Emotion and imitation in early infant-parent interaction: a longitudinal and cross-cultural study

Following a brief introduction to the diverse views on the motives for imitation, a review of the literature is presented covering the following topics: early theories and observations concerning the origin and development of human imitation in infancy; recent theoretical models that have emerged from experimental studies of infant imitation and from naturalistic studies of imitation in infant -mother communication; and traditional and recent theoretical and empirical approaches to imitative phenomena in infant -father interaction. This review leads to the following conclusions:a) The failure of attempts to confirm certain ideas, hypotheses and suggestions built into the theories and strategies of earlier studies does not detract from their great contribution, which set the foundations upon which recent research is carried forward.b) Despite the different theoretical frameworks and the lack of a consensus as to the best method for investigating early imitative phenomena in experimental settings, neonatal imitation is now accepted as a fact.c) Imitative phenomena found in empirical studies focusing on infant -father interaction, as well as the relevant theoretical interpretations, are characterised by a contradiction; theory predicts bidirectional regulations, but studies employ an empirical approach that favours the view that regulation is only on the parental side.In this investigation, observations were made of thirty infants, fifteen from Greece and fifteen from Scotland. All were seen every 15 days interacting with their mothers and with their fathers at home, from the 8th to the 24th week of life. A total of 540 home recordings were made. Units of interaction that contained imitative episodes were subjected to microanalysis with the aid of specialized software, in a multi -media system that provides the capability for detection, recording, timing and signal analysis of the variables under consideration to an accuracy of 1 /25th of a second.The main findings may be summarised as follows: a) Imitation was evident, as early as the 8th week, irrespective of the country, the parent or the infant's sex. b) Cultural differences, reflecting the predominance of non -vocal and vocal imitative expressive behaviour in the two countries, were found. c) The developmental course of early imitative expressive behaviours was typically non -linear. d) Turn-taking imitative exchanges predominated over co-actions. e) Parents were found to imitate their infants more than vice versa. f) Regulation of emotion, either in the sense of emotional matching or of emotional attunement, proved to be the underlying motivating principle for both parental and infant imitations.The implications of these findings for understanding universal intersubjective nature of early imitation in infant -father and infant-mother interactions are discussed

Externalizing and interpreting autonomic arousal in people diagnosed with autism

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, School of Architecture and Planning, Program in Media Arts and Sciences, 2011.Cataloged from PDF version of thesis.Includes bibliographical references (p. 123-128).This research explores how externalization of physiological states helps to provide an awareness of hidden stressors through a home-based study, a lab-based study, and a school-based study in order to facilitate social understanding of people who are nonspeaking, especially those diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). For people who experienced with hyper- or hypo-sensory responses (e.g., many people diagnosed with ASD), over-aroused situations or " meltdowns" are often accompanied by incorrect attributions of potential stressors in their everyday lives. A series of physiology-based technologies are implemented as a toolkit (e.g., providing in-situ visual and tactile feedback, or enabling interactive and analytical indexing of collected data) for assisting the interpretations of individuals' arousal states. First, the home-based study is a participant-driven study following Kanner's perspective of documenting "fascinating peculiarities" in autism. I arrive in a family as an ethnographer documenting a dynamic process of hypothesizing and interpreting situations in order to seek a dialogue with a young man with ASD who is able to name objects, but does not use language in typical ways. Second, the lab-based study is a single-case design experiment with direct replications focusing on class teachers' interpretations of arousal states in students diagnosed with ASD. The goal of this study is to assess how real-time displays of student physiological activity (i.e. heart rate) affect teacher estimation of arousal and relaxation. The results suggest that arousal estimation varies as a function of how physiological information is displayed. Third, the school- based study presents a collaboration with an occupational therapist (OT) and three teenage participants with ASD. This study documents the iterated investigations of the OT's interpretations with and without the presence of students' physiological data (i.e. skin conductance data). This study demonstrates how participants' arousal information assists the OT in making judgments from a clinical perspective. This dissertation presents an experimental method and toolkit to help calibrate typical assumptions about people diagnosed with ASD. With the intervention of physiology-based technologies, this research shows a novel approach of debugging reciprocal understanding of people in both naturalistic and experimental environments.by Chia-Hsun Jackie Lee.Ph.D

A vision of human solitude: Rhetoric of isolation and ephemerality in two novels by Virginia Woolf

This thesis investigates the interrelationship between the two dominant themes, isolation and human ephemerality found in two of Virginia Woolf\u27s books, To the lighthouse and The Waves

A strange mirror : realism, ambiguity and absence in the work of Harmony Korine

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 162-169).This dissertation examines the work of Harmony Korine with a particular focus on his use of realism as a disruptive critical tool. My study combines a theoretical and an analytical project. My aim is to defend Korine's works against charges of naive realism by revealing the limits of a structuralist approach to Korine's realism and arguing, instead, for the adoption of the phenomenologically grounded, realist criticism of Andre Bazin. I use Bazin' s observations about the referential or indexical relationship between the camera and the physical world and his definition of 'phenomenological realism' to argue for a privileged and fruitful relationship between Korine's realism and the physical or affective dimensions of the cinematic image. I supplement this discussion with a critical application of theories of affect forwarded by such theorists as Vivian Sobchack and Laura U. Marks, as well as theories of the grotesque. In addition, my thesis extends the links that Bazin draws between the restraint defining phenomenological realism and a productive ambiguity to argue that, rather than presenting an unsophisticated realist approach, Korine's realism operates as the primary critical tool in a confrontation with dominant sign systems and, ultimately, with the limitations of both verbal and filmic language

