The brain is a prediction machine that cares about good and bad - Any implications for neuropragmatics?

Experimental pragmatics asks how people construct contextualized meaning in communication. So what does it mean for this field to add neuroas a prefix to its name? After analyzing the options for any subfield of cognitive science, I argue that neuropragmatics can and occasionally should go beyond the instrumental use of EEG or fMRI and beyond mapping classic theoretical distinctions onto Brodmann areas. In particular, if experimental pragmatics ‘goes neuro’, it should take into account that the brain evolved as a control system that helps its bearer negotiate a highly complex, rapidly changing and often not so friendly environment. In this context, the ability to predict current unknowns, and to rapidly tell good from bad, are essential ingredients of processing. Using insights from non-linguistic areas of cognitive neuroscience as well as from EEG research on utterance comprehension, I argue that for a balanced development of experimental pragmatics, these two characteristics of the brain cannot be ignored

Schema therapy for emotional dysregulation: Theoretical implication and clinical applications

The term emotional dysregulation refers to an impaired ability to regulate unwanted emotional states. Scientific evidence supports the idea that emotional dysregulation underlies several psychological disorders as, for example: personality disorders, bipolar disorder type II, interpersonal trauma, anxiety disorders, mood disorders and posttraumatic stress disorder. Emotional dysregulation may derive from early interpersonal traumas in childhood. These early traumatic events create a persistent sensitization of the central nervous system in relation to early life stressing events. For this reason, some authors suggest a common endophenotypical origin across psychopathologies. In the last 20 years, cognitive behavioral therapy has increasingly adopted an interactiveontogenetic view to explain the development of disorders associated to emotional dysregulation. Unfortunately, standard Cognitive Behavior Therapy (CBT) methods are not useful in treating emotional dysregulation. A CBT-derived new approach called Schema Therapy (ST), that integrates theory and techniques from psychodynamic and emotion focused therapy, holds the promise to fill this gap in cognitive literature. In this model, psychopathology is viewed as the interaction between the innate temperament of the child and the early experiences of deprivation or frustration of the subject\u2019s basic needs. This deprivation may lead to develop early maladaptive schemas (EMS), and maladaptive Modes. In the present paper we point out that EMSs and Modes are associated with either dysregulated emotions or with dysregulatory strategies that produce and maintain problematic emotional responses. Thanks to a special focus on the therapeutic relationship and emotion focused-experiential techniques, this approach successfully treats severe emotional dysregulation. In this paper, we make several comparisons between the main ideas of ST and the science of emotion regulation, and we present how to conceptualize pathological phenomena in terms of failed regulation and some of the ST strategies and techniques to foster successful regulation in patients

For the Record: [Un]Official Voices at the V&A

This overview of the historical and affective value of oral history recordings draws on my current research on curators at the Victoria & Albert Museum. Questions about the changing definition of the title ‘curator’ over time but also about the way the oral history interview as a medium demonstrates this are raised. In telling of their lives, curators’ agency is extended to encompass the construction of their narrative identity. The entanglement of the ‘unofficial’ and ‘official’ persona of the curator is revealed. Nevertheless, is it possible to disentangle this distinction? Is it even necessary? Or, is the personal voice the medium for reflecting and transmitting the multi-layered snapshots of experience, and that what engages is this very quality of the life lived as a story

'No news today': talk of witnessing with families of missing people

The paper contributes new ways of thinking about and responding to interview talk in the context of recent scholarship on interviewing, orality and witnessing. We proceed by paying attention to specific examples of interview talk on the experience of absence via the collecting of narratives from families of missing people. We highlight how ambiguous emotions are bound up with broader ways of recognizing such talk, largely exercised here as reflections on what is involved in witnessing those who are missing in communications with police. Tensions that may be produced by official ways of regarding and responding to family character witness of the missing are discussed in the context of two case studies. In response to these tensions, we offer suggestions for finding different spaces through which to value such ‘witness talk’ by families, particularly via ideas from grief scholarship. The paper concludes by briefly reflecting on how interviewing encounters might produce versions of praxis in which the content of talk is not just, and simply, ‘apprehended’ as academic evidence

Barnes Hospital Bulletin

https://digitalcommons.wustl.edu/bjc_barnes_bulletin/1264/thumbnail.jp

Designing the interface between research, learning and teaching.

Abstract: This paper’s central argument is that teaching and research need to be reshaped so that they connect in a productive way. This will require actions at a whole range of levels, from the individual teacher to the national system and include the international communities of design scholars. To do this, we need to start at the level of the individual teacher and course team. This paper cites some examples of strategies that focus on what students do as learners and how teachers teach and design courses to enhance research-led teaching. The paper commences with an examination of the departmental context of (art and) design education. This is followed by an exploration of what is understood by research-led teaching and a further discussion of the dimensions of research-led teaching. It questions whether these dimensions are evident, and if so to what degree in design departments, programmes and courses. The discussion examines the features of research-led departments and asks if a department is not research-led in its approach to teaching, why it should consider changing strategies

Focal Spot, Fall/Winter 1990

https://digitalcommons.wustl.edu/focal_spot_archives/1056/thumbnail.jp