Week 4 - Self determination - Agency and control

Question 1

What is agency?

Answer 1

A sense of agency: that feeling you have when you know you’ve done something; that can vary.

E.g., flicking a light switch, you know you’ve done that yourself. Something in the cognitive systems pings to say that thing i did caused something to happen.

Registers a cause and effect relationship.

FEELING IN CONTROL (AGENCY)

Question 2

Explicit VS Implicit measures

Answer 2

Explicit: Just how much do you feel like you caused something to happen

Implicit: an indirect way of assessing someone’s sense of control over their actions, common example is the “intentional binding” paradigm, where the perceived time between an action and its consequence is measured to infer agency perception.

Question 3

Conditions that relate to agency:

Answer 3

• Schizophrenia
• Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD)

Question 4

Symptoms of schizophrenia:

Answer 4

• Hallucinations; hearing or seeing things that do not exist outside of the mind
• Delusions; unusal beliefs not based on reality
• Muddled thoughts based on hallucinations or delusions
• Losing interest in everyday activities
• Not caring about your personal hygiene
• Wanting to avoid people, including friends

Question 5

Obsessive Compulsive Disorder symptoms

Answer 5

• Obsessive thoughts
• Compulsive behaviours
• ‘Not just right’ experiences
• Lack of ‘completion’ in actions
• Altered agency as central to OCD