1,721,078 research outputs found
Emozioni, umori e psicopatologia: Schizofrenia e depressione come disturbi affettivi
No full textPhenomena of reality distortion such as delusions or hallucinations are indubitably among the most puzzling features of mental disorders. These are instances in which patients perceive the world in a different way with respect to healthy subjects and believe things that run counter common sense or are utterly unsupported by evidence. In this paper I argue that the phenomena of reality distortion exhibited by schizophrenic and depressed patients should be characterized as different forms of affective disturbance. More specifically, I maintain that these subjects fall prey to strong affective states - i.e. emotions or moods - that prompt them to regard some environmental stimuli as exhibiting a heightened or diminished degree of salience. As a consequence, they develop a peculiar experience of reality characterized by phenomena of hypersalience (too many things are relevant) or hyposalience (hardly anything is relevant). The argument is divided into three parts: first, I review some results from psychology about the influence of moods and emotions on human experience. In particular, I draw on the notions of core affect introduced by Russell (1980; 2003) and developed later by Barrett (2006), as well as on the notions of appraisal and concern (Frijda 1986). Second, I argue that the research on affect can be successfully applied to psychiatry and that it helps to make sense of experiences of reality distortion. Third, I discuss a few case-studies of patients affected by schizophrenia and depression and I argue that both disorders involve affective disturbances where salience is significantly altered
The Trade between Fiction and Reality. Smuggling across Imagination and the World
No full textThe current debate on literary cognitivism in the philosophy of fiction typically assumes that we can rigorously distinguish between fiction and reality, and focuses on the question of whether and how works of fiction can impart propositional knowledge to the reader. In this paper we suggest that this way of framing the debate
may be problematic. We argue that works of fiction almost inevitably include a reference to the real world and that – contrary to what is usually assumed – the exchange between fiction and reality is vivid as well as potentially fruitful. We shed a new light on these complex dynamics by building on the metaphors of trade exchange and smuggling between the two worlds. While the current debate exclusively focuses on cognitively relevant goods that “officially” cross the border through “customs”, as it were, we show that exchanges between fiction and reality run deeper. Indeed, as we show, a substantial part of the cognitive impact that we derive from fiction goes “under the table” and is “smuggled” from fiction to reality. As such, it bypasses the audience’s conscious control, which in turn explains the manipulative force that fiction can exert. Smuggling takes place when cognitively relevant contents are passed on to the reader in subliminal ways, as it happens when they imprint implicit biases or
prejudices, shift perspectives or subtly modify habits or patterns of behavior. By
elaborating on the metaphors of trade exchange and smuggling, we aim at presenting a more comprehensive and nuanced understanding of the relations between fiction and reality and of the impact that imagination has on our real-world beliefs
Psicopatologia e scienze cognitive
No full textLa psichiatria e, più in generale, la psicopatologia si trovano oggi in pro- fonda trasformazione: un modello medico tradizionale, basato su sintomi e prognosi, si affianca ad approcci alla ricerca e alla diagnosi basati su studi di neuroimaging, genetica ed epigenetica, epidemiologia e farmacologia, e si confronta con modelli fenomenologici, legati alla prospettiva della prima per- sona e del corpo agente, e psicodinamici, che hanno radici storiche ma sono sostenuti da nuove metodologie di indagine sperimentale. In questo quadro, la caratterizzazione del concetto di disturbo mentale e l'individuazione dei vari disturbi mette in gioco scelte teoriche importanti che coinvolgono in maniera essenziale le scienze della mente e la filosofia.
Scopo di questo simposio è discutere alcuni aspetti concettuali della psicopatologia con filosofi italiani della scienza cognitiva. In particolare verranno affrontate le seguenti questioni:
è possibile definire la categoria generale di disturbo mentale, e co- me?
quale modello di nosologia è più adeguato per i disturbi mentali, alla luce di una concezione unitaria della mente, in cui il patologico si trova su un continuum con il normale?
Quale concezione del del sé e quale teoria della mente possono spiegare la natura dei disturbi mentali
- …
