Welcome to Incels.is - Involuntary Celibate Forum

Welcome! This is a forum for involuntary celibates: people who lack a significant other. Are you lonely and wish you had someone in your life? You're not alone! Join our forum and talk to people just like you.

Mental problems are written in your face

1708273299821

1708273385846

1708273397256
 
1708298150222

1708298196212

The quotidian experience of cognitive sense, of ‘hearing’ a voice within the mind
or ‘seeing’ a scene of childhood through the lens of memory, seems to be so
everyday as to hardly warrant closer examination. And yet, it is largely these
faculties of interiority and their cycles of recurrence in the mind that constitute our
understanding of the past, of the world around us, and consequently of ourselves. The
phenomena of the inner voice and the intimate cinema of the mind are the internal echoes
of our experience of the outside world. They are the reverberations and reflections of the
outside within. Inner vocality, vision, and their conglomeration in the experience of memory
are perhaps the richest example of what Gaston Bachelard called “the dialectic of outside
and inside,” of exteriority and interiority. Among many other questions that we will
approach here, we must ask: to what degree is the self constituted by voices from within
and without? How is the inner voice bound up with self-identification? And what is the
role of memory and interiority in identification processes? Our conceptions of self and
our perceptions of the world is bound to and thoroughly effected by the phenomena of
the inner voice and eidetic vision. This analysis seeks to examine the manner in which
these complex phenomenal processes perform the dialectic of inside and outside and the
extent to which voice, image, and affect comprise the ambiguous elements at the threshold
between interiority and exteriority.
Our inner speech seemingly constitutes the most private and immediate aspect of self-
consciousness. We intuit that our inner speech is our own, that it is spoken and controlled
by ourselves. Though the din of inner voices can be unwieldy, our common presumption
/ 6160 / JOURNAL OF COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND AESTHETICS
is that, as an aspect of our inner life, this speech is of our own possession and is uniquely
bound to us specifically. Adriana Cavarero has developed what she calls a “vocal ontology
of uniqueness;” structured much like Levinas’s ethical model of intersubjectivity, Cavarero’s
system places the voice in an ontologically primary position. Here, the voice is always
already social in that it immediately posits an interlocutionary relation. Most central to
her system is the ontological uniqueness that is revealed in the voice of each individual.
She invests the voice with an inherent and unassailable authenticity and truth value. She
writes that “the truth of the vocal…proclaims simply that every human being is a unique
being, and is capable of manifesting this uniqueness with the voice, calling and infecting
the other, and enjoying this reciprocal manifestation” (7). The relation and interlocution
of voices is a reciprocal “relation among uniquenesses;” perhaps most importantly for our
particular concerns: for Cavarero, the voice, though not exactly a “sort of secret nucleus
of the self,” is however “what the unique person has that is most hidden and most genuine”
(16, 4). According to this formulation the voice is (1) ontologically primary in humans,
(2) essentially veridical and authentic, (3) embodied, (4) reciprocally relational, and (5)
the bearer of a singular uniqueness. In this system, the voice is the avatar of the particular
uniqueness of the self, it is in my complete possession, and when interiorized, remains a
hidden domain of privacy that can withdrawal from a relation with an exterior other,
though it continues in a relation of the self to itself.
While Cavarero argues for an essential, authentic hiddeness to the voice that precedes
articulate speech, she largely fails to theorize in her “vocal phenomenology of uniqueness”
the embodied voice that “resonates, [though] no air is agitated. No larynx swells, no
eardrum vibrates,” that is interior vocality (Cavarero 7, “Voice” 58). Some basic questions
arise here: is the interior voice an articulate voice? Can it properly be called speech? And
when we hear the voice of the other in our own minds, whose uniqueness is borne on that
voice, that of the self or the other, for can we properly say that we possess within ourselves
that which is supposedly most unique and hidden in the other? It is clear that the voice of
the other reverberates in the mind; at any moment we can mentally conjure a chorus of
unique voices that we’re familiar with. As light effortlessly passes through a sheer veil, in
like fashion the voices outside ourselves easily pass into interiority and remain. The supposed
privacy of interiority is continually trespassed, most often against our will, calling into
question the strict inside/outside distinction, as well as the privacy and uniqueness of the
inner voice, and the control or possession we have over the voice (within or without).
Denise Riley, like Cavarero, argues for the inherent sociality of the voice, but to such a
seemingly radical degree as to eclipse its uniqueness. Cavarero’s contention that “the
voice belongs to the living; it communicates the presence of an existent in flesh and
bone,” is starkly opposed by Riley’s proposition that “the dead chatter away as the inner
speech of the living” (Cavarero 177, “Voice” 71). The latter’s notion of interior speech is
one of ambiguous agency. While we are subjects of “linguistic occupation” by the chorus
of remembered voices that inhabit our inner life, our inner voice is neither produced by
“the exertion of pure will nor [is it] straightforwardly spoken” by these various voices of
memory. Given this “principled ambiguity” of interior vocalic control, a theory of the voice
 
