Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by Ema Sullivan-Bissett. In her last post , Lisa outlined two conditions on Epistemic Innocence:  1. Epistemic Benefit. The cognition delivers some significant epistemic benefit to a given subject at a given time, that is, it contributes to the acquisition, retention or use of relevant true beliefs. 2. No Relevant Alternatives. Alternative cognitions to the imperfect cognition are either unavailable or fail to deliver the same epistemic benefits as the imperfect cognition to that subject at that time. In this post I will focus on the second condition, which requires further elucidation with respect to what notion of unavailability is in play. 

The Psychosis Research Partnership We, Professor Philippa Garety, Professor Elizabeth Kuipers, Dr Helen Waller and Dr Amy Hardy, are Research Clinical Psychologists based at the Department of Psychology, Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London.  We work with the Psychosis Research Partnership (Professor David Fowler, Professor Paul Bebbington, Professor Daniel Freeman, Dr Richard Emsley & Professor Graham Dunn) on a research programme funded by the Maudsley Charity and the Wellcome Trust.  This research has found it is common for people to have thoughts about others intending to cause them harm, which do not seem to be a valid reflection of the shared reality of others. These can range from fleeting ideas that someone on the street might be laughing at us, to more elaborate and persistent beliefs such as that the secret services are trying to have us killed. Most people experience paranoid thoughts occasionally, but for some the preoccupation, distress and convicti

This post is by Rachel Gunn, PhD student at the University of Birmingham, working on delusion and thought insertion. After introducing the phenomenon of thought insertion in my previous post , here I discuss ownership of thoughts. The impossibility of immunity to error through misidentification (IEM) is an established notion in relation to the self. If I have something to say about my experience it is self-evident that I am the one undergoing the experience. I cannot be mistaken.  A subject experiencing thought insertion cannot be mistaken about who is experiencing the thought. Whilst this is true it does not explain what the experience is like. The thought is observed or witnessed by the subject, they have access to the content and have some sort of first-person experience of it. It is not, however, the same kind of experience that they ‘normally’ have. It differs from other thoughts – but in what sense?

I was awarded an AHRC Fellowship to develop and test the notion of epistemic innocence , and this blog is part of that project. Since she joined the project, Ema has helped me work out a sensible set of conditions for the notion, and Kengo has also provided a number of helpful suggestions and constructive objections. The process of defining the notion and applying it to different cognitions has just started, and we still have some problems to solve, but I thought I would update you on my own progress with it (and Ema will do the same in posts to follow this one). My initial questions were the following: In what circumstances do delusional beliefs, distorted memories, and confabulatory explanations contribute to the acquisition and preservation of relevant truths? Do delusional beliefs, distorted memories, and confabulatory explanations have benefits that are genuinely epistemic? Are people epistemically blameworthy for having "imperfect cognitions"? What are the consequ

 Rachel Gunn I’m a new PhD student at the University of Birmingham studying delusion. I work as a counsellor and psychotherapist in Birmingham, Coventry and Warwick and studied thought insertion for my Masters dissertation at the University of Warwick. (What follows is a very rough summary of some of the findings from my work on my Masters dissertation). While trying to understand thought insertion I became aware of the lack of first person descriptions in the philosophical literature. I didn’t understand the phenomenon and didn’t feel that the philosophical literature helped me, as it was full of contradictions. I felt I couldn’t make progress without more information. In my work in this area I rely heavily on what patients and others say about their experience (using mental health web forums and other first person descriptions) and take their description of their experience seriously. Alienonite from the Crazyboards web forum describes the experience: “Often, in a quiet

Over the last few years I have worked more and more on the idea that the brain is a prediction error minimizer. This has now resulted in a book— The Predictive Mind —just published with Oxford University Press. The Predictive Mind By Jakob Hohwy The first part of the book explains the basic idea of prediction error minimization, which mainly stems from work by Karl Friston and others in computational neuroscience. The second part applies this to the binding problem, to cognitive impenetrability, to delusions and autism, and to a range of philosophical questions about misrepresentation. The third part considers how it applies to attention, consciousness, the mind-world relation, and the nature of self. The prediction error minimization idea says that all the brain ever does is minimize the error of predictions about its sensory input, formed on the basis of an internal model of the world and the body. The better these predictions are, the less error there is. On this view, the

