Anaclitic and Introjective Personality Distinctions among Psychotherapy Outpatients: Examining Clinical Change across Baseline and Therapy Phases

S. J. Blatt and colleagues (e.g., Blatt, 1995; Blatt & Blass, 1996; Blatt & Shichman, 1983) have theorized that individuals develop and function along two basic lines— that of interpersonal relatedness and that of self-definition. These two modes, while moderately-oscillatory across the lifespan, suggest two respective, relatively-fixed, personality configurations—the anaclitic and the introjective. It is suggested that psychopathology arises when investment in the themes of one’s preferred personality configuration become enduringly over-emphasized. Individuals with anaclitic psychopathologies tend to be plagued by feelings of helplessness and weakness, and they tend to have fears of being abandoned; they generally have a depleted sense of self. Individuals with introjective psychopathologies tend to be plagued by feelings of guilt, self-criticism, and inadequacy; they generally have a distorted sense of self. Some individuals struggle with both types of feelings and problems. Previous research, conducted mostly among seriously disturbed inpatients in long-term therapy, with only a few measurements over time, suggests differential responses to treatment as a function of these anaclitic—introjective distinctions. Uniquely, the present study employs a form of hierarchical modeling, using continuously collected outcome measurements, to examine therapeutic course and outcome in relatively short-term psychotherapy among outpatients. More specifically, it tests a number of hypotheses examining the role of personality configuration in clinical change during baseline as well as therapy phases. Results indicate that duration-of therapy, and therapeutic alliance levels did not differ significantly as a function of personality configuration; pre-treatment level of symptomotology did not differ between anaclitic and mixed-type patients, and was lower among introjective patients—who as a group reported a symptomotology-level that was subclinical. In the sample as a whole, significant symptom improvement occurred during baseline-phase—most of which was driven by clear improvement in the anaclitic and mixed-type groups, while attenuated some by the lack of improvement in the introjective group. During therapy-phase, patients as a whole, and by group, did not report any meaningful change in symptomotology. Several possible explanations for this no-therapy-effect phenomenon, as well as study-limitations, are discussed

The Neural Basis of Conceptualizing the Same Action at Different Levels of Abstraction

People can conceptualize the same action (e.g., "riding a bike") at different levels of abstraction (LOA), where higher LOAs specify the abstract motives that explain why the action is performed (e.g., "getting exercise"), while lower LOAs specify the concrete steps that indicate how the action is performed (e.g., "gripping handlebars"). Prior neuroimaging studies have shown that why and how questions about actions differentially activate two cortical networks associated with mental-state reasoning and action representation, respectively; however, it remains unknown whether this is due to the differential demands of the questions per se or to the shifts in LOA those questions produce. We conducted functional MRI while participants judged pairs of action phrases that varied in LOA and that could be framed either as a why question (Why ride a bike? Get exercise.) or a how question (How to get exercise? Ride a bike.). Question framing (why vs. how) had no effect on activity in regions of the two networks. Instead, these regions uniquely tracked parametric variation in LOA, both across and within trials. This suggests that the human capacity to understand actions at different levels of abstraction is based in the relative activity of two cortical networks

A formal methodology for integral security design and verification of network protocols

We propose a methodology for verifying security properties of network protocols at design level. It can be separated in two main parts: context and requirements analysis and informal verification; and formal representation and procedural verification. It is an iterative process where the early steps are simpler than the last ones. Therefore, the effort required for detecting flaws is proportional to the complexity of the associated attack. Thus, we avoid wasting valuable resources for simple flaws that can be detected early in the verification process. In order to illustrate the advantages provided by our methodology, we also analyze three real protocols

Decoding Brain Activity Associated with Literal and Metaphoric Sentence Comprehension Using Distributional Semantic Models