Cognitive mechanisms associated with clinical and non-clinical psychotic experiences

The studies reported in this thesis were designed to address several important issues in symptom-specific cognitive models of psychosis. The design of these studies was guided by a commitment to the continuity hypothesis of psychosis, which holds that psychotic experiences exist on a continuum stretching into the healthy population. The thesis firstly examines a two-factor cognitive model of persecutory ideation, focusing primarily on the roles of thought suppression, intrusive thoughts, anxiety, social rank, and the jumping to conclusions bias. The thesis then turns to an examination of cognitive factors involved in hallucinations and, in particular, auditory verbal hallucinations. Chapters in this section describe a series of experimental and theoretical studies of the relations between intrusive thoughts and hallucinations, agency and hallucinations, and the role of inner speech in auditory verbal hallucinations. Two-factor models of persecutory delusion (PD) formation propose that in the first stage of PD formation an initial implausible idea is triggered. The second stage of Deformation is then the uncritical adoption of such a thought as a belief, which may be due to cognitive biases such as the jumping to conclusions (JTC) bias often present in those with PDs. The first study (Chapter 1) investigated whether thought suppression, and its interaction with anxiety, was associated with levels of non-clinical persecutory delusion like beliefs (PDLBs). It was hypothesised that thought suppression could play a role in the formation and maintenance of PDLBs through its tendency to lead to intrusive thoughts, and to trigger initial implausible ideas. Consistent with this proposal, thought suppression was positively associated with PDLBs only when anxiety was high. The second study (Chapter 2) examined a prediction of the two-factor model, namely that a second-stage factor, the jumping to conclusions (JTC) bias, should interact with first-stage factors, specifically social anxiety, social rank, anomalous experiences and thought suppression. Consistent with the two-factor model, the JTC bias was found not to be an independent predictor of PDLB levels, but its interaction with social rank was a significant predictor of PDLBs. It was concluded that although evidence was found for the two-factor model, the presence of the JTC bias was neither a sufficient nor necessary condition for PDLB formation. In addition to being postulated to play a role in persecutory delusion formation, intrusive thoughts have been implicated in the formation of hallucinations, and particularly auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs). The third study (Chapter 3) created a new tool for assessing hypnagogic and hypnopompic (H&H) hallucinations, and showed that the presence of auditory H&H hallucinations, but not visual or felt-presence H&H hallucinations, was associated with a greater tendency to experience intrusions. The fourth study (Chapter 4) developed an extended model of AVHs in which rumination, as well as thought suppression, were proposed to be involved in the formation of AVHs, through their creation of intrusive thoughts. This model was tested in a healthy sample of individuals using structural equation modelling, and the proposed model was found to be a good fit to the data. The study on rumination and AVHs highlighted that agency disruption factors are likely to be involved in leading these self-generated cognitions to be experienced as alien. A theoretical analysis (Chapter 5) was made of the mechanisms likely to be involved in this disruption of agency, involving the concept of a neurocognitive action self-monitoring system (NASS) and a breakdown in the processes leading to the illusion of conscious will. A consideration was also given to how a Vygotskian conception of inner speech could contribute to inner speech models of AVHs. The next study (Chapter 6) then performed an empirical test of the proposal that the disruption of agency in AVHs is associated with a faulty NASS. Subliminal primes were used as a proxy for the predicted state proposed to exist in the NASS, which leads to the experience of agency. It was proposed that those prone to hallucinations would be less able to use primes to enhance their experience of agency, due to deficits in their NASS. A statistically significant trend was found for the more hallucination-prone to be less able to use subliminal primes, but this effect was only found in women. It was concluded that although this was a promising finding, the effect was too small and gender-specific to be practical to test in a clinical sample of patients with AVHs. The proposal that AVHs result from a breakdown in the NASS, specifically a corollary discharge deficit between speech production and reception areas, has been claimed to be supported by electrophysiological event-related potential (ERP) studies. However, only a simplistic conception of inner speech has thus far been investigated in ERP studies, and the potential confounding effects of attention have not been considered. The Nl ERP component response to auditory stimuli during inner speech was studied in as ample of healthy volunteers (Chapter 7). Although dampening of the Nl response was found during all types of inner speech, as compared to a silent baseline condition, dampening was also found during a mental rotation task. It was concluded that dampening of the Nl ERP component during inner speech is due to attention factors, and is not indicative of a corollary discharge mechanism. Finally, a theoretical analysis considers whether inner speech models of AVHs are able to satisfactorily account for the phenomenology of the experience (Chapter 8). It is concluded that subcategorisation of auditory hallucinations may be necessary, with memory-based, inner speech-based, and ictal-based models each accounting for a subcategory of auditory hallucinations. The concept of the dynamic developmental progression of AVHs is introduced and avenues for future research in this area highlighte