1708298275894

A marked difficulty in verbalizing emotions is considered a core characteristic of the personality trait of alexithymia. In a study with 52 low- and 50 high-alexithymic, healthy subjects, covering a wide age range, semi-standardized interviews covering emotional topics and explicitly addressing the concept level of emotion were conducted. High-alexithymic subjects produced fewer different types of emotions words and fewer synonyms for a target emotion than low-alexithymics indicating that the diversity of the semantic space of emotion words is reduced in alexithymia. Interestingly, compared to low-alexithymics high-alexithymic subjects reported fewer symptomatic, physiological-expressive terms to describe emotions. This result suggests that experiential aspects of the proposed emotion schemata in alexithymics are less differentiated, supporting the idea of a difficulty in emotion conceptualization.
1708298304208

In contrast to the original conceptualization of body image as an expression of meanings-emotions stimulated by body activity, many investigators conceptualize body image as satisfaction with one’s physical appearance assessed with questionnaires. However, authors following psychodynamic psychology advocate that meanings-emotions expressed with body activity and when fantasizing or verbalizing are interrelated unless developmental interferences resulted in the repression of embodied meanings. In response, a method was developed that asks a participant to perform various actions-gestures and share thoughts—emotions that came to mind. The heuristic value of this method is illustrated by studies that explored the relations among meanings-emotions that participants expressed in response to body activity, Rorschach inkblots and when discussing upsetting events. The results support the proposed body image test and illustrate its potential for psychodynamic approaches to personality assessment and psychotherapy. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

1708298328303

Affect tolerance can be defined as the ability to respond to a stimulus which would ordinarily be expected to evoke affects by the subjective experiencing of feelings, rather than by an apparent non-reaction response or a discharge pattern of response such as impulsive behavior, somatic dysfunction, or personality disorganization. The purpose of this study is to enhance our understanding of affect tolerance by developing a model of affect-response. The literature suggests that affect tolerance is particularly influenced by three variables—the capacity to fantasize, the state of the inner container, and the capacity to verbalize affect. Examining the response, A, to an affect-evoking stimulus, S, we see that it has five characteristics: multiple states, sudden jumps, inaccessibility, hysteresis and divergence. And since the mental apparatus is not a static system but rather a dynamic system of forces interacting seeking equilibrium, we are naturally led to a consideration of catastrophe theory, a field designed to model discontinuous phenomena particularly in dynamic systems governed by a potential, for a model of affect-response.
As an introduction, we examine first a greatly simplified version of the clinical situation using the cusp catastrophe model. Then we consider the richer, more complex butterfly catastrophe model. This model, given by the single formula A5 = LA3 + FA2 + CA + S, where L is the degree of impairment of the capacity to verbalize affect, F is the capacity to fantasize, and C is the degree of impairment of the inner container, effectively models the affect-response phenomenon. It is consistent with clinical data, provides us with a coherent synthesis of disparate clinical material, and appears to have predictive power as well. Some implications for research, psychoanalytic theory and treatment are discussed.
1708298354223

This study explored the extent to which alexithymia can be seen as a dissociative phenomenon, examining three facets of dissociation in relationship to the five dimensions of alexithymia. The dissociative facets were: pathological psychoform dissociation (amnesia and derealization/depersonalization), non-pathological psychoform dissociation (absorption) and somatoform dissociation. The alexithymia facets were: difficulties emotionalizing, fantasizing, identifying, verbalizing and analyzing emotions. Various self-report measures were used including the latest developed measure of alexithymia, the Bermond Vorst Alexithymia Questionnaire (BVAQ). Canonical correlation results indicated that somatoform dissociation was the strongest predictor of alexithymia. For younger males, somatoform dissociation was directly related to all facets of alexithymia except for fantasizing. Males with somatoform dissociation, irrespective of age, appeared to have the highest difficulties emotionalizing and identifying emotions. Whilst somatoform and pathological psychoform dissociation were related to difficulties identifying emotions for younger females, no type of dissociation directly influenced the development of any alexithymia dimension for women.
1708298380798


