PSY 324 Final Exam Flashcards
Chapter 1: The Living Dead - Cotards Syndrome / symptoms
[SYMPTOMS]
- Cotard’s DELUSION: belief that one is dead
Cotard’s Syndrome: believing body parts are missing or decaying, GUILT, feeling condemned, immortality
- most still do NOT attempt suicide (no will to do it)
- no desire to eat or sleep, don’t find pleasure in things
- PRONOUNCED experience of depression (worst of the worst)
- usually SHORT lived, patients can recover from it
Chapter 2: The Unmaking of Your Story - Alzheimer’s / symptoms
- Alzheimer’s
[SYMPTOMS]
- only condition where NARRATIVE SELF is eroded
- can be vascular, or due to build up/blockage of proteins in brain
Chapter 3: The Man Who Didn’t Want His Leg - Body Identity Integrity Disorder / symptoms
- Body Identity Integrity Disorder
[SYMPTOMS]
- fierce desire to amputate 1+ of one’s limbs; “the limb is NOT part of the bodily self constructed by the brain”
- often paralleled to Gender Identity Disorder
- ppl can id specifically where a limb “stops being theirs”
- most people are happy/feel much better after surgery
Chapter 4: Tell Me I’m Here: Schizophrenia - people (2)
- Schizophrenia
[PEOPLE]
a. Laurie: suicide attempt off a building, felt like someone else was controlling her actions; has convos w her neg voices, tries to rationalize them; problems w cutting herself/self-harm
b. Sophie: grew up w schizophren. mom, began as a scientist, later developed schizophren.; her boundary b/w inner and outer worlds dissolved
- Perceived the world as insubstantial, where solid boundaries melted away into an
amorphous whole.
Chapter 6: The Self’s Baby Steps - Autism / symptoms
- Autism
[SYMPTOMS]
- inability to relate themselves in the ordinary way to people and situations; trouble carrying out “affective/emotional” contact with others
- is innate, from birth
- sensory hypersensitivity
- inability to integrate sensory information; thought to always be experiencing an “unpredictable” environ - can’t assimilate to environ. conditions/feedback well
- –> this contributes to insistence on “Sameness”; try to create order to offset the constant unpredictability
Chapter 7: When You Are Beside Yourself - Out of Body Exp. / symptoms
[SYMPTOMS] - 1. doppleganger-effect: seeing or feeling another “body” of onself nearby, often fts strong emotions (anger, fear, panic), can seem to inhabit the other body –> “autoscopic phenomena”
- Out of Body Exp: leave body and perceive it from an outside perspective
Chapter 8: Being No One, Here and Now - Ecstatic Seizures / symptoms
[SYMPTOMS]
1. heightened self-awareness 2. sense of physical well-being (protection from negativity/harm) 3. intense positive emotions (harmony, connection w the world)
(can’t tell how long they last); triggered by pleasant things
Chapter 5: I Am As If A Dream: Dissociation/Depersonalization - symptoms
[SYMPTOMS] -1. disembodiment 2. emotional numbing (no empathy) 3. trouble remembering things that they did 4. de-realization of surroundings
- ppl do “reality testing”, trying to convince themselves they’re tripping (Sarah ordering tacos)
- Can develop as a response to extreme danger and the anxiety assoc. with it
- people struggle to articulate it well
Chapter 5: I Am As If A Dream: Dissociation/Depersonalization - people (2)
[PEOPLE]
a. Nicholas, Addict parents
- DEP. began in early teens, lasted for years
- went to rehab for time, has muted emotional responses, lifted when his daughter was born
b. Sarah, drug induced
- was crossfaded and started tweaking, went away naturally after a cpl weeks
Chapter 5: I Am As If A Dream: Dissociation/Depersonalization - neuroscience
- Damasio: the proto-self - to keep homeostasis body must make maps of what’s going on inside/internal sensations
+ protoself - contains expected body states (ex. state of your organs, etc.)
