Imperfect Cognitions

Today's post is by Valentina Petrolini (University of the Basque Country – UPV/EHU). Here she talks about a recent paper she wrote, “Too Much or Too Little? Disorders of Agency on a Spectrum” published open access in a special issue of the European Journal of Analytic Philosophy on Bounds of Rationality. Valentina Petrolini   “Rock You like a Hurricane” has been playing on repeat in my head since yesterday. I am unsure where it came from, although I am afraid a binge session of Stranger Things might have something to do with it. Despite my attempts, getting rid of the song proves surprisingly difficult. In my paper I characterize these episodes as mild cases of hypoagency . An action – in this case a mental one – is attributed to an agent, who is unsure about having initiated it and lacks a robust sense of control over it. Some instances of hypoagency – such as having an 80’s song stuck in your head – strike us as relatively innocent. We may even imagine circumstances in which...

In this post I reflect on what the Disney film Frozen can tell us about youth mental health. (This is a slightly expanded version of a post that appeared on the University of Birmingham website on 16th December 2019.) When it was released in 2013, Frozen was praised for having a leading female character who was different: a guest at Elsa’s coronation calls her a monster when she loses control; Elsa isolates herself from the people she loves for fear of harming them; and she is distressed because she does not fully comprehend what is happening to her. Elsa does not ‘fit in’, and often makes those around her feel uncomfortable. When Elsa celebrates her liberation from her stuffy conventional life with the song “Let it go”, some critics talked about Disney’s ‘gay agenda’ and Elsa was welcomed in some circles as a queer icon. Some were hoping that she would get a girlfriend in Frozen II . But there is another form of diversity that Elsa embodies just as convincingly, that...

Amy Hardy (pictured above) is a Research Clinical Psychologist at the Institute of Psychiatry, Psychology & Neuroscience at King’s College London and Psychology Lead for Posttraumatic Stress in Psychosis in the Psychosis Clinical Academic Group, South London & Maudsley NHS Foundation Trust.  In this post, Amy describes a paper  published in the journal  Schizophrenia Bulletin  by the Psychosis Research Partnership that supports the causal role of childhood victimisation in psychosis by demonstrating how understandable reactions to trauma contribute to psychotic experiences. We know there is a relationship between trauma and psychosis, and research is unraveling the puzzle of how they are linked. Findings point towards childhood victimisation playing a causal role in psychotic experiences, at least for some people. For example, trauma has been shown to occur before the onset of psychosis, trauma severity is associated with the magnitude of psyc...

This post is by Wolfram Hinzen , who is research professor at ICREA (Catalan Institute for Advanced Studies and Research), currently investigating language as an aspect of human nature, cognition, and biology at the Grammar and Cognition Lab . In this post, he summarises his recent paper "Can delusions be linguistically explained?", co-authored with Joana Rossello and Peter McKenna and published in Cognitive Neuropsychiatry. Wolfram Hinzen Explanations of delusions often revolve around meaning and knowledge. Indeed the philosopher and psychiatrist Karl Jaspers (1959) famously argued that all delusions could be understood as a radical transformation in the awareness of meaning, which became immediate and intrusive attribution. How such an abnormality might give rise to statements such as ‘I am Jesus’, ‘the Royal family are stealing my inventions’ and in extreme cases ‘I have fathered 7,000 children’ or ‘I have invented a machine to run the whole solar system powered ...

This post is by Cherise Rosen (pictured above). Cherise is an Assistant Professor in the Departments of Psychiatry and Public Health at the University of Illinois at Chicago. She has conducted extensive research on issues involving the symptoms and longitudinal course of psychosis.  Her research has focused on the phenomenological aspects of psychosis, hallucinations, delusions, metacognition, and self-disturbances. Much of her research follows mixed-methods research designs to elucidate findings that include the subjective experience.  Additionally, her research investigates the underlying epigenetic mechanisms of psychosis. In this post, Cherise summarises her recent paper (co-authored with Nev Jones, Kayla A. Chase, Hannah Gin, Linda S. Grossman, and Rajiv P. Sharma) ' The Intrasubjectivity of Self, Voices, and Delusions: A Phenomenological Analysis ', published in Psychosis.  In our recent study, we focused on the phenomenologically complex and nuanced inte...