Consciousness and Moral Responsibility By Neil Levy This  book  aims to contribute to debates within moral philosophy and in philosophy of mind. There has been a lot of debate in recent years focusing on the relationship between consciousness and moral responsibility. Some of this debate has been spurred by work in neuroscience and in social psychology , which allegedly shows that we lack ‘conscious will’: we are not conscious of the volitions that actually cause our actions. This work has been taken by some neuroscientists to threaten moral responsibility: “We do not hold people responsible for actions performed unconsciously, without the possibility of conscious control”, Libet claims . On the other hand, and quite independently of concerns over these alleged threats, a number of philosophers have recently argued that consciousness is not needed for moral responsibility at all: that we can be morally responsible for actions while unconscious of the reasons for which we act

John Sutton and Chris McCarroll Currently I am a PhD student under the supervision of John Sutton at the ARC Centre of Excellence in Cognition and its Disorders , Macquarie University. One of John’s research projects, and the topic of my PhD, is a philosophical investigation of visual perspective in autobiographical memory, and we recently gave a talk on this subject at the Philosophy of Memory Workshop in Adelaide. When remembering past experiences, one can remember the event from one’s original point of view, maintaining the same visual perspective on the scene with which one experienced the event. Many people, however, report sometimes seeing themselves in the remembered scene, from an external or third-person perspective. Following Nigro and Neisser’s seminal paper these are known within psychology as memories from field and observer perspectives respectively.  

Departures from reality and self-enhancing distortions apply not just to beliefs about the present and to future predictions , but also to memories. People neglect evidence of bad performance, concentrating on evidence of good performance, and emphasising their contribution to successful enterprises. When one’s personal story takes an unexpected direction, there are two conflicting epistemic demands: one needs to impose some coherence between new and previous episodes in the story, but also guarantee as much correspondence as possible between the story and the experienced reality. These principles of coherence and correspondence apply to autobiographical memory ( Conway 2005 ): memories are sometimes altered to preserve a coherent self as the past is re-written to make sense of current goals and a new self-image.  Distortions exaggerating continuity between previous and present self may also be psychologically adaptive by enhancing self-appraisal and well-being. One instanc

University of Adelaide On Friday, November 15th, a workshop on the philosophy of memory took place at the University of Adelaide, South Australia. This workshop was organized by Suzanne Bliss and myself, and it was funded by a grant from the Australian Research Council for a project on the debate between the 'false memory' approach versus the 'recovered memory' approach to reports of long-forgotten memories of sexual abuse. The project is now finalizing its first phase, which has dealt with conceptual issues on the metaphysics of memory (what kind of causal history must a mental state have to count as a memory), the epistemology of memory (what kind of knowledge do we have of our own memories?) and the phenomenology of memory (what aspects of what it is like to remember something episodically are essential to memory, and what aspects could be missing from memory?). The workshop concentrated on conceptual issues for that reason.

Reece Roberts Our previous post outlined the evidence for episodic memory being a constructive process, and one that plays a necessary role in our ability to imagine future scenarios. In this post, I hope to sketch out a framework directly relating our work on episodic simulation to one of the main topics of this project: false beliefs and memories. The constructive nature of episodic simulation – whether it be remembering or imagining the future – allows for deeply rooted cognitive biases to play a role in these processes. In particular, biases that maintain (or increase) self-esteem have been shown to strongly modulate properties of episodic simulation. In the case of episodic memory, we tend to remember positive events in more detail than negative events, regard achievements as occurring more recently than failures when this is not case, and experience a more rapid loss of affect associated with negative events relative to positive events. Similar effects are observed when i

Positive illusions provide a challenge to the once-accepted view that accurate beliefs about oneself and the world are conducive to wellbeing and mental health. Illusions are "beliefs that depart from reality" and they are positive when they involve unrealistic optimism about one's capacities, prospects, or control over the external environment.  We can find three broad types of positive illusions, following Taylor and Brown (1994) : (1) excessively positive self-appraisals; (2) the belief that one has greater control over events than it is actually the case; (3) more rosy views of the future than statistics can warrant. It is important that positive illusions are regarded as  mild distortions of reality and do not involve "denying the obvious": most researchers interested in positive illusions are keen to distinguish positive illusions from cases of self-deception or from defence mechanisms. Taylor and Brown have shown not only that positive illusions are

On 11th and 12th of October the Department of Philosophy at the University of York hosted an international conference on the topic of Art and the Nature of Belief, organised by Helen Bradley and Ema Sullivan-Bissett . The aim of the conference was to bring together philosophers of mind working on belief and its connection to truth with aestheticians working on beliefs gained from artworks. We thought that there was an opportunity for a significant philosophical interaction between belief theorists and aestheticians which would illuminate the nature of belief for both parties. The interaction was intended to present the belief theorist with pertinent questions regarding the status of beliefs formed as a result of engaging with art and, in turn, encourage aestheticians to further consider the relations between art, belief, and truth.

