Imperfect Cognitions

This week, we welcome Daniel Vespermann (Heidelberg University) and Sanna Karoliina Tirkkonen (University of Helsinki) to present their recent paper Existential injustice in phenomenological psychopathology in  Philosophical Psychology.   Sanna Karoliina Tirkkonen   In our paper “Existential injustice in phenomenological psychopathology”, we discuss a particular type of affective injustice. We start from the widely shared premise in phenomenological psychopathology that distressing alterations of background feelings play an important role in challenging mental health conditions. Background feelings are standing states that orient our evaluative perceptions of the world, shape emotional patterns, and regulate how we relate to others. In our paper, we refer to feelings of insecurity, self-blame, anxiety, estrangement, or inferiority as examples of distressing background feelings. Phenomenological approaches to psychopathology usually treat alterations of background feeling...

Here is the fifth post in our series on social approaches to delusions. Today, Phil Corlett raises some concerns about the arguments proposed in favour of a social turn in the previous posts, offering a different perspective. Phil Corlett Lots of people I like and respect who think about delusions have recently decided that social processes are relevant to belief formation and maintenance and thence to delusions. I call this the social turn . The preceding blog posts in this fascinating series suggest: 1) That we give testimony about the quality of other individuals as sources of testimony, and as such, we should define delusions and (given their social contents) delusions arise within individuals, through inherently social processes. 2) That testimonial abnormalities might be domain specific and dissociable from general reasoning abnormalities, and further that the socially specific deficit is one of coalitional cognition – how we form and sustain alliances with conspecifics. 3) That...

Justin Sulik Here is the fourth post in the series on social approaches to delusions, after the posts by Miyazono , Williams and Montagnese , and Wilkinson . In today's post, Justin Sulik, Charles Jefferson, and Ryan McKay discuss their new paper, “ Collectively Jumping to Conclusions: Social Information Amplifies the Tendency to Gather Insufficient Data ”. Justin Sulik is a postdoctoral researcher in the Cognition, Values and Behavior group at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich.  Charles Efferson is Professor in the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Lausanne.  Ryan McKay is Professor of Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London.   Charles Efferson Human beings are inveterate misbelievers. At the individual level, our propensity to false beliefs about our prowess and prospects can be costly and dangerous: promoting harmful behaviours like unsafe driving, smoking and overspending. Spreading and amplifying in large groups, however,...

Today's post is by Sam Wilkinson (University of Exeter) and it is the third in the series “Social Approaches to Delusions”. Sam Wilkinson This series of posts has sought to show how there has been a “social turn” in thinking about delusions. The excellent posts by Kengo Miyazono and Dan Williams on their respective co-authored papers ( Miyazono and Salice 2020 ; Williams and Montagnese preprint ) are testament to the fruitfulness of going beyond individual cognition and individualistic epistemology when theorising about delusion. In this post I draw inspiration from their work to reflect on precisely what we might mean by delusions being social. Let’s draw a distinction between delusions being social in their formation (call this “the social formation claim”), and in their evaluation (call this “the social evaluation claim”). In other words, social factors (deficits in social cognition, social epistemology) may play a role in generating those things that we end up calling delusi...

Today's post is by Daniel Williams and Marcella Montagnese and it is the second in the series “Social Approaches to Delusions”. Daniel is an Early Career Research Fellow at Corpus Christi College, University of Cambridge, and Marcella is a doctoral student in the Department of Neuroimaging, Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience, at King’s College London. Here Daniel and Marcella talk about their new paper “ Bayesian Psychiatry and the Social Focus of Delusions ”.   Daniel Williams As with many other areas of psychology and philosophy, the study of delusions is taking a social turn. This has different manifestations. For example, in an extremely interesting article , Sam Wilkinson argues that the very attribution of delusional status to certain beliefs is wrapped up in social practices of folk-epistemic approval and disapproval. To call something a delusion, Wilkinson argues, is not to describe – or at least not only to describe – reality but to express a certa...

Today's post is by Kengo Miyazono (Hokkaido University) and it is the first in the series “Social Approaches to Delusions”. Here Kengo talks about his new paper with Alessandro Salice (University College Cork) “ Social Epistemological Conception of Delusion ” (open access in  Synthese ). Kengo Miyazono The dominant conception of delusion in psychiatry (in textbooks, research papers, diagnostic manuals, etc.) is predominantly epistemic ( Broome & Bortolotti 2009 ). Delusions are almost always characterized in terms of some epistemic notion, e.g., evidence, reasoning, judgment, etc. For instance, DSM-5 characterizes delusions as “fixed beliefs that are not amenable to change in light of conflicting evidence ” (italics added: p. 87), and they are said to be “based on incorrect inference about external reality” and “firmly held despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary” (italics added:...