Abstract​

Objective: To review neurobiological studies of alexithymia in order to achieve a better understanding of the relationship between alexithymia and psychosomatic diseases and psychiatric illnesses. Methods: Neurobiological studies of alexithymia were reviewed with a special focus on how emotional and cognitive elements of alexithymia are reflected in earlier research. Results: Studies that have correlated alexithymia to corpus callosum dysfunctioning have mainly found impairments in cognitive characteristics of alexithymia, whereas from studies of right hemisphere and frontal lobe deficits, it may be concluded that both cognitive and emotional characteristics of alexithymia are impaired. Conclusion: The fact that there is no general agreement on how to define alexithymia seems to have hampered theoretical and empirical progress on the neurobiology of alexithymia and related psychosomatic diseases and psychiatric illnesses. Alexithymia should no longer be approached as one distinct categorical phenomenon and follow-up studies should monitor subjects according to both the cognitive and emotional characteristics of alexithymia.

Introduction​

Over the past two decades, there has been an expanding scientific interest in the regulation of emotion and in the impact of dysregulated emotion on mental and physical health [1]. Alexithymia refers to difficulties in emotional self-regulation and is thought to be one of several possible risk factors in a variety of medical [2], [3], [4], [5], [6], [7] and psychiatric disorders [8], [9], [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], [16], [17]. The alexithymia concept stems from the field of the psychology of emotions and psychosomatics. A large proportion of patients with psychosomatic complaints showed difficulties in emotional self-regulation. Sifneos [18] introduced the term ‘alexithymia’ for these emotional difficulties, which was derived from “the Greek alexis (no words), thymos (emotion).” Five salient characteristics of alexithymia have been described: (1) a reduction or incapacity to experience emotions; (2) a reduction or incapacity to verbalize emotions; (3) a reduction or incapacity to fantasize; (4) an absence of tendencies to think about one's emotions; and (5) difficulty in identifying emotions [15], [19]. From the first introduction of the term alexithymia, it has been evaluated, criticized and refined. Whereas some researchers regard the cognitive, evaluative aspects of alexithymia as most important [17], others suggest that the fundamental deficit in alexithymia is a limited—and in extreme cases nonexistent—ability to consciously experience emotion [20]. Drawing on recent knowledge from neurobiology, Bermond [21], [22] distinguishes two main forms of alexithymia (Types I and II). Type I alexithymia is characterized by the absence of the emotional experience and, consequently, by the absence of the cognition accompanying the emotion. Type II alexithymia is characterized by a selective deficit of emotional cognition with sparing of emotional experience. Given the important psychological differences between the two types of alexithymia, it is suggested here that the classification into two types of alexithymia is useful towards examining the existing literature on the neurobiology of alexithymia, since it may offer an explanation for the distinct neurobiological and related physiological findings in the literature.
Many of the early studies on alexithymia are of questionable validity, as they were conducted with measures that were shown to lack reliability and validity, such as the Schalling Sifneos Personality Scale (SSPS) and the MMPI alexithymia scale [1]. For several years, however, the Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS) has proven to be the most reliable and valid method for measuring several characteristics of alexithymia [23], [24], [25]. The TAS demonstrated a replicable four-factor structure: difficulty identifying feelings (Factor 1); difficulty describing feelings (Factor 2); reduced daydreaming (Factor 3); and a tendency to think in externally oriented ways (Factor 4). Since the items assessing daydreaming showed little coherence with the other factors, two successive revisions of the scale have led to the 20-item Toronto Alexithymia Scale (TAS-20), eliminating all items assessing imaginal activity [26], [27], [28].
Recently, the validity and reliability of a new instrument to assess alexithymia, the Bermond–Vorst Alexithymia Questionnaire (BVAQ), have been established [29], [30]. The BVAQ contains five subscales: (1) emotionalizing, (2) fantasizing, (3) identifying, (4) analyzing and (5) verbalizing emotions. Analogous to the distinction in cognitive and emotional aspects of alexithymia within the hypothesized subtypes of alexithymia [21], [22], the subscales of the BVAQ exhibit a second-order (two-factor) structure, with the subscales emotionalizing and fantasizing representing an emotional component, and the subscales identifying, analyzing and verbalizing emotions representing a cognitive component of alexithymia, respectively. The total TAS-20 score shows high correlations with the cognitive, but not the emotional, component of the BVAQ [29], [30]. Both difficulty fantasizing and difficulty emotionalizing within the BVAQ remained statistically uncorrelated with the total TAS-20 and weakly correlated or uncorrelated with the TAS-20 subscales [29]. Therefore, as a diagnostic instrument, the TAS-20 may emphasize the cognitive and underestimate the emotional component of alexithymia. It is suggested here that both the original and revised versions of the TAS emphasize the cognitive component of alexithymia, since most, if not all, factors of the TAS represent cognitive characteristics of alexithymia.
Alexithymia has often been attributed to neurobiological dysfunctioning. Some studies found evidence for dysfunctioning of the corpus callosum in alexithymia, whereas other studies found a relationship between alexithymic characteristics and dysfunctioning of the right cerebral hemisphere, anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) or the orbitofrontal cortex. The aim of this article is to review neurobiological studies of alexithymia in order to achieve a better understanding of the relationship between alexithymia and psychosomatic diseases and psychiatric illnesses. To that aim, neurobiological studies of alexithymia were reviewed with a special focus on how emotional and cognitive elements of alexithymia are reflected in earlier research, seeking evidence for the two main forms of alexithymia as originally defined by Bermond [21].
 
