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Being someone: A neuropsychological model of the integrative self

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Abstract

Fully functioning persons are characterized by a unity in thought, emotion, and action that amounts to “being someone” or having “an integrated self”. Psychologists have typically treated the integrated self as merely a descriptive term that summarizes significant behavioral achievements. In the present article, the authors seek to place the integrated self on firmer theoretical grounds, by relating the integrated self to a neurobiological system with distinct processing characteristics. Building on personality systems interactions theory (Kuhl, 2000b), the authors suggest that the integrated self is supported by parallel-distributed processing in the right anterior cortex. From this neuropsychological model, the authors derive seven functions of the integrated self: Emotional connectedness, broad vigilance, utilization of felt feedback, unconscious processing, integration of negative experiences, extended resilience, and extended trust. The authors discuss the seven functions and their mutual relations, along with relevant behavioral and neurobiological evidence. Finally, the authors highlight the importance of positive relationships for optimal development of the integrated self, and discuss how the integrated self might be further cultivated to improve self-regulation and health.

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... Results revealed that subjects in the rational-reasoning condition were less satisfied with their choice when asked about 3 weeks after the experimental session compared to subjects who chose a poster intuitively. Reduced levels of satisfaction in the analytical group may have occurred because analytic processing typically abstracts from the emotional and personal meaning of a decision at hand (Kuhl et al., 2015). In other words, analytic processes reduce the complexity of a problem by breaking ambiguous information down to one aspect that is important in a particular situation (Dijksterhuis, 2004; Kuhl et al., 2015). ...
... Reduced levels of satisfaction in the analytical group may have occurred because analytic processing typically abstracts from the emotional and personal meaning of a decision at hand (Kuhl et al., 2015). In other words, analytic processes reduce the complexity of a problem by breaking ambiguous information down to one aspect that is important in a particular situation (Dijksterhuis, 2004; Kuhl et al., 2015). This is of advantage for logical problem solving but of disadvantage when the problem includes divergent aspects that need to be considered (e.g., solving a complex personal problem; interpersonal relationships; dealing with an illness; see Kuhl et al., 2015). ...
... In other words, analytic processes reduce the complexity of a problem by breaking ambiguous information down to one aspect that is important in a particular situation (Dijksterhuis, 2004; Kuhl et al., 2015). This is of advantage for logical problem solving but of disadvantage when the problem includes divergent aspects that need to be considered (e.g., solving a complex personal problem; interpersonal relationships; dealing with an illness; see Kuhl et al., 2015). For the latter problem type, intuitive decision-making seems to be advantageous. ...
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... Vitality is not only a mental state, but also relates to healthy bodily functioning (see also Ryan & Frederick, 1997). Due to this integrated mind-body nature, vitality represents an organismic construct (Kuhl, Quirin, & Koole, 2015;Ryan, Kuhl, & Deci, 1997). Somatic factors such as diet, exercise, sleep patterns, and substance use have for instance been shown to influence vitality (Rozanski & Kubzansky, 2005). ...
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... Vitality is not only a mental state, but also relates to healthy bodily functioning (see also Ryan & Frederick, 1997). Due to this integrated mind-body nature, vitality represents an organismic construct (Kuhl, Quirin, & Koole, 2015;Ryan, Kuhl, & Deci, 1997). Somatic factors such as diet, exercise, sleep patterns, and substance use have for instance been shown to influence vitality (Rozanski & Kubzansky, 2005). ...
... According to Personality Systems Interactions (PSI) theory (Kuhl, 2000), this coping may be facilitated by volitional processes. Volition in this conception is a higher form of action control that allows the person to coordinate a multitude of specific motivational directives in a coherent manner (Kuhl, Quirin, & Koole, 2015). Because volition operates at a general level, it affords the person with greater flexibility in adjusting to increases in external demands. ...
Article
Vitality, or feeling alive and full of energy, is a universal human experience that is grounded in the body and linked to positive motivation, health, and wellbeing. Prior work demonstrated that demanding conditions can lower vitality, presumably by undermining intrinsic need satisfaction (Ryan & Deci, 2008). In the present research, we examined if the devitalizing effects of demands are moderated by individual differences in action versus state orientation. Prior work has shown that action-oriented people can efficiently disengage from demands, whereas state-oriented people tend to get preoccupied by them. We therefore hypothesized that state-oriented people would suffer more from the devitalizing effects of demands than action-oriented people. As expected, Study 1 (N = 171) found that life demands were associated with lower body vitality among people higher in state orientation, but not among people higher in action orientation. Study 2 (N = 259) replicated the findings of Study 1, and showed that priming demands lowered body vitality among people higher in state orientation, but not among people higher in action orientation. Study 3 (N = 541) provided a pre-registered replication of Study 1, and showed that the effects were not due to variations in subjective wellbeing, general vitality, or mood. These findings suggest that action-state orientation plays a key role in maintaining the self’s energetic resources.