Tony David Delusions are the hallmark of madness. Coming up with a precise definition of ‘delusion’ is nevertheless difficult and perhaps impossible, especially when concerned exclusively on epistemology (David, 1999).  Most aspects of standard definitions have exceptions on which clinicians in practice agree. The notion that delusions like other psychotic phenomena are best viewed as lying on a continuum with normal beliefs is appealing but flawed (David, 2010).  Delusions are multiply determined with many typical features but none essential and / or invariable. Delusions are more than the sum of their epistemic features. They are clinical phenomena that require a huge amount of contextual information before they can be understood (or before it can be concluded that they are un-understandable!). Sometimes a statement that would only be weakly eligible to be called a delusion, passes this threshold because the person expressing the utterance shows evidence of psychosis on other

Recently I had the pleasure to update the Delusion entry in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. I wrote the original version of it in 2009 and so much has happened in four years that I had to select topics or the entry would have become far too long. It seemed to me there were several areas to revise and expand, and some entirely new debates to discuss. The most obvious sections to revise were: the one on the definition of delusion (given the subtle shifts in DSM-5 we previously reported in this blog ); the one on whether the formation and maintenance of delusion can be regarded as rational (given the recent debate on Bayesianism initiated by the 2010 paper by Coltheart, Menzies and Sutton ), the one on delusion formation theories, as in the original version too little space was dedicated to the prediction error theory defended by Jakob Hohwy and Phil Corlett among others; and the one on whether delusions are beliefs, considering the recent proposal by Schwitzgebel that delusi

Chloë FitzGerald I am a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Biomedical Ethics, University of Geneva , currently working on a project about implicit bias in clinical care. My background is in philosophy and I work in areas at the intersection of moral psychology, philosophy of mind, ethics and bioethics. As Natalia and Jules have explained in previous posts, talk of implicit bias in social psychology typically refers to implicit associations between particular social groups, such as minority or oppressed racial groups, the obese, the elderly, women, transgender individuals etc., and negative evaluations or characteristics. Much remains to be understood about how these associations work. Psychologists may also distinguish between implicit stereotypes and implicit prejudices/attitudes, where implicit stereotypes refer to sets of belief-like states and implicit prejudice or implicit attitudes are ‘hotter’ states, more like preferences. This use of ‘attitude’ can be confusing

Phil Corlett I’m interested in beliefs. Specifically, how the brain is involved in normal and abnormal belief formation. For example, I study delusions, the often bizarre and fixed false beliefs that characterize serious mental illnesses like schizophrenia.  I’m a cognitive neuroscientist, which means I use data from brains to make inferences about minds.    I take what many consider to be a radically reductionist approach to beliefs. I think they might be related to simple behaviors like Pavlovian and instrumental learning. These processes can be observed in very simple organisms and I try to apply what we know about them to study beliefs. Central to our understanding of learning, and I argue belief formation, is the concept of salience or importance. We learn and remember information about important events so we can respond appropriately if the same circumstances recur in the future. I think beliefs are one way that such learning and memory is manifest. If beliefs a

Reece Roberts, Aleea Devitt, Donna Rose Addis  We’re a group of researchers in the Memory Lab at The University of Auckland. Our research interests are broad, ranging from autobiographical memory to false memory to imagination and creativity, and we approach these topics from both cognitive and neural perspectives. But the strand that threads all this research together is the constructive nature of memory. It is well established that episodic memory is a constructive process. Seminal work from Bartlett (1932) demonstrated the fallibility of memory, and also highlighted the ways in which it can be distorted. Building on this earlier work on false memory, Schacter and colleagues proposed a framework for the cognitive neuroscience of constructive memory in the early 1990s that has proved influential. Since that time, advances in neuroimaging have provided evidence to support three key ideas: (1) that features or elemental parts comprising an episode must be linked toget

Zoë Boden I am Zoë Boden , a post-doctoral scholar working in the field of mental health. Much of my work focuses on emotional and intersubjective experiences, and how we make sense of these, especially when they’re complex or distressing.  In thinking about distortions in beliefs and memories, in my research, I have focused on the stories we tell to help make sense of our experiences. My PhD research looked at experiences of feeling guilty and explored the relationship between our lived, bodily experiences and our narrative accounts.   A large part of feeling guilty is an experience of unfamiliarity – a feeling that your behaviour is out of character, and that you are unfamiliar to yourself. Who is this person who did this thing? How can it be the same me that is here now, knowing that thing to be wrong? This unfamiliarity can be understood as a distorted belief. It feels incongruous to acknowledge and accept that whatever was done, was done by you. So how did my research part