This post is by Clara Humpston  (in the picture above), PhD student in the School of Psychology at Cardiff University. Her research focuses on the pathogenesis of psychotic symptoms and adopts a cognitive neuropsychiatric approach; by incorporating behavioural, neuroimaging, and phenomenological investigations, she aims to further contribute to a unified account of delusions and hallucinations.  Here she summarises her recent paper, co-written with Matthew Broome  (in the picture below), ' The Spectra of Soundless Voices and Audible Thoughts: Towards an Integrative Model of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations and Thought Insertion ', published in Review of Philosophy and Psychology . Thought insertion is currently described as a delusion and a first-rank symptom of schizophrenia, i.e. a false belief that the subject receives inserted, whereas auditory-verbal hallucinations (voices) are aberrant sensory perceptions in the absence of any external stimulus. Our paper s...

In today's post Rachel Gunn reports from How the Light Gets in Festival 2015. How the Light Gets in is a philosophy and music festival which takes place annually at Hay-on-Wye. This May was the seventh festival with over 650 philosophy, comedy and music events over a 9 day period. On the 24th May I attended a workshop run by Richard Bentall  (pictured above) about hallucinations – in particular AVHs (auditory verbal hallucinations) also known as ‘voice hearing’. In this workshop Bentall gave us a ‘whistle stop tour’ of the research and literature on ‘voice hearing’. He drew on his own research and the research of others on signal detection analysis (eg: Bentall & Slade, 1985 ; Badcock et. al.,2013 ), the research of Chris Frith and others (eg Frith, 1987 ; Ford & Mathalon, 2005 ) on the neuroscience behind the experience and on research from Marius Romme who has investigated aspects such as history, background and onset (including childhood trauma) to understand...

In today's post Rachel Gunn reports from The Cognitive Futures conference which took place on 13-15 April at Worcester College, University of Oxford (in the picture). Cognitive Futures in the Humanities is a multidisciplinary conference which aims to bring together literary disciplines, linguistics, theater and the arts, philosophy, psychology and neuroscience for our mutual benefit. The three day conference was held at Worcester College, Oxford and is in its third year, the first being held at Bangor and last year's being at Durham. There were a variety of panels on such diverse topics as narrative, imagination, mirroring and reflexiveness, kinesthetics, memory, embodied cognition, perception and hallucination. In the ‘clinical’ panel I (pictured above) presented a paper on thought insertion ('On thought insertion', forthcoming in a special issue of  Review of Philosophy and Psychology  on Voices and Thoughts in Psychosis) where I used first person narrativ...

On 16th and 17th of April, the School of Psychology at the University of Birmingham held a two day conference on the Neurocognition of Aberrant Experience and Belief to celebrate the launch of the Aberrant Experience and Belief research theme . The conference was organized by Jason Braithwaite and Hayley Dewe , and featured nineteen talks across two days by researchers from different disciplines interested in aberrant experience and belief. In this post I will report on just a handful of these talks (see delegates' reactions by heading over to Twitter with #AEBConference ). In his talk ‘Things that Make you go Weird’, Roger Newport reported on findings using the MIRAGE  machine, which he demonstrated over lunch on the first day. I was lucky enough to have a go and experienced the illusion of an elongated index finger and a missing right hand! Newport suggested that not having these so-called ‘aberrant’ experiences is abnormal, and that future research might look t...

Hearing the Voice logo Today we publish a post that originally appeared in The Conversation   on 11th March 2015 , authored by Angela Woods and Ben Alderson-Day (both at the University of Durham and working on Hearing the Voice ). For many people hearing voices is synonymous with schizophrenia and severe mental illness. But is this always the case? We’ve known for a long time that hearing voices, or auditory hallucination, is reported by people with a wide range of psychiatric diagnoses as well as by those who have none . Indeed, 5-13% of adults will hear voices at some point during their lives – in circumstances that may be related to spiritual experiences, bereavement, trauma, sensory deprivation or impairment, as well as mental and emotional distress. Despite this, many people, including health-care professionals, still regard hearing voices as a “first-rank” symptom of schizophrenia and assume that these voices are experienced as negative, commanding, loud, frequent and c...

Launch of the report On 27 November 2014 the British Psychological Society (Division of Clinical Psychology) launched a new ground-breaking report on Understanding Psychosis and Schizophrenia, edited by Anne Cooke. At the meeting, contributors and other interested parties offered their own view of the challenges that need to be met to ensure that people hearing voices and having unusual beliefs can get support in an effective way. I only attended the morning session, and this is a brief report of the content of the talks I heard. Peter Kinderman (Professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Liverpool) opened the session and welcomed the audience and the speakers. The first speaker, Luciana Berger (MP and shadow Minister for Public Health and Mental Health) highlighted the need to invest more in mental health and make sure that mental health receives the same attention and resources as physical health. She praised those sections of the report suggesting that psychosi...