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... These integrated networks of personality systems are closely connected with the autonomic nervous system. Person-oriented emotion regulation is not mediated by explicit intentions, but rather by integrated feelings or intuitions about appropriate courses of action (Kuhl, Quirin, & Koole, 2015). ...
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The annual Applied Positive Psychology Symposium dates back to the inaugural symposium held in May 2015, designed as an opportunity for the first cohort of graduates of the MSc Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) at Bucks to present their completed dissertation work to a wider audience, and prepare papers for the symposium’s Proceedings. Since then, the symposium has grown considerably in scope, aiming to build a community of education and new research in the fast-growing field of applied positive psychology, from across the UK and now Ireland as well. MAPP programmes can currently be found in the UK at Anglia Ruskin University (ARU), Buckinghamshire New University (Bucks), and the University of East London (UEL). Other universities also offer some positive psychology courses as part of undergraduate and postgraduate programmes. This Proceedings represents the contributions of students, graduates, and staff of many of these programmes to the 5th Applied Positive Psychology Symposium held on Saturday 1st June 2019 at the Buckinghamshire New University High Wycombe campus. This symposium has proved a real success and has only grown in popularity, scope, and engagement each year, with ever more contributions from other MAPP and university positive psychology programmes. We were delighted to be able to return for a fifth year which was our largest event yet, necessitating parallel sessions for the first time, to accommodate a full programme of talks, quickfire ‘flash’ presentations, practical workshops, a video presentation, poster presentations, and even a brief magic show(!), and attracting an audience of 80+. This year we welcomed a number of students from UEL and for the first time University College Cork, Ireland, to present their work, as well as Goldsmiths London, and staff from the University of Buckingham, alongside many Bucks MAPP students and returning graduates. The applied nature of the MAPP courses emphasises using evidence-based practices to actively improve lives and institutions, and MAPP students are at the forefront of this relatively new discipline, contributing innovative and important research, solutions, and products. We hope you enjoy this year’s exciting offerings in this Proceedings.
... The final result was Personality Systems Interactions (PSI) theory. PSI theory and its applications have been published in many English-language publications (e.g., Kuhl, 2000a,b,c;Kuhl & Baumann, 2000;Kuhl & Koole, 2004Kuhl, Quirin, & Koole, 2015). However, the most important publication on PSI theory is once again a book: Kuhl's (2001) magnum opus. ...
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Der amerikanische Psychotherapeut Eugene T. Gendlin stellte in Untersuchungen fest, dass Menschen, die gut mit Krisen und Problemen umgehen können, offenbar über eine andere Art der Selbstwahrnehmung verfügen: Sie beziehen körperliche Empfindungen ein und äußern sich nicht nur theoretisch oder abstrakt über ihre Lage. Von dieser Beobachtung ausgehend, entwickelt Gendlin eine Methode, solche Art der Selbstwahrnehmung zu lehren: Focusing. In seinem Buch stellt er die Technik des Focusing vor und erläutert zugleich, wei diese zur Selbsthilfe bei der Lösung persönlicher Probleme eingesetzt werden kann.
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Within any culture of the world people differ in the preferred degree of closeness and relatedness to others. Emotion is perhaps the most striking feature in which the constructs of independence and interdependence differ. This chapter improves our understanding of the role of emotion across cultures by taking a closer look at the cognitive, emotional, and developmental differences observed in cross-cultural research on independent and interdependent orientations; providing a theoretical explanation for the observed pattern of cognitive, emotional, and developmental differences between cultures that lean more toward individualistic or interrelated orientations. From a developmental point of view, the two cultural concepts of independence and interdependence are conceived of as idealized developmental pathways toward desirable endpoints in specific cultural environments. The theory of personality systems interactions (PSI) provides an understanding of patterns of cognitive, emotional, and behavioral characteristics that can be observed among people with or without a shared cultural environment. The new distinctions proposed are subtle but revealing, especially with regard to the distinction between integrative and orientations. The chapter also elaborates the role affect regulation plays in modulating the interaction between diverging cognitive processing styles and derives an elaborated model extending the framework of independence and interdependence to overcome some conceptual difficulties involved in this contrast.
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This chapter presents the evolution of motivation and cognition across cultures through different time periods. In the 1970s, a major shift in emphasis began occurring in social psychology; cognition emerged as the dominant force, and motivation declined to a secondary element. The notion of motivational influences on perception and cognition was highly discussed, though always controversial in perception. In the early 1980s, people came to realize that motivation and cognition were important to the study of cross-cultural research in the context of both differences and similarities.
