for unrelated events. Studies in animals have suggested that such novelty-induced memory boosts are mediated by hippocampal dopamine. The dopaminergic system is known to develop and deteriorate over the lifespan, but so far, the effects of novelty on memory across the lifespan have not yet been investigated. In the current study, we used novel and previously familiarized virtual environments to pinpoint the effects of spatial novelty on declarative memory in humans across the lifespan. After exploring a novel or familiar environment, participants were presented a list of words, and either performed a semantic task (deep encoding) or judged whether the first letter of the shown word was open or closed (shallow encoding). Incidental memory was quantified in a surprise test. Our sample (n = 439) included children, adolescents, younger adults, and older adults. Results showed that participants in the deep encoding condition remembered more words than those in the shallow condition, but novelty did not influence this effect. Interestingly, however, children, adolescents and younger adults benefitted from exploring a novel compared to a familiar environment as evidenced by better word recall, while these effects were absent in older adults. Our findings suggest that the beneficial effects of novelty on memory follow the deterioration of pathways in the brain involved in novelty-related processing across the lifespan.

Bimodal Remapping of Visual Grids

Spatially modulated neurons from the rat secondary visual cortex (V2) show grid-like firing patterns during freely foraging in open-field enclosures. However, the remapping of the V2 grid cells is not well understood. Here we report two classes of V2 grid cell populations with distinct remapping properties: one regular class with invariant grid field patterns, and the other bimodal class that has remapping induced by environmental manipulations such as changes in enclosure shape, size, orientation and lighting in a familiar environment. The bimodal V2 grid cell pattern remains stable regardless of the follow-up manipulations, but restores to the original firing pattern upon animal's re-entry into the familiar environment on the next day or from the novel environment. The bimodal V2 grid cells are modulated with theta frequency during the course of remapping and stabilize quickly. We also found conjunctive bistable V2 grid cells with invariant head directional tuning. Overall, our results suggest a new grid cell mechanism in V2 that is different from the medial entorhinal cortex (MEC) grid cells.

The Impact of the “Zoom Fatigue” Phenomenon and Ways of Managing It

The context of the COVID 19 pandemic has forced managers and entrepreneurs to review how they run their businesses and guide their employees. The new normality has brought with it a number of challenges and changes that have produced immediate and profound effects both in the way business is conducted, the online negotiations giving a formal and less human character, and in the way the employees perceive the work carried out exclusively online. Research has revealed a new phenomenon called "Zoom Fatigue" which is reflected in the human psyche through exhaustion and burnout, a phenomenon caused by the intensity and long duration of video calls and frequent online meetings. Additional cognitive processes required by video calls, the concentration required to absorb all the information transmitted, the lack of visual breaks, multitasking, as well as the merging of professional activity with the familiar environment from the comfort of our home, have led to psychological consequences, such as pronounced fatigue, exhaustion or irritation. All these effects are felt differently by men and women, the latter suffering more from videoconferencing and online work. At the same time, extroverts were found to be less tired than introverted people, feeling the effects of the "Zoom Fatigue" phenomenon differently. For the proper conduct of work and for the creation of a healthy organizational climate and an ethical organizational culture, the role of managers in knowing employees at a human level is of outmost importance, in order to best manage such situations and to identify appropriate measures for motivation and support aimed in particular at female and vulnerable personnel. Orientation towards setting a precise schedule for organizing video conferencing, recommending to avoid multitasking and reducing on-screen stimulus, setting visual breaks, avoiding the use of video calls in their spare time are some of the measures that managers can implement among their employees.

