210 research outputs found
A desirable convulsive threshold. Some reflections about electroconvulsive therapy (ect)
No full textDugogodišnja psihijatrijska praksa potvrđuje sveprisutnu uporabu farmakoloških terapija za liječenje teških mentalnih poremećaja. U mnogim okolnostima, lijekovi predstavljaju najbolje saveznike psihoterapijskih intervencija. Mnogo znanstvene literature usmjereno je na pronalaženje najboljih strategija za poboljšanje terapijske učinkovitosti kroz različite načine i vrijeme kombiniranih intervencija. Ipak, daleko smo od trijumfalnog terapijskog uspjeha. Unatoč napretku koji je postigla neuropsihijatrija, ovoj medicinskoj disciplini i dalje nedostaju dijagnostičke i prognostičke sposobnosti u usporedbi s drugim granama medicine. I dalje ostaje važeće etičko načelo za vođenje terapijskih intervencija prema kojemu je cilj poboljšanje kvalitete života pacijenata. Nažalost, psihotropni lijekovi i psihoterapije nisu uvijek uspješni za ublažavanje simptoma. U ovom radu potkrepljujem ideju da bi terapeuti trebali pružiti pacijentima otpornima na lijekove svaki učinkovit i dostupan tretman, čak i ako bi neke od takvih intervencija mogle biti invazivne, poput elektrokonvulzivne terapije (ECT). ECT na svojim plećima nosi dugu i dramatičnu povijest koju bi trebalo bolje istražiti kako bi se dobili novi uvidi. Zapravo, ECT posljednjih godina privlači sve veći interes zbog činjenice da antidepresivi kod mlađih bolesnika nisu učinkoviti i često imaju neugodne nuspojave. Štoviše, pokazujem da, zahvaljujući modernom napretku, ECT može djelovati kao uspješan oblik liječenja za specifične i rijetke slučajeve, poput teške depresije (s pokušajima samoubojstva) i katatonije.Long-standing psychiatric practice confirms the pervasive use of pharmacological therapies for treating severe mental disorders. In many circumstances, drugs constitute the best allies of psychotherapeutic interventions. A robust scientific literature is oriented on finding the best strategies to improve therapeutic efficacy through different modes and timing of combined interventions. Nevertheless, we are far from triumphal therapeutic success. Despite the advances made by neuropsychiatry, this medical discipline remains lacking in terms of diagnostic and prognostic capabilities when compared to other branches of medicine. An ethical principle remains as the guidance of therapeutic interventions: improving the quality of life for patients. Unfortunately, psychotropic drugs and psychotherapies do not always result in an efficient remission of symptoms. In this paper I corroborate the idea that therapists should provide drug-resistant patients with every effective and available treatment, even if some of such interventions could be invasive, like Electroconvulsive Therapy (ECT). ECT carries upon its shoulders a long and dramatic history that should be better investigated to provide new insights. In fact, ECT has attracted renewed interest in recent years. This is due to the fact that antidepressant drugs in younger patients show often scarce effectiveness and unpleasant side-effects. Moreover, I show that, thanks to modern advances, ECT may work as a successful form of treatment for specific and rare cases, such as severe depression (with suicide attempts) and catatonia
Luca Tonetti, L’arte di prolungare la vita. Medici, filosofi e alchimisti alla ricerca della longevità, Editrice Bibliografica, Milano 2022
No full textProsocialità, creatività sessuale e tecnologie per l’assistenza medica a distanza. Cambiamenti sociali attraverso nuovi comportamenti nella terza età
No full textThe demographic perspective presents a portrait of a new society, where individuals aged over 60 and over 70 will constitute a signi cant portion of the population in industrialized countries. This scenario, which is evolutionarily and culturally unprecedented, will impact political orientations, socio-economic structures,
and medical and welfare needs. While current infrastructures and sociohealthcare characteristics may not be equipped to handle this future scenario, there are models and technological tools in the eld of Aging sciences and remote healthcare that can offer capabilities to transform the future aspect of society from a problem into a resource by focusing on the needs, possibilities, and risks of the elderly person
Learning through Others. Natural pedagogy and mindreading: a possible cooperation
No full textThe theory of natural pedagogy provides a model of social learning based on the direct communicative ostensive relation and aimed to the transfer of generic cultural knowledge. The pedagogical transmission of information originates from an explicit manifestation of teaching made by knowledgeable adults, who are naturally inclined to manifestly provide their cultural baggage to naïve conspecifics. The domain of transferable knowledge encompasses artifact functions, novel means actions, first words, gestural symbols, social practices, and rituals. This teaching process can be fast and efficient in virtue of a natural inclination possessed by infants to seek information and decode signals of ostensive communication. In this sense, the natural pedagogy
represents, as the two proponents – György Gergey and Gergely Csibra – claim, «a communicative system of mutual design specialized for the fast and efficient transfer of new and relevant cultural knowledge from knowledgeable to ignorant conspecifics». This book suggests that natural pedagogy utilises early belief attribution competences
NEUROSCIENCES APPLIED TO ACTION INTERPRETATION. Epistemological conflicting perspectives for infant social learning
No full textIn the last decades neurosciences provided so much important contributions to philosophy of mind that nowadays the latter is inconceivable without the former in every topic this philosophical branch deals with. The studies connected to action understanding provided great advances in the field of developmental psychology for what concerns social learning abilities grounded on imitation. All information received by the infants are transmitted through actions. It would be impossible to conceive infant imitation without action interpretation. According to Meltzoff’s “like-me” hypothesis, imitation is possible in human infants already at birth in virtue of an identification mechanism with the adults supported by mirror neurons (MNs) based simulation system. However, if we split the types of actions in two general categories, instrumental and communicative actions, we will see, according to an alternative account, how infants modulate differently the comprehension of observed scenarios, depending on whether they are passive observers (in the case of instrumental actions) or actively involved (in the case of communicative actions). Such a recognition of action features seems to be evident through different degrees of motor activation, as ERP techniques applied to infants and young adults revealed. Neuroscientific evidences highlight the crucial role of brain areas connected to motor activation for action interpretation, but at the same time they allow both a bottom-up process and a top-down process interpretation whereby the motor activation is seen asa product of action understanding rather than its determining causal factor. The aim of the present study is to examine such epistemological conflicting perspectives underlying action interpretation, and their repercussions on different social learning theories
