Past Selves Research Articles

Spatio-temporal brain dynamics of self-identity: an EEG source analysis of the current and past self

Current research on self-identity suggests that the self is settled in a unique mental representation updated across the lifespan in autobiographical memory. Spatio-temporal brain dynamics of these cognitive processes are poorly understood. ERP studies revealed early (N170-N250) and late (P3-LPC) waveforms modulations tracking the temporal processing of global face configuration, familiarity processes, and access to autobiographical contents. Neuroimaging studies revealed that such processes encompass face-specific regions of the occipitotemporal cortex, and medial cortical regions tracing the self-identity into autobiographical memory across the life span. The present study combined both approaches, analyzing brain source power using a data-driven, beamforming approach. Face recognition was used in two separate tasks: identity (self, close friend and unknown) and life stages (childhood, adolescence, adulthood) recognition. The main areas observed were specific-face areas (fusiform area), autobiographical memory areas (medial prefrontal cortex, parahippocampus, posterior cingulate cortex/precuneus), along with executive areas (dorsolateral prefrontal and anterior temporal cortices). The cluster-permutation test yielded no significant early effects (150–200 ms). However, during the 250–300 ms time window, the precuneus and the fusiform cortices exhibited larger activation to familiar compared to unknown faces, regardless of life stages. Subsequently (300–600 ms), the medial prefrontal cortex discriminates between self-identity vs. close-familiar and unknown. Moreover, significant effects were found in the cluster-permutation test specifically on self-identity discriminating between adulthood from adolescence and childhood. These findings suggest that recognizing self-identity from other facial identities (diachronic self) comprises the temporal coordination of anterior and posterior areas. While mPFC maintained an updated representation of self-identity (diachronic self) based on actual rewarding value, the dlPFC, FG, MTG, paraHC, PCC was sensitive to different life stages of self-identity (synchronic self) during the access to autobiographical memory.

The scarlet V: how women with dyspareunia negotiate postfeminist discourses of sexual agency

Young women must often contend with cultural scripts dictating neoliberal/postfeminist ideals of female sexual agency, including the ability to act in accord with one’s personal sexual self-interest. The aim of this study was to explore how young women (n = 26) living with dyspareunia (pain experienced during penetrative sexual activity) negotiate these ideals. We found that in addition to discussing traditional discourses that assign value to women in accordance with their perceived sexual virtue, women judged themselves according to the degree to which their behaviour reflected sexual agency. Women perceived to be sexually agentic were, for the most part, lauded, while those perceived to lack sexual agency were either denigrated (in the case of high sexual activity) or seen as deficient (in the case of low sexual activity). The inability to be penetrated without pain significantly limited women’s sexual repertoires. Contrasting their sexual agency with that of other women and of their past selves, women expressed feelings of disempowerment. Conceptualising agency as a spectrum rather than something that one has or lacks, as well as actively cultivating the potentialities of sexual ‘transgression’, may allow young women to resist heteronormative sexual hierarchies - including those rooted in a a postfeminist ethos.

Metacognition and mentalizing are associated with distinct neural representations of decision uncertainty.

Metacognition and mentalizing are both associated with meta-level mental state representations. Conventionally, metacognition refers to monitoring one’s own cognitive processes, while mentalizing refers to monitoring others’ cognitive processes. However, this self-other dichotomy is insufficient to delineate the 2 high-level mental processes. We here used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to systematically investigate the neural representations of different levels of decision uncertainty in monitoring different targets (the current self, the past self [PS], and others) performing a perceptual decision-making task. Our results reveal diverse formats of internal mental state representations of decision uncertainty in mentalizing, separate from the associations with external cue information. External cue information was commonly represented in the right inferior parietal lobe (IPL) across the mentalizing tasks. However, the internal mental states of decision uncertainty attributed to others were uniquely represented in the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), rather than the temporoparietal junction (TPJ) that also represented the object-level mental states of decision inaccuracy attributed to others. Further, the object-level and meta-level mental states of decision uncertainty, when attributed to the PS, were represented in the precuneus and the lateral frontopolar cortex (lFPC), respectively. In contrast, the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex (dACC) represented currently experienced decision uncertainty in metacognition, and also uncertainty about the estimated decision uncertainty (estimate uncertainty), but not the estimated decision uncertainty per se in mentalizing. Hence, our findings identify neural signatures to clearly delineate metacognition and mentalizing and further imply distinct neural computations on internal mental states of decision uncertainty during metacognition and mentalizing.

