Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Mara Floris on her recent paper " “I’m Not Hungry:” Bodily Representations and Bodily Experiences in Anorexia Nervosa " ( Review of Philosophy and Psychology , 2024). Anorexia Nervosa (AN) is a severe psychiatric disorder characterized by an intense fear of gaining weight, leading to extreme food restriction and a distorted perception of one’s own body. In our paper, we explore how individuals with AN experience significant alterations in two primary domains: bodily representations and bodily experiences. Mara Floris Bodily Representations and Perceptual Distortions Bodily representations refer to the cognitive and perceptual processes that help us perceive and understand our body’s size, shape, and function. In individuals with AN, these representations are often distorted, leading to body image disturbances. These disturbances manifest as an overestimation of body size—patients with AN often perceive themselves as larger than they are. This mispercept...

In this post, Kathleen reports from the 'Experiences of Loss' Conference which took place on the 26th and 27th October 2023, at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. The conference was organised and ran by Sabrina Coninx (VU Amsterdam). The selection of talks over two days all spoke to the theme of loss in different contexts, addressing self, illness, and memory.  Day 1 Regina Fabry Regina Fabry (Macquarie University): Sharing experiences of loss through self-narration: possibilities and limitations. (online) Regina first clarified the concept of a self-narrative. Individuals might also draw on master narratives, which are widely shared in a socio-cultural community or society. These are value-laden, usually reflecting systems of power and oppression in play. Individuals might push back against these master narratives with alternative narratives, as a form of resistance. In cases of Major Depressive Disorder (MDD), there is a sense of loss or absence which is very much felt by the...

Today’s post is from Kyle De Young and Lindsay Rettler on their recent paper, “ Causal Connections between Anorexia Nervosa and Delusional Beliefs ” (published in  Review of Psychology and Philosophy  in 2023).  Kyle is a clinical psychologist specializing in eating and related behaviors, who oversees the Eating Behaviors Research Lab at the University of Wyoming. Lindsay is a philosopher at UW teaching ethics and philosophy of mental health, who oversees the ethics curriculum for Wyoming’s med school ( Wyoming WWAMI Medical Education Program ). Lindsay and Kyle Anorexia nervosa (AN) is a severe mental disorder associated with mortality and functional impairment. It is complex, multi-systemic (e.g., behavioral, cognitive, endocrine, gastrointestinal), and requires multidisciplinary evidence-based treatment at various levels (e.g., outpatient, inpatient). Despite the availability and use of intense treatments, outcomes are poor, with only 1 in 3 individuals recovering w...

Today's post is by Stephen Gadsby . Stephen is a Fonds Wetenschappelijk Onderzoek (FWO) postdoctoral fellow, based at the Centre for Philosophical Psychology , Antwerp University. His research employs theoretical and empirical methods to explore a broad range of topics within philosophy, psychology, and psychiatry. These include eating disorders, delusions, self-deception, imposter syndrome, and body representation. Stephen Gadsby Sufferers of anorexia and bulimia often believe that their bodies are larger than reality. This appears undeniably irrational. Given that their bodies are not as large as they claim, such beliefs appear untethered to evidence. In my recent paper , I suggest that those who suffer from these disorders are not as irrational as they appear. The first clue comes from first-person reports. These individuals often report experiencing changes in the physical size of their body, as if their stomach and legs were extended, expanding, or blown-up. Taking these repor...

A nna Lavis is a Lecturer in Medical Sociology and Qualitative Methods in the Social Studies in Medicine (SSiM) Team in the Institute of Applied Health Research at the University of Birmingham. She also holds an honorary research position in the Institute of Social and Cultural Anthropology, University of Oxford. Her work explores individuals’ and informal caregivers’ experiences and subjectivities of mental illness and distress across a range of social and cultural contexts, both offline and on social media, with a particular focus on eating disorders and self-harm.  In this post Eugenia Lancellotta interviews Anna on her latest project, Virtual Scars: Exploring the Ethics of Care on Social Media through Interactions Around Self-Injury , funded by the Wellcome Trust, Seed Award in Humanities and Social Science. EL: How did you become interested in the ethics of care in self-harming online communities? AL: I started work on relationships between social media an...