"Tizzoni fiammeggianti": l'assistenza all'infanzia nella Fiume dannunziana
No full textDurante l'Impresa Fiumana, la precaria situazione economica venutasi a creare portò a misure assistenziali straordinarie in favore di centinaia di minori. Si trattava di viaggi organizzati da comitati speciali col compito di portare centinaia di bambini fiumani in molte città italiane per essere accolti ed ospitati da famiglie di volontari. Il saggio tratta della questione della cura all'infanzia nella città di Fiume, con un focus sul modello assistenziale già messo in atto in Italia, dai socialisti, nei confronti dei bambini di Vienna. L'intento è quello di mostrare che, lungi da essere soltanto una modalità itinerante di intervento sociale, i viaggi in Italia dei bambini fiumani furono anche una forma di propaganda politica che saldò dannunzianesimo e fascismo
The Role of the Ostensive Communicative Context in the Childhood Social Learning
No full textIn 2006 Gergely Csibra and György Gergely proposed a new type of social cognitive learning mechanism, called “natural pedagogy”, grounded on the ostensive communication. According to their theory human infants show very early sensitivity to communicative and ostensive cues that indicate teaching contexts; they tend to interpret certain actions (e.g. gaze shift or pointing) occurring in these communicative contexts as referential cues to identify the referents about which new information will be provided. Furthermore, they argue, infants can infer that the information revealed about the referents in such ostensive communicative teaching contexts will not only be new and relevant, but will consist of publicly shared and universal cultural knowledge that is, thus, generalizable and shareable with other members of the cultural community. This last crucial point makes rise the question if mindreading capacities are involved in the pedagogical system, insofar infants are able to ascribe to others beliefs in the form of knowledge content transmitted and acquired in ostensive way
Introduction: Advances in developmental psychology: theoretical and empirical perspectives
No full textThis thematic focus comprises five invited contributions from developmental psychologists, philosophers, and cognitive scientists whose research centers on the communicative and social dimensions of children’s early cognitive development. It provides a rich and updated overview of the main advances in developmental psychology from different theoretical and empirical perspectives. The selection of the contributions has been guided by the intent to offer the reader a wide range of alternative views on children’s early cognitive abilities, thereby giving representativeness to different theoretical approaches and providing a comprehensive picture of the main debates and research directions in the field.
We are convinced that child development research is facing a challenging and complex task that can no longer be postponed, given the numerous, and high-quality studies on infants’ cognitive abilities on the one hand, and the increasing empirical evidence on very young infant’s ability to read the context and to be receptive to emotional reactions to stimuli. There has been a tendency, so far, to separate cognitive development from the self-regulatory development of emotions in early childhood. We believe that this separation in developmental psychology and cognitive science needs to be overcome; in this regard, the Focus we proudly present in this issue of “Mefisto” has the humble intention of beginning to intertwine these fields of investigation.
Among all the sophisticated cognitive and affective capacities, we believe that infant communication can offer fertile ground for such a meeting. If we accept the assumption that human emotional experience – throughout the individual life span – is inseparable from the relationships and social contexts in which it arises, we can identify the parameters that define the social context and how the latter change throughout development. The following essays offer insightful suggestions along these lines
EUJAP’S SPECIAL ISSUE “THE BOUNDS OF RATIONALITY” EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION
No full textWe thought it appropriate for a philosophical reflection on the concept of rationality and irrationality to start out with this excerpt from Nietzsche’s The Gay Science (1882). The idea that error may be an intrinsic part of
life—surely a Baconian echo—appears particularly useful to zoom in on all the difficulties that arise whenever we focus on the boundaries surrounding rationality. In our everyday experience of the world, as well as of ourselves and our minds, our capacity for rational judgment proves staggeringly unsuccessful in carving out a stable dominion for itself. We delude ourselves to be rational even when we employ apparently solid a posteriori arguments. Confabulation is part and parcel of our mental life: it comes in the form of the explanations that we provide to ourselves and others for actions or thoughts that we are unable to authentically understand (Hirstein 2009)
LORIA, PITRÈ, VILLARI: IMPERTINENZE, RESISTENZE, CORRISPONDENZE
No full textThis work explores the contradictory relationship of intense scientific rivalry between Giuseppe Pitré and Lamberto Loria. To do this, the author analyzes the correspondence collections of the Historical Archives of the “Giuseppe Pitrè” Ethnographic Museum of Palermo and of the National Museum of Popular Arts and Traditions in Rome, crossing them with other sources already analyzed in previous studies
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