Ema Sullivan-Bissett In my last blog post I wrote about mine and Paul Noordhof ’s work on relationist accounts of experience and delusional belief formation. The conclusion from that post was that the relationist who denies phenomenal character to hallucinatory experience could not accept any empiricist account (an account which gives anomalous experience a role in the explanation of delusion formation) of what we called ‘positive delusions’ (delusions involving hallucinatory experience). This meant that the relationist must adopt a rationalist account of delusion formation, an account which refuses ‘to ground the delusion in an abnormal experience’ ( Bayne and Pacherie 2004 : 81). 

Pablo López-Silva I am a current PhD student at the University of Manchester Philosophy Department ( Mind Group ). I’m working on different philosophical problems raised by schizophrenia under the supervision of Dr Joel Smith and Prof Tim Bayne . I became interested in the philosophical discussions surrounding schizophrenia while I was taking my clinical courses for my psychology professional degree in Chile. While attending some patients, I realized that delusions seemed to have a strong adaptive function. Although this is a matter that needs further argumentation, I think that systematic research on the structure of certain delusions can facilitate better understandings of their role ( Roberts, 1992) and, quite importantly, to improve therapeutic intervention ( Guidano, 1991 ). An example of this can be offered by looking at the structure of thought insertion, an abnormal conscious experience commonly regarded as suggestive of schizophrenia ( Mullins & Spence, 2003).  

We all know what mental states we are in. We know whether we are happy, whether we are in pain, whether we have religious beliefs, whether we have a desire to be a philosopher, and so on. But how do we know it? Jordi Fernández I have recently proposed ( Transparent Minds: A Study of Self-Knowledge , Oxford University Press, 2013) that we determine which beliefs and desires we have on the basis of our grounds for belief and desire. The idea is that the racist, for example, thinks that he believes that white people are more intelligent than black people on the basis of his hate towards black people. The theory is one of the 'transparent' approaches inspired by Gareth Evans's observation that, when we are asked what we believe, we look at the world instead of inspecting the contents of our own minds.

Ema Sullivan-Bissett Currently, I am a PhD student at the University of York, and will soon be a Research Fellow at the University of Birmingham, working on Lisa Bortolotti’s Epistemic Innocence project . Paul Noordhof  is Professor of Philosophy at the University of York. We are currently thinking about relationist accounts of perceptual experience, and what proponents of such accounts might have to say about delusional belief formation. Paul Noordhof Relationists about perceptual experience hold that perception is a relation of brute non-representational awareness of items in the world. This account can be contrasted with representationalist accounts which hold that perceivers represent the world to be a certain way. On the relationist account, the phenomenal character of perception—what it feels like to the subject to have a perceptual experience—is constituted by the items of which the subject is aware. In the case of hallucination, where intuitively, such objects and p

Kengo Miyazono This post is a response to Lisa's earlier post on delusion in DSM-5 . Is the definition of delusion really different between DSM-5 and DSM-IV? In DSM-5, definitional remarks on delusion appear twice; first, in "Schizophrenia Spectrum and Other Psychotic Disorders" in Section II (p.87) and, second, in "Glossary of Technical Terms" in Appendix (p.819). So, we need to look at both of them and compare them to their counterparts in DSM-IV.  

Sam Wilkinson I am currently a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Durham University, as part of a Wellcome Trust funded project that examines voice hearing (hearingthevoice.org). Recently, I completed my PhD at the University of Edinburgh on monothematic delusions caused by brain damage. The issue of whether delusions are beliefs has been central to philosophical work on delusion, as several of the previous posts here reflect (see especially Bortolotti and Gerrans ). I'd like to express a few reactions to this debate. Obviously, before we can ask whether delusions are beliefs, we need to get clear about the nature of delusions, and the nature of beliefs.