- based in upper brain stem
+ primordial feelings - reflect urrent state of body, evidence of existing
+ core self - capture relationship between proto-self and objects, mental reps of what’s happening to us [most animals ONLY have this]
+ autobiographical self - interacts with protoself to create one’s personality - PARADOX: emotions are muted, but being dissociated causes intense distress and panic (“i have no emotions, it makes me so unhappy”)
- Show far less activity in the L ANT. INSULA (resp. for interoception) –> may stem from over-active VentroLat PFC (resp for top-down ctrl of emotions) - May be a result of prediction errors of brain
- Bayesian brain: the brain making probability-based inferences about likely causes of sensory inputs, confusion here –> disorder
- the importance of somatosensory info in registering a “sentient self”
Chapter 4: Tell Me I’m Here: Schizophrenia - neuroscience
- Frith’s “comparator model” of the sense of agency, and his account of schizophrenia:
+ During arm movement, the comparator matches actual sensations with predicted
sensations. If there is no mismatch, we feel that we performed the action — we own the action, giving us a sense of agency. A mismatch makes us feel that
someone else, an external agency, is responsible.
o Tickling - Schizophrenic ppl can tickle themselves - IPSEITY: the implicit sense of feeling that you are here (you don’t think about this directly).
- Auditory Vocal Hallucinations: raw material is unbidden thoughts
- “predictive brain” malfunction, ppl don’t realize their thoughts are their own
- Corollary Discharge
- the brain uses the corollary signal to tell whether the arm moved because you tried to move it, or whether it moved due to an external cause
o correspond to the experience of will or intention
“efference copy” of each action sent throughout body
o Arguments that schizophrenia is a disturbance of corollary signals
- the brain uses the corollary signal to tell whether the arm moved because you tried to move it, or whether it moved due to an external cause
Chapter 4: Tell Me I’m Here: Schizophrenia - symptoms
+ positive: delusions, hallucinations (auditory, 75% of ppl get them)
o negative: apathy, emotional flatness
o disorganized: jumbled speech
+ Disrupted sense of agency (someone else ctrling their actions)
+ inability to decipher between reality and imagined things externally
Chapter 6: The Self’s Baby Steps - Autism / people (2)
[PEOPLE]
- Alex - child, accounts from parents
- hated being hugged, wouldn’t play with other kids/siblings, didn’t assign value judgements to ppl (ex. he’s nice, she’s smart), very solitary, no close relationships
- unable to draw very well (motor skills), particularly bad at drawing bodies
- Cohen - adult, says he thinks” love toward his sister, but doesn’t feel love toward her; talking to others is really taxing;
Chapter 6: The Self’s Baby Steps - Autism / neuroscience
[NEUROSCIENCE]
- difference btween “I” (Ecological self) and “me” (interpersonal self)
- Q: is proper management of our social self/social relationships and body necessary for proper development of the self?
- Theory of Mind: ability to infer what other ppl are thinking; autistic children perform poor on Sally-Anne marble task
- develops between ages 4-6
- tested also with Appearance-Reality (AR) test [egg vs stone egg exp] –> neurotypical + Down’s kids do fine
- SUGGESTS: when environ. stimuli conflicts with personal knowledge, PERCEPTUAL info overrides other info in ASD kids (ex. they maintain that it’s an egg)
- TOM Deficits may be associated with EXEC FUNC deficits
- ex. not knowing that you have to put socks on before shoes
- Relevant brain regions: TPJ, Precuneus, vMedialPFC
- In ASD Adults: introspection and inner-speech is impaired; can overcome with explicit cognition
Chapter 7: When You Are Beside Yourself - Out of Body Exp. / people (4)
[PEOPLE]
- Ashwin - author’s cousin, brain tumor induced doppleganger-effect
- Michaele - intense pain during childbirth, had an OBE then came back
- Thomas Metzinger: studying to be a philosopher, had 1st OBE at a meditation retreat (could hear himself breathing), was eventually convinced that his OBE’s were hallucinations
- Chris: spoke with his brother over the phone during a doppleganger effect episode –> heautoscopy (intense emotions, involvement of sensory-motor sys, INSULA)