Recent years have seen a growing interest within the natural language processing (NLP)community in evaluating the ability of semantic models to capture human meaning representation in the brain. Existing research has mainly focused on applying semantic models to de-code brain activity patterns associated with the meaning of individual words, and, more recently, this approach has been extended to sentences and larger text fragments. Our work is the first to investigate metaphor process-ing in the brain in this context. We evaluate a range of semantic models (word embeddings, compositional, and visual models) in their ability to decode brain activity associated with reading of both literal and metaphoric sentences. Our results suggest that compositional models and word embeddings are able to capture differences in the processing of literal and metaphoric sentences, providing sup-port for the idea that the literal meaning is not fully accessible during familiar metaphor comprehension

Dissociation between Semantic Representations for Motion and Action Verbs: Evidence from Patients with Left Hemisphere Lesions

This multiple single case study contrasted left hemisphere stroke patients (N = 6) to healthy age-matched control participants (N = 15) on their understanding of action (e.g., holding, clenching) and motion verbs (e.g., crumbling, flowing). The tasks required participants to correctly identify the matching verb or associated picture. Dissociations on action and motion verb content depending on lesion site were expected. As predicted for verbs containing an action and/or motion content, modified t-tests confirmed selective deficits in processing motion verbs in patients with lesions involving posterior parietal and lateral occipitotemporal cortex. In contrast, deficits in verbs describing motionless actions were found in patients with more anterior lesions sparing posterior parietal and lateral occipitotemporal cortex. These findings support the hypotheses that semantic representations for action and motion are behaviorally and neuro-anatomically dissociable. The findings clarify the differential and critical role of perceptual and motor regions in processing modality-specific semantic knowledge as opposed to a supportive but not necessary role. We contextualize these results within theories from both cognitive psychology and cognitive neuroscience that make claims over the role of sensory and motor information in semantic representation

Data provenance to audit compliance with privacy policy in the Internet of Things

Managing privacy in the IoT presents a significant challenge. We make the case that information obtained by auditing the flows of data can assist in demonstrating that the systems handling personal data satisfy regulatory and user requirements. Thus, components handling personal data should be audited to demonstrate that their actions comply with all such policies and requirements. A valuable side-effect of this approach is that such an auditing process will highlight areas where technical enforcement has been incompletely or incorrectly specified. There is a clear role for technical assistance in aligning privacy policy enforcement mechanisms with data protection regulations. The first step necessary in producing technology to accomplish this alignment is to gather evidence of data flows. We describe our work producing, representing and querying audit data and discuss outstanding challenges.Engineering and Applied Science

Presentation_1_Revisiting the relation between syntax, action, and left BA44.pdf

Among the many lines of research that have been exploring how embodiment contributes to cognition, one focuses on how the neural substrates of language may be shared, or at least closely coupled, with those of action. This paper revisits a particular proposal that has received considerable attention—namely, that the forms of hierarchical sequencing that characterize both linguistic syntax and goal-directed action are underpinned partly by common mechanisms in left Brodmann area (BA) 44, a cortical region that is not only classically regarded as part of Broca’s area, but is also a core component of the human Mirror Neuron System. First, a recent multi-participant, multi-round debate about this proposal is summarized together with some other relevant findings. This review reveals that while the proposal is supported by a variety of theoretical arguments and empirical results, it still faces several challenges. Next, a narrower application of the proposal is discussed, specifically involving the basic word order of subject (S), object (O), and verb (V) in simple transitive clauses. Most languages are either SOV or SVO, and, building on prior work, it is argued that these strong syntactic tendencies derive from how left BA44 represents the sequential-hierarchical structure of goal-directed actions. Finally, with the aim of clarifying what it might mean for syntax and action to have “common” neural mechanisms in left BA44, two different versions of the main proposal are distinguished. Hypothesis 1 states that the very same neural mechanisms in left BA44 subserve some aspects of hierarchical sequencing for syntax and action, whereas Hypothesis 2 states that anatomically distinct but functionally parallel neural mechanisms in left BA44 subserve some aspects of hierarchical sequencing for syntax and action. Although these two hypotheses make different predictions, at this point neither one has significantly more explanatory power than the other, and further research is needed to elaborate and test them.</p