Natalia Washington I am a graduate student in the Philosophy department at Purdue University. My research interests lie at the intersection of philosophy of mind, cognitive science, moral psychology, and scientific psychiatry—and especially in externalist viewpoints on these subjects. In a forthcoming paper with Dan Kelly , we defend a kind of social externalism about moral responsibility in the case of implicit bias, a particular kind of “imperfect cognition.” For those who aren’t familiar, implicit biases are unconscious and automatic negative evaluative tendencies about people based on their membership in a stigmatized social group—for example, on gender, sexual orientation, race, age, or weight. Because implicit biases operate without our conscious awareness, one might worry about the prospects for holding individuals responsible for their behaviors when they are influenced by biases, as mounting evidence suggests.

G reg is Professor of Philosophy at Nottingham (moving to York in September); Anna is doing her PhD with him.   Greg Currie We both work on the topics of fiction and imagination, and recently have become interested in the question of how our imaginative engagement with fictions influences our attitudes towards the real world – notably, our real-world beliefs. When we read Anna Karenina and become engrossed in the story of her life, what effects – if any – does this have on what we think, feel, desire about our own lives? Do we acquire new beliefs (or worries, or hopes...) about the real nature of love, or the evils of social conformity? To the extent to which we do that, how does it happen, and how rational is it?   Anna Ichino These are in important respects empirical questions. In order to answer them we are looking at the psychological work in this area. We have started by considering a growing body of studies that go under the heading of ‘Transportation

Alessandro Blasimme  & Marco Canevelli The relationship between mental capacities and autonomy has long been a matter of dispute, but we can surmise that clinical judgments about one’s mental capacities may incorporate or support considerations about patients’ autonomy as well as value judgments bearing on the choice of different therapeutic options, on how and to which degree a patient should be involved in therapeutic decisions and, finally, on the role of caregivers. This has important consequences for patients affected by dementia. Behavioural and psychological symptoms of dementia (BPSD) are defined as “a heterogeneous set of psychological reactions, psychiatric symptoms and anomalous behaviours that appear in patients with dementia, of any etiology” ( Finkel et al. 1996 ).

  Gregory Yates In schizophrenia, the basic experience of existing as a “self” – as a subject whose thoughts, beliefs and actions coincide with what is regarded to be “self” – is disturbed. This has been hypothesised as the distinct phenotypic core of schizophrenia ( Sass and Parnas, 2003 ; Parnas et al., 2005) and the central psychopathological trait marker of psychotic vulnerability ( Nelson et al., 2008 ; Parnas et al., 2005 ) 'The clinical symptoms come and go,' describes one schizophrenia patient, 'but this nothingness of self is permanently there.' ( Kean, 2009 ) Anomalous self-experiences (ASEs) provide much of the material for delusional beliefs formed in acute schizophrenia ( Stanghellini, 2012 ). In line with my last post  on this blog, I would like to consider whether ASEs might also provide a ‘secondary gain’ or epistemic benefit ( Graham, 2013 ). I will examine one delusion frequently reported by schizophrenia patients, and highly suggestive of a

Matthew Parrott I  am currently a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Oxford. Most of my research is in philosophy of mind, cognitive science, and psychiatry (although I also have a strong interest in Hume).   Among other things, I'm currently thinking a lot about delusions.   It seems to me that most current philosophical work on delusions is heavily focused on two issues.    First, as we can see from this blog, there is a lively and engaging debate about whether delusions are doxastic states or some other kind of mental state. Secondly, there are discussions about the best framework or model to adopt for explaining delusions - for example, whether we should adopt a one-factor or two-factor theory or whether some kind of Bayesian model could be developed to explain the onset of delusion. Although I think these are both fascinating issues, I also think delusions present us with other philosophical questions that are worth consideration, especially once we start to think of del

This post is by Matthew Broome. Matthew Broome I’ve recently taken up a new post as Senior Clinical Research Fellow in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Oxford, but prior to that was Associate Clinical Professor of Psychiatry at Warwick University and Lecturer at the Institute of Psychiatry, King’s College London, and it was during a Journal Club at the IoP where I first met Lisa Bortolotti and we began our collaboration. A month ago  I was delighted to take part in a public philosophy event at the European Institute of the LSE, as part of their  Consilience  series, devoted to mental illness.  The format was that, together with two colleagues,  Tim Thornton  and  Bonnie Evans , we were asked to talk about the nature of mental illness prior to the chair,  Kristina Musholt , opening the discussion to the floor.  

María G. Navarro I am a postdoctoral ‘Juan de la Cierva’ fellow at the Institute of Philosophy of the Spanish National Research Council . Until the end of November this year I am a visiting fellow at the Department of Philosophy at Birmingham. I am interested in how people reason and ascribe knowledge through the daily act of making interpretations. In the very simple, fast and productive act of interpreting something as being something all of us use and project our beliefs, desires and actions. But not less important is that we produce interpretations in order to express, represent, and reason about knowledge. That implies that being capable of producing interpretations is not only related to folk psychology but also to folk epistemology. But what does ‘epistemology’ mean when we affirm that it may be ‘folk’?

