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...

In this post I interview Steve Cole Professor of Medicine, Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences at David Geffen UCLA School of Medicine . VM: Loneliness has been characterized in reference to feelings of distress and dysphoria resulting from a mismatch between a person’s desired and achieved levels of social relations. In some of your latest papers you suggest that the experience of loneliness is not a uniquely human phenomenon but that, as any other adaptive predispositions, it can be found across phylogeny. In what sense can we say that animals desire social relations and experience loneliness?  SC: We begin by assuming that certain experiences are privileged to human beings but the more we understand about how human experience arises from the way the brain works, the more we find that there are small or vestigial versions of even the most esoteric human experiences in other animals. Most animals, for example monkeys and mammals, broadly speaking, are to some extent, ...

In today's post, Peter Kinderman introduces his new book ‘ A Prescription for Psychiatry: Why We Need a Whole New Approach to Mental Health and Wellbeing ’, which is published by Palgrave Macmillan. I am professor of Clinical Psychology at the University of Liverpool and President-Elect of the British Psychological Society . My research interests are in psychological processes underpinning wellbeing and mental health. I have published widely on the role of psychological factors as mediators between biological, social and circumstantial factors in mental health and wellbeing. I have been awarded (with colleagues) a total of over £6 million in research grant funding (from the Medical Research Council, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Wellcome Trust, the NHS Forensic Mental Health Research and Development Programme, the European Commission and others). My most recent grant, awarded in 2015, was for a total of over £1m from the Economic and Social Research Council (ESR...

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). ...

WASP 50th Jubilee Congress On November 13th-15th 2014, the World Association of Social Psychiatry held its 50th Jubilee Congress . The event was a joint conference with the Royal College of Psychiatrists , organised in Park Plaza Hotel in Central London. The Congress assembled a programme of wide scientific interest, marking the achievements of social psychiatry as a keystone to excellence in mental health care. It welcomed participants from 50 different countries and consisted of 60 lectures, seminars, workshops and talks as well as nearly 200 poster presentations. This report presents only a small selection of what was an enormously rich and interesting programme. In his opening speech, the WASP President Dinesh Bhugra addressed current challenges to psychiatric practices in the 21st century. Bhugra put a particular emphasis on mental health issues arising as a result of globalization and use of modern technology, including cyber-bullying, internet-based religious radi...