Veterans in Ruins: The Soldier’s Impossible Homecoming in Tim O’Brien’s The Things They Carried

The notion of homecoming is the focal point of Tim O’Brien’s short story “Speaking of Courage,” which presents an irreconcilable scission between the present and the soldier’s past self and life, before the war. This cleavage is mainly embodied in the landscape of the story: the city that was once familiar seems remote after his homecoming. The way in which the protagonist looks at his hometown while driving around the lake that constitutes its center point allows the gradual (re)appearance of Vietnam landscapes and events in the descriptions, until memories from the past and visions of the present superimpose completely—thereby blurring the boundaries between war and peace, between suburban America and Vietnam battlegrounds. The bedimming of differences between the structural polarities of the “here” and the “elsewhere” enables the emergence of paradoxical esthetics based on the notions of conflation and reversal, which thwart the prospect of ever returning home by rendering the very notion of return nonsensical and unachievable. Through writing, O’Brien thus puts into question the very possibility and completeness of the soldier’s homecoming by collapsing together different spatiotemporal realities.

“Maybe not 100%”: Co-constructing language proficiency in the Maya diaspora

ABSTRACT Language learning and the development of language proficiency are central concerns in the study of immigrant adaptation. This paper analyzes the social construction of language proficiency among Indigenous Guatemalan Maya youth in the United States– specifically, undocumented young adults who migrated to Los Angeles, California as unaccompanied minors and who grew up as low-wage workers. Our analysis shows that youth used “percentage talk”– i.e., construing current proficiency as apercentage of idealized full proficiency– as a discursive strategy to assess their language ability and level of social adaptación (adaptation) relative to native English and Spanish speakers, other Indigenous language speakers, and their past selves. Through percentage talk, youth wrestled with social stratification and inequality in the U.S. and Guatemala and imagined themselves as future members of Spanish- and English-oriented discourse communities. While outwardly individualistic, percentage talk also allowed youth to gauge their ability to support the language socialization and social incorporation of other L1 Maya speakers in diaspora. Youth’s tricultural adaptation and contestation of an all-or-nothing ideology of proficiency shows their nuanced understanding of the role of language in immigrant socialization.

Understanding and supporting peer relationships in adolescents with acquired brain injury: A stakeholder engagement study

ABSTRACT Peer relationship difficulties in adolescents with acquired brain injury (ABI) are under-recognized and targets for intervention are unclear. From a social constructionist position, this study aimed to engage with stakeholders to develop a collaborative understanding of peer relationship difficulties in adolescents with ABI and seek consultation on what might be required to improve them. Focus groups and semi-structured interviews were conducted with four stakeholder groups: adolescents with ABI (n = 4); parents of adolescents with ABI (n = 7); adults who sustained an ABI in adolescence (n = 2); and specialist practitioners (n = 3). Qualitative data were analysed using thematic analysis. The analysis yielded 11 themes, grouped into two domains. The first, understanding peer relationship difficulties, included themes from “exclusion and a need to belong”, to “loss of past self”. The second, supporting peer relationships, comprised themes of “building understanding” and “meaningful social connection”, amongst others. A logic model of stakeholder experiences of peer relationship difficulties was constructed. Difficulties with peers can increase vulnerability to feelings of loneliness, shame, and hopelessness for adolescents post-ABI. Stakeholders described that a meaningful intervention would be multi-layered, targeting change within the adolescent's environment and within the adolescent themselves. The presented logic model provides a framework for future intervention development.