Are delusions beliefs? Delusions are formed in response to perceptual or sensory experiences, they interact with other mental states in a more or less intelligible fashion and they regulate behavior. Any mental state with these properties deserves to be called a belief, or so say doxastic theorists of delusion. The fact that delusions are irrational merely means that we need to search for the causes of irrationality rather than abandon the doxastic conception. I disagree. Delusions also have some very un-belief like features. They are very resistant to counterevidence, often maintained with ambivalence, and also seem to involve a phenomenology and stance towards the world which is very dissimilar to that of someone trying to produce and verify an empirical hypothesis. John Nash the Fields medal winner (the Nobel prize for mathematics) and celebrity schizophrenic said of his delusions “ it’s kind of like a dream. In a dream it’s typical not to be rational.” Adoxastic th

Gregory Yates I am a Masters student in Philosophy of Mind and Cognitive Science at the University of Birmingham. My research interests here are centred on the experiences of patients diagnosed with schizophrenia. I am also involved with the CogWatch project at Birmingham, a European funded research initiative aiming to enhance the rehabilitation of patients suffering from neurological disorders. Much of my theoretical and practical work, then, concerns cognitions seen as ‘imperfect’! An article posted to Imperfect Cognitions in May  explored the often-overlooked positive-psychological qualities or ‘secondary gains’ ( Graham, 2013 ) associated with manic-depressive illness. I would like to consider here whether anything similar can be found in  psychotic  disorders – namely, schizophrenia.  

This post is by Lisa Bortolotti. How has the definition of delusions changed in the DSM 5? Here are some first impressions. In the DSM-IV (Glossary) delusions were defined as follows: Delusion. A false belief based on incorrect inference about external reality that is firmly sustained despite what almost everyone else believes and despite what constitutes incontrovertible and obvious proof or evidence to the contrary. The belief is not one ordinarily accepted by other members of the person's culture or subculture (e.g., it is not an article of religious faith). When a false belief involves a value judgment, it is regarded as a delusion only when the judgment is so extreme as to defy credibility.

I am Professor of Philosophy at the University of Birmingham and I mainly work in the philosophy of psychology and psychiatry. I am also involved in the numerous activities of the  Philosophy of Health and Happiness research cluster which I co-founded with Heather Widdows and Iain Law .  In the last few years I have been mostly interested in delusions, and I have been very fortunate to work at a series of papers on delusions with psychiatrist and philosopher Matthew Broome. Lisa Bortolotti I am interested in clinical delusions in their own right, what they are, how they are formed, how they differ from other "imperfect cognitions", but I also think that the phenomenon of delusions can help us make progress with some long-standing issues in the philosophy of mind, such as the relationship between rationality and belief. We tend to see delusions as the mark of madness. The content of some delusions is so bizarre as to invite scepticism about whether anybody can ge

Jules Holroyd I am a lecturer in philosophy at the University of Nottingham. I've recently been working on implicit social cognitions in responsible agency - in particular, implicit biases. Implicit biases are, roughly, stored associations in memory, which can operate without the conscious awareness of the agent, and influence judgements and behaviours. We have many implicit associations and some of these enable us to navigate the world effectively. But others - those falling under the rubric of 'implicit bias' - seem deeply problematic and have a role in perpetuating discrimination and disadvantage (for a great resource on implicit bias, see here ).

Magdalena Antrobus I am a Masters student in Philosophy of Health and Happiness at the University of Birmingham. I also hold a Masters degree in Clinical Psychology and have over 5 years experience in clinical practice, working mainly with psychosis, depression, eating disorders and manic - depressive illness in conjunction with addictions (so-called dual diagnosis).  In my recent work I examined possible beneficial traits of manic-depressive illness (Bipolar Disorder). At first glance it may sound surprising to place ‘bipolar’ and ‘positive’ in the same sentence. However, a thorough study and analyses conducted by some psychiatrists ( Galvez, Thommi, Ghaemi, 2011 , Ghaemi 2012a , Ghaemi, 2012b ) discovered that having the illness might enhance particular characteristics that are seen as beneficial. The authors of one of the studies reviewed 81 examples that mentioned positive psychological qualities in individuals diagnosed with manic depressive illness and found a strong asso