Kind Of Dissociation Research Articles

Twenty-Five Years of Research Using Implicit Measures

The year 2020 marks the 25th anniversary of two seminal publications that have set the foundation for an exponentially growing body of research using implicit measures: Fazio, Jackson, Dunton, and Williams's (1995) work using evaluative priming to measure racial attitudes, and Greenwald and Banaji's (1995) review of implicit social cognition research that served as the basis for the development of the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The current article provides an overview of (1) two conceptual roots that continue to shape interpretations of implicit measures; (2) conflicting interpretations of the term implicit; (3) different kinds of dissociations between implicit and explicit measures; (4) theoretical developments inspired by these dissociations; and (5) research that used implicit measures to address domain-specific and applied questions. We conclude with a discussion of challenges and open questions that remain to be addressed, offering guidance for the next generation of research using implicit measures.

The Metaphor of Dissociation: Teleological, Phenomenological, Structural, Dynamical

Dissociation as used in psychology and psychiatry is a troubled conceptual metaphor. The main problems include conflicting definitions and a lack of internal consistency of some of these formulations. Trying to mend the situation, Van der Hart, Nijenhuis and Steele (2006) revisited Janet's original definition of dissociation, and referred to it as "structural dissociation of the personality". This term is not meant to suggest that "structural dissociation" involves a particular kind of dissociation as is sometimes thought. To prevent or repair further misunderstanding, in the present article I highlight four inherent features of dissociation of the personality: teleological, phenomenological, structural, and dynamical. The article alsoaims to bridge some metaphors that are commonly described and understood as dichotomies, implying dualisms that plague philosophy, science, and clinical practice. For example, personality is understood as an organism-environment system, involving subjects and "objects" (that may be other subjects) as co-dependent and co-constitutive partners. Regarding matter (brain/body) and mind as attributes of one substance reflects an attempt to avoid the problems of philosophical (substance) dualism, as well as the one-sidedness of philosophical materialism and idealism. The generation, maintenance, and elaboration ofdissociation is analyzed in terms of causing, that is, the mutual manifestation of a network of reciprocal powers. The joint analyses involve an enactive approach to life, and intend to achieve further conceptual clarity and consistency of the metaphor of dissociation.

Reconsidering the autohypnotic model of the dissociative disorders

ABSTRACTThe dissociative disorders field and the hypnosis field currently reject the autohypnotic model of the dissociative disorders, largely because many correlational studies have shown hypnotizability and dissociation to be minimally related (r = .12). Curiously, it is also widely accepted that dissociative patients are highly hypnotizable. If dissociative patients are highly hypnotizable because only highly hypnotizable individuals can develop a dissociative disorder – as the author proposes – then the methodology of correlational studies of hypnotizability and dissociation in random clinical and community samples would necessarily be constitutively unable to detect, and statistically unable to reflect, that fact. That is, the autohypnotic, dissociative distancing of that small subset of highly hypnotizable individuals who repeatedly encountered intolerable circumstances is statistically lost among the data of (1) the highly hypnotizable subjects who do not dissociate and (2) subjects (of all levels of hypnotizability) who manifest other kinds of dissociation. The author proposes that, when highly hypnotizable individuals repeatedly engage in autohypnotic distancing from intolerable circumstances, they develop an overlearned, highly-motivated, automatized pattern of dissociative self-protection (i.e., a dissociative disorder). The author urges that theorists of hypnosis and the dissociative disorders explicitly include in their theories (a) the trait of high hypnotizability, (b) the phenomena of autohypnosis, and (c) the manifestations of systematized, autohypnotic pathology. Said differently, the author is suggesting that autohypnosis and autohypnotic pathology are unacknowledged nodes in the nomothetic networks of both hypnosis and dissociation.

Are Major Dissociative Disorders Characterized by a Qualitatively Different Kind of Dissociation?

A total of 66 patients with a major dissociative disorder, 54 patients with nondissociative disorders, and 30 nonclinical controls were administered the Structured Clinical Interview for DSM–IV Dissociative Disorders–Revised, the Dissociative Experiences Scale, the Multidimensional Inventory of Dissociation, and the Symptom Checklist 90–Revised. Dissociative patients reported significantly more dissociative and nondissociative symptoms than did nondissociative patients and nonclinical controls. When general psychopathology was controlled, the dissociation scores of dissociative patients were still significantly higher than those of both other groups, whereas the dissociation scores of nondissociative patients and nonclinical controls no longer differed. These findings appear to be congruent with a typological model of dissociation that distinguishes between 2 qualitatively different kinds of dissociation. Specifically, the results of this study suggest that the dissociation that occurs in major dissociative disorders (i.e., dissociative identity disorder [DID] and dissociative disorder not otherwise specified, Type 1 [DDNOS-1]) is qualitatively different from the dissociation that occurs in persons who do not have a dissociative disorder. In contrast to previous research, the dissociation of persons who do not have a dissociative disorder is not limited to absorption; it covers a much wider range of phenomena. The authors hypothesize that different mechanisms produce the dissociation of persons with DID and DDNOS-1 as opposed to the dissociation of persons who do not have a dissociative disorder.