Population dynamics of the thalamic head direction system during drift and reorientation

The head direction (HD) system is classically modeled as a ring attractor network1,2 which ensures a stable representation of the animal’s head direction. This unidimensional description popularized the view of the HD system as the brain’s internal compass3,4. However, unlike a globally consistent magnetic compass, the orientation of the HD system is dynamic, depends on local cues and exhibits remapping across familiar environments5. Such a system requires mechanisms to remember and align to familiar landmarks, which may not be well described within the classic 1-dimensional framework. To search for these mechanisms, we performed large population recordings of mouse thalamic HD cells using calcium imaging, during controlled manipulations of a visual landmark in a familiar environment. First, we find that realignment of the system was associated with a continuous rotation of the HD network representation. The speed and angular distance of this rotation was predicted by a 2nd dimension to the ring attractor which we refer to as network gain, i.e. the instantaneous population firing rate. Moreover, the 360-degree azimuthal profile of network gain, during darkness, maintained a ‘memory trace’ of a previously displayed visual landmark. In a 2nd experiment, brief presentations of a rotated landmark revealed an attraction of the network back to its initial orientation, suggesting a time-dependent mechanism underlying the formation of these network gain memory traces. Finally, in a 3rd experiment, continuous rotation of a visual landmark induced a similar rotation of the HD representation which persisted following removal of the landmark, demonstrating that HD network orientation is subject to experience-dependent recalibration. Together, these results provide new mechanistic insights into how the neural compass flexibly adapts to environmental cues to maintain a reliable representation of the head direction.

Dynamic representation of space in the hippocampus: spatial novelty detection and consolidation in CA1 and CA2

Hippocampal place cells are the functional units of spatial navigation and are present in all subregions- CA1, CA2, CA3 and CA4. Recent studies on CA2 have indicated its role in social and contextual memory, but its contribution towards spatial novelty detection and consolidation remains largely unknown. The current study aims to uncover how CA1 and CA2 detect, process, assimilate and consolidate spatial novelty. Accordingly, a novel 3-day paradigm was designed where the animal was introduced to a completely new environment on the first day and to varying degrees of familiarity and novelty on subsequent days, as the track was extended in length and modified in shape, keeping other environmental constraints fixed. Detection of spatial novelty was found to be a dynamic and complex phenomenon, characterized by different responses from hippocampal place cells, depending on when novelty was introduced. Therefore, the study concludes that early novelty detection (the first time a novel space is introduced in a relatively familiar environment) and subsequent novelty detection are not processed in the same way. Additionally, while neuronal responses to spatial novelty detection (early and subsequent) were found to be the same in CA1 and CA2 ensembles, their responses differed in spatial consolidation mechanisms during subsequent sleep replays. For CA1, spatial coverage of prior behaviour was found to be closely reflected in subsequent sleep for that particular day, but CA2 showed no such coherent response, highlighting mnemonic processing differences between CA2 and CA1 with respect to spatial novelty.

Muscular energy and water: Servants and cooling technologies in Colonial India

Во времена Британской Индии, попадая в колонию, британцы оказывались в трудно переносимых климатических условиях. В стремлении уберечься от зловредного воздействия окружающей среды, они воспроизводили элементы привычной им обстановки, одним из атрибутов которой была прохлада. В знойные и дождливые месяцы британцы тратили немало усилий на охлаждение воздуха вокруг них, для чего использовали приспособления разной степени сложности, а также приводивших их в действие специальных слуг. Сопротивляясь естественным природным условиям, европейцы организовывали локусы своей колониальной культуры, существовавшей по принципу разбросанных по субконтиненту оазисов, где искусственно создаваемый холод обеспечивал не только комфорт для работы и жизни, но и условия для поддержания достойного имиджа властителей. In the days of British India, getting into a colony, the British found themselves in difficult climatic conditions. In an effort to protect themselves from the harmful effects of the heat, they reproduced elements of their familiar environment, one of the attributes of which was coolness. In the hot and rainy months, the British spent a lot of effort to cool the air in their homes, for which they used devices of varying degrees of complexity and special servants who powered them. Resisting natural conditions, the Europeans organized the loci of their colonial culture, which existed on the principle of oases scattered over the subcontinent, where the artificially created cold provided not only comfort for work and life, but also the conditions for maintaining a decent image of colonial rulers.