Marking Pandemic Time: Introduction to the Special Section “Writing Ethnographically During a Pandemic” (Part Two)

Marking Pandemic Time: Introduction to the Special Section “Writing Ethnographically During a Pandemic” (Part Two)

Beyond ‘la petite mort’ – sex and death in 120 BPM

ABSTRACT Recent French films have sparked discussion about how we understand the AIDS crisis and how that historical understanding informs present-day views of HIV/AIDS in France and further afield. An example of this, Robin Campillo’s period piece, 120 Battements par minute (2017), explicitly depicts ‘la petite mort’ and the connection between orgasm and demise through the experiences of Parisian ACT UP members during the height of the AIDS crisis in the early 1990s. The following article argues that the three sex scenes in 120 BPM are pivotal points in the narrative which quite literally raise the dead, connecting the characters to lost lovers, members of their community and their past selves. Through this, I analyse how these scenes interact with the film’s re-enactment scenes of protest actions in the 1990s, through their choreography, dialogue, duration, and the images of sexual acts themselves. To do this, I identify how the film troubles and reconstructs ideas of death in AIDS cinema through the recognition of the HIV+ individual as one who will not be desexualised by the virus, even if they are dying. This article will scrutinise and query the relationship between the sex scene, mortality, and memory in 120 BPM.

The Phoenix Complex

The Phoenix Complex

Utopias of Self in Imaginary Homelands

Moving between different homelands involves constructing utopias of place and self. Such mythical past, present and future selves are intertwined with the construction of imaginary homelands in the writings of transnational Canadians, for whom the quintessential questions of the Canadian imagination – Who am I? and Where is here? – continue to be unsolvable dilemmas.

Co-Animation in Troubles-Talk

ABSTRACT Through troubles-talk, participants disclose and negatively assess unfortunate past or habitual happenings and offenses, and these are often vividly staged in the here and now by temporarily “doing being” past Self or others, what we call animation. In this study, we show how by animating their own affective reactions toward the recounted experiences, tellers cast themselves as victims and their recipients as witnesses. More importantly, we demonstrate how animation is also a relevant practice for recipients, who in a contiguous position often offer a responsive co-animation of the same figure, validating and amplifying their teller’s affective displays, turning the experience into a common cause. This study contributes further to our understanding of empathic responses in troubles-talk in English by inscribing co-animation as a previously undescribed alternative at the response slot that allows recipients to temporarily position themselves “into the moment” as co-victims, co-experiencers, and co-sanctioners. Data are in English.

True Self and True Thing: A New Reading and Reinterpretation of Wang Lü’s “Preface to the Second Version of the Mount Hua Paintings”