Article
Scientific research shows how experience shapes the organization of the human brain through mechanisms of neural plasticity, which capture the information of the world within the connections among neurons. To understand this plasticity, it is important to look to the developmental mechanisms through which the brain grows from a single cell in embryogenesis to achieve the complex architecture of the human brain. The process of neural morphogenesis involves exuberant formation of neuronal connections, and then subtractive elimination of unused connections. This process is continued after birth, providing the neural plasticity of learning that allows cognitive development in infancy and childhood. Recognizing this continuity suggests an interesting insight-cognition is a reflection of neural development throughout the life span. This book examines the embryonic development of the brain to appreciate the dimensions of developmental momentum that shape the neural and psychological development of our lives. Human brain embryogenesis involves gradients of trophic factors that guide the migration of neurons from ventricular proliferative zones to organize the architecture of the cerebral hemispheres. The architecture of human cognition involves a functional differentiation of dorsal (pyramidal) and ventral (granular) corticolimbic divisions. This differentiation is a defining feature of not just human but mammalian neuroanatomy. The separation of pyramidal and granular cortical architectures appeared with the evolution of the six-layered mammalian neocortex from the three-layered primitive general cortex of reptiles and amphibians. The functional differentiation of the dorsal and ventral divisions of the cerebral hemispheres has been shown to be integral to multiple levels of psychological function, from elementary motivation to the most complex forms of executive self-regulation.
Article
Article
Human beings are unique in their ability to think consciously about themselves. Because they have a capacity for self-awareness not shared by other animals, people can imagine themselves in the future, anticipate consequences, plan ahead, improve themselves, and perform many other behaviors that are uniquely characteristic of human beings. Yet, despite the obvious advantages of self-reflection, the capacity for self-thought comes at a high price as people's lives are adversely affected and their inner chatter interferes with their success, pollutes their relationships, and undermines their happiness. Indeed, self-relevant thought is responsible for most of the personal and social difficulties that human beings face as individuals and as a species. Among other things, the capacity for self-reflection distorts people's perceptions, leading them to make bad decisions based on faulty information. The self conjures up a great deal of personal suffering in the form of depression, anxiety, anger, envy, and other negative emotions by allowing people to ruminate about the past or imagine the future. Egocentrism and egotism blind people to their own shortcomings, promote self-serving biases, and undermine their relationships with others. The ability to self-reflect also underlies social conflict by leading people to separate themselves into ingroups and outgroups. Ironically, many sources of personal unhappiness - such as addictions, overeating, unsafe sex, infidelity, and domestic violence - are due to people's inability to exert self-control. For those inclined toward religion and spirituality, visionaries throughout history have proclaimed that the egoic self stymies the quest for spiritual fulfillment and leads to immoral behavior.
Article
This article describes the concept of posttraumatic growth, its conceptual foundations, and supporting empirical evidence. Posttraumatic growth is the experience of positive change that occurs as a result of the struggle with highly challenging life crises. It is manifested in a variety of ways, including an increased appreciation for life in general, more meaningful interpersonal relationships, an increased sense of personal strength, changed priorities, and a richer existential and spiritual life. Although the term is new, the idea that great good can come from great suffering is ancient. We propose a model for understanding the process of posttraumatic growth in which individual characteristics, support and disclosure, and more centrally, significant cognitive processing involving cognitive structures threatened or nullified by the traumatic events, play an important role. It is also suggested that posttraumatic growth mutually interacts with life wisdom and the development of the life narrative, and that it is an on-going process, not a static outcome.
Article
Experiment 1 used the Implicit Association Test (IAT; A. G. Greenwald, D. E. McGhee, Be J. L. K. Schwartz, 1998) to measure self-esteem by assessing automatic associations of self with positive or negative valence. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) showed that two IAT measures defined a factor that was distinct from, but weakly correlated with, a factor defined by standard explicit (self-report) measures of self-esteem. Experiment 2 tested known-groups validity of two IAT gender self-concept measures. Compared with well-established explicit measures, the IAT measures revealed triple the difference in measured masculinity-femininity between men and women. Again, CFA revealed construct divergence between implicit and explicit measures. Experiment 3 assessed the self-esteem IAT's validity in predicting cognitive reactions to success and failure. High implicit self-esteem was associated in the predicted fashion with buffering against adverse effects of failure on two of four measures.