1708298555183


Symptoms of psychosis have been proposed to form part of a continuous distribution of experiences in the general population rather than being an all-or-nothing phenomenon. Indeed, schizotypal signs have been reported in subjects from non-clinical samples. Emotional processing has been documented to be deficient in schizophrenia. In the present study, we tested the hypothesis whether putatively psychosis-prone subjects would show abnormalities in emotion processing. Based on the extremes of Launay–Slade Hallucination Scale (LSHS) ratings of 200 undergraduate students, two groups of subjects (total N=40) were selected. All 40 participants filled in the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (SPQ). We compared both groups on an alexithymia questionnaire and on four behavioral emotional information processing tasks. Hallucination-proneness was associated with an increased subjective emotional arousal and fantasy-proneness. Although no differences between the high and low group were observed on three behavioral emotion processing tasks, on the affective word-priming task presentation of emotional stimuli was associated with longer reactions times to neutral words in high schizotypal subjects. Also, SPQ scores correlated with several emotion processing tasks. We conclude that these findings lend partial support to the hypothesis of continuity between symptoms characteristic of schizophrenia and psychosis-related phenomena in the normal population.
A growing number of studies consider psychosis as a continuum with normal functioning at one end and abnormal functioning (psychosis) at the other end Verdoux and van Os, 2002, Johns and van Os, 2001, Claridge, 1997. In accordance with this view, Johns and van Os (2001) have reviewed evidence indicating that psychotic signs, often called schizotypal signs or schizotypal traits, are present in healthy people to a certain extent. Schizotypy refers to the personality trait of experiencing ‘psychotic’ symptoms (Claridge, 1997) and schizotypy may be conceptualized as a predisposition to schizophrenia at the level of the organization of the personality Meehl, 1989, Vollema and van den Bosch, 1995. Such schizotypal traits, e.g., referential thinking and odd or eccentric behavior have been hypothesized to be normally distributed in the non-clinical population (Chapman et al., 1976).

One of the cardinal dysfunctions associated with schizophrenia concerns processing of emotional information (McKenna, 1994), including disturbances in the expression, experience and perception of emotions. Indeed, Kreapelin (1907) regarded emotional disturbances, such as flattened and inappropriate affect, to be characteristic of schizophrenia. Although schizophrenic patients inadequately express emotions Berenbaum and Oltmanns, 1992, Knight and Valner, 1993, Kring et al., 1994, Kring and Neale, 1996, Kohler et al. (2000) and Myin-Germeys et al. (2000) suggested that the subjective experience of emotion is much less disturbed in schizophrenia.

Sifneos (1973) introduced the term ‘alexithymia’ to describe abnormalities in affect regulation. More specifically, alexithymia refers to difficulties in recognizing, identifying and describing one's own emotions. Thus, alexithymic individuals have impaired affect regulation (Bagby and Taylor, 1997) and may also show specific inabilities to communicate emotions while the experience of emotion might be intact (Kihlstrom et al., 2000). Cedro et al. (2001) demonstrated that schizophrenic patients have higher scores on an alexithymia questionnaire than healthy controls, i.e., they have more problems in identifying and verbalizing their emotions.