                 Today's post is written by Cailin O'Connor and James Owen Weatherall . In this post, they present their new book The Misinformation Age: How False Beliefs Spread , published by Yale University Press. Cailin O’Connor is a philosopher of science and applied mathematician specializing in models of social interaction. She is Associate Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science and a member of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Science at the University of California, Irvine.  James Owen Weatherall is a philosopher of physics and philosopher of science. He is Professor of Logic and Philosophy of Science at the University of California, Irvine, where he is also a member of the Institute for Mathematical Behavioral Science.    Since early 2016, in the lead-up to the U.S. presidential election and the Brexit vote in the UK, there has been a growing appreciation of the role that misinformatio...

The Helsinki Network for Philosophy of Psychiatry organized the symposium ”Culture, Extended and Embodied Cognition and Mental Disorders” on June 30-July 1, 2016, in Helsinki. The symposium was dedicated to cultural issues related to diagnostics, definitions and classifications of mental disorders, as well as phenomenological questions of experience, affectivity and embodiment. The symposium took place in Lapinlahti Hospital that was one of the first modern psychiatric hospitals in Northern Europe when it first opened its doors 175 years ago (on 1st of July 1841) - and now is a cultural venue. Culture-Bound Syndromes and Mechanisms Several talks focused on the ways culture affects disorders and their classification. In his introduction, Tuomas Vesterinen argued that definitions of mental disorders are inalienably value-laden, and that socio-cultural forces should be taken into account in explanations and classifications in order not to spread the diagnostic categori...

This post is by Misia Temler , project coordinator of the recently launched Not Guilty Sydney Exoneration Project at the University of Sydney. She recently completed her PhD in Cognitive Science at Macquarie University in the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders . Her PhD dissertation was on how individual and social factors impact autobiographical memory variation across retellings.  In my last post , I discussed the general reconstructive nature of autobiographical memory. In this post I discuss the powerful effect of social influence on memory and summarise a study from my thesis.  Remembering with others can lead to the development of false memories. When individuals witness an event and then remember the event together they can change one another’s memory of what happened (Paterson & Kemp, 2006 ; Wright, Memon, Skagerberg & Gabbert, 2009 ). This has significant consequences in the forensic setting. Eyewitness memory distor...

This post is by Marwa El Zein (pictured above), currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Social Cognition Group, based in Paris. In this post Marwa summarises her paper ‘ Anxiety Dissociates the Adaptive Functions of Sensory and Motor Response Enhancements to Social Threats ’, co-authored with Valentin Wyart and Julie Grèzes, and published in eLife. I investigate the neural mechanisms of contextual influences during social perceptual decisions. Specifically, my work characterizes behaviorally and neurally how personality traits, past experience, and attention modulate facial perception. In my paper, the adaptive role of moderate anxiety in reacting to social threats is put forward. Neural activity (electroencephalography, EEG) of participants was recorded while they categorized angry and fearful facial emotions. Individual anxiety of participants was assessed thanks to a personality trait questionnaire filled out at the beginning of the experiment (State-Trait Anxiety Inventory). ...

This post is by Sophie Stammers , PhD student in Philosophy at King’s College London. Here she writes about two policy papers, Unintentional Bias in Court and Unintentional Bias in Forensic Investigation , written as part of a recent research fellowship at the Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology, supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council. The Parliamentary Office of Science and Technology (POST) provides accessible overviews of research from the sciences, prepared for general parliamentary use, many of which are also freely available . My papers are part of a recent research stream exploring how advances in science and technology interact with issues in crime and justice: it would seem that if there is one place where unbiased reasoning and fair judgement really matter, then it is in the justice system. My research focuses on implicit cognition, and in particular, implicit social bias. I am interested in the extent to which implicit biases differ from...

On 12th May 2015 in London I attended the " Psychiatry and Society " conference organised by the Psychiatry Section of the Royal Society of Medicine. Here I will summarise the talks I heard in session 1, emphasising those themes that are close to our blog readers' hearts. Session 1: Genetics and Neuroscience of Mind, Self and Behaviour Neuroscientist Jean-Pierre Changeux  (pictured above) kicked off the conference with a presentation entitled: "What neuroscience can tell us about mind and behaviour?" He presented the brain as a very complex physico-chemical system about which we know a lot already but not everything. This is because the brain is the product of the integration of different types of evolution occurred in millions of years (evolution of species in terms of variability of genome, ontogenetic development in terms of variability of connections, evolution of thought in terms of variability of spontaneous activity and synaptic efficacies, and soc...