Book
According to Thomas Metzinger, no such things as selves exist in the world: nobody ever had or was a self. All that exists are phenomenal selves, as they appear in conscious experience. The phenomenal self, however, is not a thing but an ongoing process; it is the content of a "transparent self-model." In Being No One, Metzinger, a German philosopher, draws strongly on neuroscientific research to present a representationalist and functional analysis of what a consciously experienced first-person perspective actually is. Building a bridge between the humanities and the empirical sciences of the mind, he develops new conceptual toolkits and metaphors; uses case studies of unusual states of mind such as agnosia, neglect, blindsight, and hallucinations; and offers new sets of multilevel constraints for the concept of consciousness. Metzinger's central question is: How exactly does strong, consciously experienced subjectivity emerge out of objective events in the natural world? His epistemic goal is to determine whether conscious experience, in particular the experience of being someone that results from the emergence of a phenomenal self, can be analyzed on subpersonal levels of description. He also asks if and how our Cartesian intuitions that subjective experiences as such can never be reductively explained are themselves ultimately rooted in the deeper representational structure of our conscious minds. Bradford Books imprint
Article
Pursuing personal goals is an important way that people organize their behavior and mature as individuals. However, because people are typically unaware of their own implicit motivations and potentials, they may pick goals that do not serve them well. This article suggests that "self-concordant" goal selection is a difficult self-perceptual skill, with important ramifications for thriving. Various means of conceptualizing and measuring goal self-concordance are considered. Then, relevant literature is reviewed to show that goal self-concordance, as assessed by a self-determination theory methodology, is predicted by goal/motive fit; that goal self-concordance in turn predicts more persistent goal effort and, thus, better goal attainment over time; and that self-concordant goal selection is enhanced by personality variables and interpersonal contexts that promote accurate self-insight and personal autonomy. Implications for the nature of the self, the causes of personality thriving and growth, and the free will question are considered.
Article
Since the classical Babinski’s (1914) observation of lack of awareness (“anosognosia”) for a left-sided hemiplegia, the problem of the mechanisms underlying this surprising phenomenon has been raised. Most authors have stressed the links between right hemisphere and emotional processes, considering anosognosia as an abnormal emotional reaction, caused by disruption of the side of the brain crucially involved in emotional behavior. Theoretically motivated models of hemispheric asymmetries in emotional processing have proposed either a right-hemisphere dominance for specific components of emotions, or a different involvement of the right and left hemispheres in different levels of emotional processing. Following the last line of thought, we have proposed that the right hemisphere may subserve the lower “schematic” level (where emotions are automatically generated and experienced as “true emotions) and the left hemisphere the higher “conceptual” level (where emotions are consciously analyzed and submitted to an intentional control). In agreement with this model, recent empirical data strongly suggest that the right hemisphere might play a major role in the automatic, unconscious generation of emotions, whereas the left hemisphere could be mainly involved in the conscious analysis and control of emotional processes.
Article
Mechanistic understandings of forms of incidental emotion regulation have implications for basic and translational research in the affective sciences. In this study we applied Dynamic Causal Modeling (DCM) for fMRI to a common paradigm of labeling facial affect to elucidate prefrontal to subcortical influences. Four brain regions were used to model affect labeling, including right ventrolateral prefrontal cortex (vlPFC), amygdala and Broca's area. 64 models were compared, for each of 45 healthy subjects. Family level inference split the model space to a likely driving input and Bayesian Model Selection within the winning family of 32 models revealed a strong pattern of endogenous network connectivity. Modulatory effects of labeling were most prominently observed following Bayesian Model Averaging, with the dampening influence on amygdala originating from Broca's area but much more strongly from right vlPFC. These results solidify and extend previous correlation and regression-based estimations of negative corticolimbic coupling.
Article
Over the last ten years the basic knowledge of brain structure and function has vastly ex- panded, and its incorporation into the developmental sciences is now allowing for more complex and heuristic models of human infancy. In a continuation of this effort, in this two-part work I integrate current interdisciplinary data from attachment studies on dyadic affective communications, neuroscience on the early developing right brain, psychophysiology on stress systems, and psychiatry on psychopath- ogenesis to provide a deeper understanding of the psychoneurobiological mechanisms that underlie infant mental health. In this article I detail the neurobiology of a secure attachment, an exemplar of adaptive infant mental health, and focus upon the primary caregiver's psychobiological regulation of the infant's maturing limbic system, the brain areas specialized for adapting to a rapidly changing environment. The infant's early developing right hemisphere has deep connections into the limbic and autonomic nervous systems and is dominant for the human stress response, and in this manner the attachment relationship facilitates the expansion of the child's coping capcities. This model suggests that adaptive infant mental health can be fundamentally defined as the earliest expression of flexible strategies for coping with the novelty and stress that is inherent in human interactions. This efficient right brain function is a resilience factor for optimal development over the later stages of the life cycle.
Article
The difference between left and right hemisphere activity is proposed as defining two opposite modes for the organization of contextual connections between elements of information. According to the results of psychophysiological investigations, it is suggested that the “freedom” displayed by the isolated left hemisphere in manipulating information is due to the loss of multidimensional connections between objects. The ability to grasp such connections by the right hemisphere determines the richness of its mental activity and permits creativity. The peculiarity of the creative activity of schizophrenics is discussed and is considered to be a consequence of functional insufficiency of right hemisphere activity.