Stephen Gadsby  is a PhD candidate in the  Cognition and Philosophy lab , Monash University. His research spans a number of topics, including anorexia nervosa, body representation, delusions, psychiatric taxonomy, mental representation and predictive processing. In this post, he summarises his  new paper  "Self-Deception and the Second Factor: How Desire Causes Delusion in Anorexia Nervosa" recently published in Erkenntnis. Research shows that anorexia patients don’t hold extreme body ideals, despite common misconception. Indeed, most patients are thinner than what they judge their ideal size to be. In this paper , I advance a two-factor explanation for why patients believe they haven’t yet reached their ideal size. This account attempts to answer two questions: how the content of this belief arises and why the belief is maintained in the face of contradictory evidence. Following from previous work (Gadsby 2017a ; 2017b ), I answer the first of these question ...

This post is by André Martens, pictured above. Here André summarises his recent paper ‘ Paternalism in Psychiatry: Anorexia Nervosa, Decision-Making Capacity, and Compulsory Treatment’ , appearing in New Perspectives on Paternalism and Health Care edited by Thomas Schramme. Currently, decision-making capacity (DMC) is intensively discussed in disciplines such as bioethics, philosophy of psychiatry, and psychology. Some authors regard it as (mental) competence. But what exactly is DMC? What are the mental preconditions of making genuine decisions? And what role does DMC play in ethics, especially regarding the normative status of treatment decisions of psychiatric patients with reduced, or even completely lacking DMC? In my paper I try to answer these questions. Initially, I looked at the so-called traditional account of DMC, which is associated with the work of Paul S. Appelbaum and Thomas Grisso , among others. Here, DMC is formulated in terms of certain abilities, each bein...

On 9th October CRASSH organised a Moral Psychology Interdisciplinary Conference in Cambridge, featuring keynote talks, panel discussions and discussion groups. This is a brief report on the sessions in which I participated. The first session was a panel symposium with Josh Greene (Harvard) and Molly Crockett (Oxford) on the future of moral psychology chaired by Richard Holton. Josh started discussing the assumption in popular culture and the media that there is a “moral faculty” where all moral beliefs and decisions can be found, somewhere in the brain. But this is a myth according to him: morality is like a vehicle. “Vehicle” is a category, but what makes something a vehicle is not its internal mechanics. What makes something a vehicle is its function. Same with morality. If morality is a thing, people who study morality are interested in its function. The processes, operating principles and behavioural patterns involved in moral thinking are not distinct to morality. Molly mad...

This week Emily T. Troscianko , Knowledge Exchange Fellow at the Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities , and member of the Medieval and Modern Languages Faculty at the University of Oxford, writes about anorexia for our series of accounts by experts-by-experience. Emily (pictured above) also contributes to Psychology Today with a blog called A Hunger Artist . If there’s any mental illness that offers the sufferer an illusion of having it all, it’s anorexia. The twin towers of that disingenuous promise are thinness and control, bedfellows familiar from pop psychology and the diet industry. No other mental illness gets under observers’ skins (incomprehension, fear, anger, envy) quite like anorexia, and that’s because none other is quite so physical. And it’s in the interplay between the mental and the physical that the hollowness of anorexia’s illusions gets exposed. In the early days, the heady ‘hunger high’ gets you hooked, the admiring comments about your weight loss keep ...

During Eating Disorders Awareness Week , we take the opportunity to list some useful resources for people who want to know more about what it is like to live with an eating disorder and what can be done to help. B-eat , the UK charity for eating disorders, has organised an event for tomorrow, called " Sock it to Eating Disorders ": you can wear silly socks for a day! B-eat has also just released a report of the costs of eating disorders to the UK economy, which you can read about and download here . The Mental Health Foundation website and the website of Mind, the mental health charity, are a good source of information about eating disorders in general. The MHF features  the story of Casey  that illustrates the difficulties of people facing eating disorders in receiving adequate support. Mind features the story of Hope , who writes about her time in an adolescent psychiatric unit. There are several blogs dealing with eating disorders from different perspectives ...