With regard to behavioral measures of emotional processing in schizophrenia, deficits in emotion recognition have been found (Edwards et al., 2002). In addition, schizophrenic patients appear to inadequately process facial affect Addington and Addington, 1998, Streit et al., 2001 and demonstrate a reduced left-perceptual bias in the processing of emotional chimeric faces (Gooding et al., 2001). There might also be a bias towards material with a negative emotional valence, as observed in a study in which hallucinating patients were more sensitive to negative words compared to controls (Johns et al., 2002). Moreover, a recent study (Hoschel and Irle, 2001) reported that negative emotional expressions yield stronger priming effects in schizophrenia patients compared to control subjects (hyperpriming).

The present study is important for several reasons. First, research on psychosis-prone or schizotypal individuals may help to develop preventive interventions for schizophrenia. Cannon et al. (2002) and McGorry et al. (2002) already showed that early interventions in prodromal schizophrenic patients reduces the risk of early transition to psychosis in young people and possibly reduces the incidence of schizophrenia. Second, the study of non-clinical subjects with schizotypal traits enables researchers to study schizotypal phenomena without the confounding contribution of factors such as medication, duration of illness and severe psychopathology or institutionalization. Third, previous research has concentrated on cognitive dysfunctions that may be associated with psychotic traits in non-clinical samples Aleman et al., 2000, Suhr, 1997. To our knowledge, the present study is the first to examine emotional processing in such a sample.

The aim of this study was to investigate whether healthy individuals with high positive schizotypy differ from individuals with low positive schizotypy (as screened by the Launey–Slade Hallucination Scale (LSHS)) on measures of subjective and objective emotional information processing tasks. Following the schizophrenia literature positive schizotypal signs could, like positive symptoms in schizophrenia, be associated with an attentional bias for negative-valenced material, including threat, anger and sadness Phillips et al., 1999, Mandal et al., 1999. In contrast, negative symptoms of schizophrenia reflect a more generalized and severe emotion-recognition deficit Mandal et al., 1999, Schneider et al., 1995.

On subjective emotion processing (as measured with an alexithymia questionnaire), we predicted that individuals with positive schizotypal signs would report lower levels of identifying and verbalizing their own emotions compared to individuals without positive schizotypal signs. On the other hand, higher levels of emotionalizing might be expected, as an increase in arousal and anxiety has been associated with occurrence of positive symptoms in schizophrenia (Delespaul et al., 2002). With regard to behavioral emotional information processing, we concentrated on verbal and facial affect recognition. On verbal affect recognition tasks, we hypothesized that persons with positive schizotypal signs would show an increased sensitivity to emotional material, specifically an attentional bias for material with a negative valence. Thus, greater priming especially for negative-valenced words and a reduced Stroop effect in an emotional counting Stroop paradigm for the positive schizotypal persons compared to persons with less schizotypal signs. On facial affect recognition tasks, we predicted that persons with positive schizotypal signs would show a reduced left perceptual bias in a chimeric faces task (David and Cutting, 1990) and more errors in recognizing degraded facial affect (Mandal et al., 1998).

Finally, in a more exploratory analysis, we also included the Schizotypal Personality Questionnaire (SPQ). First, to explore relations between positive schizotypy and the other two dimensions, disorganization and negative schizotypy in a non-clinical sample. Second, to explore the relation between the SPQ subscales and the emotional measures. Given the exploratory nature of this analysis, we only hypothesized that subjects selected for positive schizotypy would also show negative schizotypal signs and emotional processing characteristics associated with negative symptoms. We based this prediction on the fact that positive and negative symptoms generally occur together in patients with schizophrenia (McKenna, 1994). For example, whereas positive symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions occurred in about 70% of a sample of 306 concordant patients with schizophrenia in the International Pilot Study on Schizophrenia (World Health Organization, 1973), flatness of affect was also found in 66% of the sample (Murray, 1997).
 
1708349349037


...

1708349364301

1708349373140


1708349391709

1708349445255

1708349451937

 

 
ye people can definitely indicate my mental health from my disposition. I'm very jitty, twitchy, quiet which is reflected in my lack of social skills. When most people speak to me I give them 1 word answers which is completely alien to most normal people in society
 

Similar threads

Jealous Freak
Replies
8
Views
186
BoneHermit666
B
Stupid Clown
Replies
13
Views
291
Rapistcel
Rapistcel
Rapistcel
Replies
18
Views
275
_meh
_meh
Persecuted
Replies
16
Views
415
DPRKcel
DPRKcel

Users who are viewing this thread

shape1
shape2
shape3
shape4
shape5
shape6
Back
Top