1 True Self and True Thing: A New Reading and Reinterpretation of Wang Lü’s “Preface to the Second Version of the Mount Hua Paintings” Peng Feng School of Arts, Peking University pengf@pku.edu.cn Since the early 20th century, Wang Lü 王履 and his Album of Mount Hua Paintings 華山圖 冊 have received extensive attention in the fields of art history and aesthetics. In addition to countless articles and book chapters, three monographs are worth noting: Kathlyn Liscomb’s Learning from Mount Hua,1 Xue Yongnian’s 薛永年 Wang Lü,2 and the catalogue Wang Lü’s Album of Mount Hua Paintings.3 Considering that Wang Lü was known less as a painter than as a physician, it is surprising that his paintings and theory of painting should attract so much attention. Indeed, Wang’s essay is worth these efforts. Despite the quantity of research to date, some of his most important ideas require elucidation, namely, the “true self” and the “true thing.” In my view, these are the most important themes in his most important text on painting theory — “Preface to the Second Version of the Mount Hua Paintings”重為 華山圖序. Back to the Original Text One reason this topic has not received sufficient attention is that the original text was altered. Before the first publication of his original text in 1978,4 Wang’s essay was read in a corrupted form. There are 13 differences between the original text and the corrupted one.5 Among these alterations, one change crucially altered the meaning. The original sentence read as follows: “If Mount Hua did not give me my self, could I be me” 苟非華山之我余余 2 其我邪? This sentence was changed into “If I did not know the visual forms of Mount Hua, how could I paint them” 苟非識華山之形我其能圖耶? Liscomb corrected many errors in her impressive monograph Learning from Mount Hua, including changing the wrong pronunciation “Wang Li” to the correct “Wang Lü,”6 and the wrong title “Preface to the Mount Hua Paintings” to the correct rendering “Preface to the Second Version of the Mount Hua Paintings.”7 Liscomb also noticed that the original text had been changed, but she retained the altered text. In a note, she wrote: “The original text at this point seems garbled: Gou fei huashan zhi wo yu, yu qi wo ye? For lack of a better solution, the present translation is based on Yu Jianhua’s 俞劍華 interpretation of this sentence as: Gou fei shi huashan zhi xing, wo qi neng tu ye? …Yu does not identify this as his interpretation, but presents it as the proper text.”8 Liscomb was unaware that Yu had not seen the original text, and so she accepted the altered text for the original one. In other words, it was not Yu’s interpretation, but rather a textual error that Yu mistook for the original text. In fact, in an earlier edition, Yuding peiwenzhai shuhua pu 禦定佩文齋書畫譜, this sentence had already been altered. Yu likely relied on this version when he edited Zhongguo hualun leibian 中國畫論類編. It is hard for me to pin down the reasons for the alteration. Perhaps this sentence was obscure, and the editor of Yuding peiwenzhai shuhua pu wanted to make it clear. In revising this sentence, he likely referred to the first preface, i.e. “You huashan tu ji shi xu” 游華山圖記詩序, which says: “You would think me preposterous if I wrote about Mt. Hua without having traveled there” 文而弗遊,將以餘為誕.9 Perhaps art historians will discover the truth some time in the future. In any case, the original text was not garbled. Xue Yongnian had already read this sentence and punctuated it correctly.10 But Xue did not 3 follow up on the theoretical implications of that sentence. This oversight more or less reflects his mistakes in subsequent punctuation.11 The “Past Self” and the “Present Self” As mentioned earlier, the sentence can be read as follows: “If Mount Hua did not give me my self, could I be me?” How could Mount Hua give Wang his self? Did Wang have no self before climbing Mount Hua? How could a man live so long without his self? Wang Lü admitted that he had studied painting for many years and aimed to follow the old...

Nostalgia across cultures

Nostalgia, a sentimental longing for one's past, has been garnering keen empirical attention in the psychological literature over the last two decades. After providing a historical overview, we place the emotion in cross-cultural context. Laypeople in many cultures conceptualize nostalgia similarly: as a past-oriented, social, self-relevant, and bittersweet emotion, but more sweet (positively toned) than bitter (negatively toned). That is, the nostalgizer reflects on a fond and personally important event—often their childhood or valued relationships—relives the event through rose-colored glasses, yearns for that time or relationship, and may even wish to return briefly to the past. Also, triggers of nostalgia (e.g., adverts, food, cold temperatures, loneliness) are similar across cultures. Moreover, across cultures nostalgia serves three key functions: it elevates social connectedness (a sense of belongingness or acceptance), meaning in life (a sense that one's life is significant, purposeful, and coherent), and self-continuity (a sense of connection between one's past and present self). Further, nostalgia acts as a buffer against discomforting psychological states (e.g., loneliness) similarly in varied cultural contexts. For example, (1) loneliness is positively related to, or intensifies, nostalgia; (2) loneliness is related to, or intensifies, adverse outcomes such as unhappiness or perceived lack of social support; and (3) nostalgia suppresses the relation between loneliness and adverse outcomes. Additionally, nostalgia facilitates one's acculturation to a host culture. Specifically, (1) nostalgia (vs. control) elicits a positive acculturation orientation toward a host culture; (2) nostalgia (vs. control) amplifies bicultural identity integration; and (3) positive acculturation orientation mediates the effect of host-culture nostalgia on bicultural identity integration. We conclude by identifying lacunae in the literature and calling for follow-up research.

