Mental Feelings Research Articles

A Comparison of Subjective and Physiological Measures of Mechanically Produced and Erotically Produced Erections (Or, Is an Erection an Erection?)

The current investigation explores possible reasons for the poor overall success rates of medical techniques used in the treatment of erectile dysfunction. This is the first study to compare directly the psychological impact of a mechanically produced versus an erotically produced erection. Subjective and objective parameters of sexual arousal were used to compare the experience of a mechanically attained erection versus an erotically stimulated erection. Twenty-eight (28) men without sexual dysfunction were asked to reach a full erection during each of the following two conditions: (a) by using an ErecAid System and (b) by self-stimulating while watching an erotic video. The results of this study suggest that the penile vacuum device was a successful method for attaining penile tumescence; however, the presence of penile tumescence was not accompanied by a subjective state of physical or mental sexual arousal. Thus, the mere physical presence of an erection does not seem to evoke bodily or mental feelings of sexual arousal. It is important to note that these findings suggest that attention to the psychosexual components of the individual's sexual experience are critical to the subjective experience of sexual arousal and reflect once againthe multimodal response systems involved insexual arousal. These results suggest that more effective treatment approaches would be based on a clinical strategy that provides instruction both on the technical use of a mechanical device as well as on the importance of creating an appropriate psychosexual environment.

Subsistence insecurity and ill feeling in domiciliary care.

The purpose of this study was to analyse the relationship between the feeling of subsistence security and well feeling. For the study 129 patients in Helsinki domiciliary care were interviewed. Relationships between subsistence security and well feeling have been demonstrated by chi-square test. According to the findings physical, mental and social well feeling decreased when financial difficulties increased. Experienced improvement in health was less for those patients who had financial difficulties than for those who had not. The subsistence security was the main predictor of the variances of the sumvariables 'physical well-ill feeling' and 'mental and social well-ill feeling'. It can be suggested that for indigent people in domiciliary care it is not sufficient that a variety of services is available. It is therefore an important task of the nurses to strengthen the indigent patients' ability to utilize the different opportunities available in order to improve their well feeling and ability to cope at home.

点滅光の精神作業及び感情への影響

点滅光の精神作業及び感情への影響

A CATATONIC EPISODE IN A MATHEMATICIAN.

Examination of the development of an acute catatonic attack showed that apart from its irreversibility, there were certain essential similarities to the psychological processes involved in falling asleep and dreaming. One in particular lay in the regression of the ego to a primitive state of its existence as a purely sensory structure which, re-created, might thus appear in the dream or in the manifest catatonic picture as a neutral, irrelevant, formless spectator. This is probably the earliest state wherein the ego has a sense of its own existence, that is “mental ego feeling”.21 Considering that further regression would obliterate this highly valued sense of self, the catatonic episode can be seen in part as an attempt to regain the lost objects,14 and thus to maintain and protect the sense of self from annihilation, oblivion, and death.

Getting Lost in Machinery

Less emphasis on mechanisms and methods, more attention to the mental processes and feelings of the learner, are urged by Dr. Myers. He has some pertinent things to say about unscientific research and dreaded supervision.

Illustrations of the Influence of the Mind upon the Body in Health and Disease, with especial reference to the Imagination

Passing, now, from the consideration of the influence of emotion upon motility, we proceed to examine the interesting series of phenomena resulting from the operation of the same influence upon sensation. Ever tending to be confounded with the converse succession of events, the influence of morbid states of sensibility in producing emotional disorder, its consideration requires more discrimination than that of the previous section. We can scarcely avoid employing language which is not strictly scientific, and can be only understood in a popular sense. Indeed, with two elements so closely allied as the emotional and sensational—mental feeling and bodily feeling (so-called)—it must constantly happen that in our terms, as in reality, we confound the two together, and in this blending fail to discover which is cause and which is effect, or speak of the consciousness of bodily pleasure and pain as if it were not a mental state. It is, however, perfectly easy, in spite of metaphysical difficulties of this kind, to make clear what is meant by the influence of a powerful emotion upon sensation as a part of that influence of the mind upon the body, which we are endeavouring in these papers to point out and illustrate. For example, there can be no question as to the fact that moral disgust does in some instances cause the sensation of nausea, or that distress of mind may occasion neuralgia, or fright the sensation of cold, or that the special senses may, under fear, be stimulated centrally, so as to cause subjective sensations, whether olfactory, visual, or auditory. These facts remain of interest and importance, although the bare statement of them suggests some questions of difficulty. They are so, whether our physiology regards the functions of the hemispherical ganglia as comprising the sensational as well as the ideational elements of the passions—(see ante, July, 1870, p. 174)—or whether it relegates the former to the sensory ganglia. They are so, although not only do mental and physical sensations merge imperceptibly into each other—for we constantly witness the same results from emotional as from sensational excitement, physical and corporeal pain alike acting upon the body (as, e. g., in quickening the circulation)—but mental sensations are so united with their associated ideas that it is difficult to separate the purely emotional from the ideational elements of passion. It is a penalty which we pay for our classifications and divisions that, however convenient they are up to a certain point, they sometimes lead us to do violence to nature; to dissever that which is inseparable, to sacrifice in the present case, it may be, the intimate cohesion of psychical states to the idol of reducing everything in science to orders and classes.