Abuse History and Pathological Dissociation Among Israeli and American College Students: A Comparative Study

ABSTRACT This paper has three objectives: (1) to compare the abuse histories of American and Israeli college students, (2) to closely examine the different types of dissociative experiences among these students, and (3) to compare the dissociative experiences of American and Israeli college students. The US sample reported higher levels of abuse than the Israeli sample. The US and Israeli samples did not differ in overall level of dissociation but the US sample had higher rank-ordered scores for five kinds of dissociation: Flashbacks, Somatoform Dissociation, Persecutory Voices, Temporarily Dissociated Knowledge or Skills, and Being Told of Disremembered Behavior.

Who is 'who' in dissociation?: A plea for psychodynamics in a time of trauma

Contemporary theories of dissociation and trauma for the most part have evolved outside of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalytic writings have also been regarded as being in opposition to trauma‐based notions of human psychopathology. The specific psychoanalytic contribution—the emphasis on unconscious conflict and meaning—is for the most part excluded from the discourse on dissociation, often resulting in a mechanic conceptualisation of trauma. In this paper, based on clinical material, the author argues in favour of including conflict, unconscious intention and personal meaning in understanding the kind of dissociation we see in cases of multiple personality pathology. Textual analysis of letters written to the analyst illustrates how events of abuse are defensively elaborated. The author demonstrates that patterns of affect regulation and dominant object–relational strategies can be captured through analysis of the discourse structure. She focuses on how an organised character pattern, revealed mainly through narrative style and the analyst's countertransference, serves protective purposes as well as wishfulfillment. She argues that dissociation in the form of multiple personalities may imply an active, strategic agent.

DISSOCIABLE SYSTEMS IN SECOND LANGUAGE INFLECTIONAL MORPHOLOGY

Pinker and Prince (1988) argued that two dissociable systems underlie the development of linguistic representations: one rule governed and the other associative. These two dissociable systems of representation and processing are claimed to be a linguistic universal (Pinker, 1999). Therefore, one should expect that nonnative speakers of a language also manifest the same kinds of dissociations in performance between rule-based and associative features of language as native speakers. The study reported here extends the work of Prasada and Pinker (1993) into the second language (L2) domain to test whether nonnative speakers (a) perform similarly to native speakers and (b) dissociate rule-based from associative features of language. In Prasada and Pinker, the degree of similarity between a nonce verb and a real English verb influenced past-tense generalizations on nonce irregular verbs but did not influence generalizations on nonce regular verbs. In the experiment reported here, first language (L1) and L2 participants of different ages and language groups were compared on the same task as that used by Prasada and Pinker. Participants overall produced more verbs with a past-tense suffix for nonce regular items than for the nonce irregular items. Significant group effects indicate that participants' varying levels of experience with English play an important role in their past-tense productions of nonce verbs. Furthermore, similarity influenced both the regular and irregular verbs on a production task. These results are discussed in terms of whether there are two dissociable systems underlying L2 linguistic knowledge and whether an alternative single associative learning mechanism could be responsible for the development of the system of regular and irregular inflectional morphology in both L1 and L2 learning.This research was partly funded by a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) grant (no. 752-94-1808). I appreciate the help of Jennifer Graham in collecting the data and am grateful to Nick Ellis, Nina Spada, Lydia White, and five anonymous SSLA reviewers for helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript.

Distinct Areas in Parietal Cortex Involved in Long-Term and Short-Term Action Planning: A Pet Investigation

The sequential organization of events within a script, can be considered as a means to explore the cognitive mechanisms involved in action planning. Scripts are composed of goal-oriented sequences of events that typically occur in a specific and systematic order. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of temporal variation between script events ( short-term versus long-term) on neural activity in normal volunteers. Subjects were required to judge whether the chronological order of three events was correct or not, while regional cerebral blood flow was measured using positron emission tomography. The modality of script presentation (graphic versus lexical) was manipulated. In the left hemisphere, the supramarginal gyrus, the middle frontal gyrus, the inferior temporal gyrus, and the middle occipital gyrus were more activated in the short-term script conditions, while the angular gyrus, the medial superior frontal gyrus, the precuneus bilaterally, the anterior cingulate gyrus and the inferior and middle temporal gyrus on the left were more involved during long-term scripts processing. The occipito-temporal junction (MT/V5) was significantly more activated in the graphic conditions as compared to the lexical ones, and in the short-term scripts conditions as compared to the long-term ones although all stimuli were static. Our results support the notion that two distinct frontal-parietal networks are engaged in short-term and long-term script processing. In addition, our study demonstrates two kinds of dissociations in the parietal lobe. A macro-dissociation between the anterior and the posterior portion of the inferior parietal lobe was found which accounts for processing short-term and long-term scripts respectively, as well as a micro-dissociation in each of these regions which is associated with distinct processing depending on the presentation modalities. These results may help to better understand apraxia at the neurophysiological level.