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

Sensitivity analysis, molecular systematics and natural history evolution of Scathophagidae (Diptera: Cyclorrhapha: Calyptratae)

The 60 000 described species of Cyclorrhapha are characterized by an unusual diversity in larval life-history traits, which range from saprophagy over phytophagy to parasitism and predation. However, the direction of evolutionary change between the different modes remains unclear. Here, we use the Scathophagidae (Diptera) for reconstructing the direction of change in this relatively small family ( 250 spp.) whose larval habits mirror the diversity in natural history found in Cyclorrhapha. We subjected a molecular data set for 63 species (22 genera) and DNA sequences from seven genes (12S, 16S, Cytb, COI, 28S, Ef1-alfa, Pol II) to an extensive sensitivity analysis and compare the performance of three different alignment strategies (manual, Clustal, POY). We find that the default Clustal alignment performs worst as judged by character incongruence, topological congruence and branch support. For this alignment, scoring indels as a fifth character state worsens character incongruence and topological congruence. However, manual alignment and direct optimization perform similarly well and yield near-identical trees, although branch support is lower for the direct-optimization trees. All three alignment techniques favor the upweighting of transversion. We furthermore confirm the independence of the concepts ‘‘node support’’ and ‘‘node stability’’ by documenting several cases of poorly supported nodes being very stable and cases of well supported nodes being unstable. We confirm the monophyly of the Scathophagidae, its two constituent subfamilies, and most genera. We demonstrate that phytophagy in the form of leaf mining is the ancestral larval feeding habit for Scathophagidae. From phytophagy, two shifts to saprophagy and one shift to predation has occurred while a second origin of predation is from a saprophagous ancestor