Imperfect Cognitions

This post is by me ( Lisa Bortolotti ), summarising a paper I wrote with Matthew Broome on how affective instability may be a causal factor in paranoia. It was published in a special issue of  Discipline Filosofiche on Philosophical Perspectives on Affective Experience and Psychopathology, edited by Anna Bortolan and Alessandro Salice. Matthew Broome Most accounts of paranoia rely on cognitive biases and perceptual anomalies. However, recent empirical research has shown that affective instability may play an important role.  What is affective instability? Unexpected changes of mood include emotional dysregulation, lability, impulsiveness, and swings. Collating the main overlapping dimensions, definitions, and their measurement scales, a recent systematic review proposed that affective instability is “rapid oscillations of intense affect, with a difficulty in regulating these oscillations or their behavioural consequences” ( Marwaha et al. 2013 ).  How does affecti...

On June 9th, the University of Birmingham hosted a workshop, " Cognition, Affect, and Motivation: Conceptual and Empirical Issues ", sponsored by Project PERFECT and the Mind Association . The conference brought together academics and students from philosophy and related disciplines, as well as members of the public, who were interested in issues relating to the interaction between cognition, affective responses and motivation. It aimed to foster interdisciplinary discussion around philosophical questions about the relation between these three drivers of human behaviour. Maura Tumulty ’s talk focussed on how we can take control over our mental states, especially those with strong affective content. Many of our mental states are controlled by our judgements. However, Tumulty discussed states that are in tension with our sincerely endorsed judgements.  Say, for example, that a person is predisposed to be attracted to smoking although she sincerely endorses...