98 research outputs found
The parent?infant dyad and the construction of the subjective self
Developmental psychology and psychopathology has in the past been more concerned with the quality of self-representation than with the development of the subjective agency which underpins our experience of feeling, thought and action, a key function of mentalisation. This review begins by contrasting a Cartesian view of pre-wired introspective subjectivity with a constructionist model based on the assumption of an innate contingency detector which orients the infant towards aspects of the social world that react congruently and in a specifically cued informative manner that expresses and facilitates the assimilation of cultural knowledge. Research on the neural mechanisms associated with mentalisation and social influences on its development are reviewed. It is suggested that the infant focuses on the attachment figure as a source of reliable information about the world. The construction of the sense of a subjective self is then an aspect of acquiring knowledge about the world through the caregiver's pedagogical communicative displays which in this context focuses on the child's thoughts and feelings. We argue that a number of possible mechanisms, including complementary activation of attachment and mentalisation, the disruptive effect of maltreatment on parent-child communication, the biobehavioural overlap of cues for learning and cues for attachment, may have a role in ensuring that the quality of relationship with the caregiver influences the development of the child's experience of thoughts and feelings
Dynamics of Two Higgs Doublet CP Violation and Baryogenesis at the Electroweak Phase Transition
We quantitatively study the charge transport mechanism of electroweak
baryogenesis in a realistic two-Higgs-doublet model, comparing the
contributions from quarks and leptons reflecting from electroweak domain walls,
and comparing the exact profile of the CP-violating phase with a commonly used
ansatz. We note that the phenomenon of spontaneous CP violation at high
temperature can occur in this model, even when there is no CP violation at zero
temperature. We include all known effects which are likely to influence the
baryon production rate, including strong sphalerons, the nontrivial dispersion
relations of the quasiparticles in the plasma, and Debye screening of gauged
charges. We confirm the claim of Joyce, Prokopec and Turok that the reflection
of tau leptons from the wall gives the dominant effect. We conclude that this
mechanism is marginally strong enough to produce the observed baryon asymmetry
of the universe.Comment: 49 pp. latex, 6 figures; section on diffusion expanded and corrected,
published versio
âThe functional fallacy: on the supposed dangers of name repetitionâ
Whenever the theme of personal naming comes up, both in academic debate and in public
opinion, we encounter a tendency to take for granted that there is some sort of collective
interest in the clear and unambiguous individuation of persons through their names.
âSocietyâ or âcultureâ, it is presumed, would not function as well if that failed, so homonymy
is automatically taken to be dysfunctional. This kind of explanation carries a deep
sense of validity in common sense attitudes and it clearly imposes itself upon all who have
discussed this issue over the past few decades, both in history and anthropology. In this
essay, I argue that, on the one hand, there are fallacious implications to this explanatory
proclivity, to which I call the functional fallacy, and, on the other hand, that it finds its
power of evidence in the implicit expectations that characterize late modern thinking concerning
what is a person and how persons are constituted. I identify three dispositions that
need to be overcome: sociocentrism, individualism and the paradigm of the soul
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