A Letter to Myself in the Past

Since 2020, everything has changed with the worldwide spread of COVID-19 and the emergence of variants. In the field of humanities, we are still unable to figure out how to face such situation and how to translate it in the first place. One way is to relearn the representations of historical plagues and calamities, but it is a determined event of the past, and no one can judge whether it is effective as a means to solve the future situation. My essay takes the form of a letter written 10 years later by the future “I” to myself today. In the world 10 years later, “I,” who lives as a Komorîto, writes a letter to her/his past self, on the assumption that it is completely divided between two kinds of people：Gaishuto, who continue to live outside as they did before the Corona era, and Komorîto, who do not go out at all but simply stay at home. Like any other disciplines, humanities have a common understanding that we cannot talk about phenomena that are not fixed or that continue to vary. That’s why we get anxious. In this essay, I have ironically described a situation in which the content written in the writing process is quickly invalidated.

Are Past and Future Selves Perceived Differently from Present Self? Replication and Extension of Pronin and Ross (2006) Temporal Differences in Trait Self-Ascription

We attempted a pre-registered replication and extension of Studies 1, 2, and 3 from Pronin and Ross (2006) regarding the effects of social and temporal distance on trait attributions with an online American Amazon MTurk sample (<em>N</em> = 911). We concluded mixed findings. We found support for the original findings: participants attributed more dispositional traits to others compared to themselves, although with weaker effects (original: <em>f</em> = 0.35, 95% CI [0.09, 0.61]; replication: <em>f</em> = 0.10, 95% CI [0.03, 0.16]). Also, similar to the original, we found that participants tended to attribute a favorable ratio of positive traits when making self-assessments (original: <em>f</em> = 0.77, 95% CI [0.29, 1.25]; replication: <em>f</em> = 0.88, 95% CI [0.50, 1.26]). However, unlike the original, we failed to find support for the core hypothesis that participants would ascribe more dispositional traits to their temporally distant self compared to their present self (original: <em>f</em> = 0.54, 95% CI [0.27, 0.77]; replication: <em>f</em> = 0.02, 95% CI [0.00, 0.06]). Furthermore, in contrast to the original, we found that the positive traits ratio increases with temporal distance (original: <em>f</em> = 0.16, 95% CI [0.00, 0.36]; replication: <em>f</em> = 0.33, 95% CI [0.22, 0.42] in the opposite direction). Contrary to our hypothesis, in an extension, we found that people were more likely to ascribe a greater ratio of positive traits to their friends than to themselves (<em>ξ</em> = 0.3, 95% CI [0.21, 0.38]). All materials, data, and code are provided here: <a href="https://osf.io/gs2rx/" target="_blank">https://osf.io/gs2rx/</a>.

Dividing the Light

Images can be powerful – and the choices that go into their making, both revealing and obscuring. In 2019 I undertook to make a stained-glass window, based on a photo I had taken ten years prior at a missionary base in South Sudan. I use reflections on this art project to highlight the idea of memory as practice, with a focus on the slippery and sometimes problematic ethics of ethnographic representation as a positioned, porous, and ‘becoming’ subject. Through explaining the context in which the photo was taken, alongside the process of the window’s construction, I reflect critically on discomfort, desire, risk, and imagination, considering the work of the (white) gaze and my own internalised structures of colonial feeling. I evoke ghosts, haunting, and the phantasmal to consider affective connections between (personal and historical) pasts and present, as well as self and other – with acknowledgement that sometimes a past self can also become an other that we must learn to recognise, and dwell with, as part of grappling with the ‘splinters’ of anthropological practice and being.

Co-animation and the Multimodal Management of Contextualisation Problems when Jointly ‘Doing Being’ Others

In everyday interaction, participants speak on their own behalf but may temporarily speak as or on behalf of a figure (i.e. past or fictional self, others or objects). This practice of ‘animation’ can be continued or extended by co-participants in responsive position, resulting in co-animation (Cantarutti, 2020) of the same figure. Animation relies on the successful ascription of roles, participation framework shifts and projected stances to either the here-and-now of interaction or the there-and-then of animated content. In turn, the recognition of a response as a co-animation requires the creation of similarity between animated contributions. Through a multimodal interactional linguistic analysis of 89 cases of co-animation, this paper discusses how participants jointly solve these interactional contextualisation ‘problems’ smoothly through multimodal gestalts of lexico-grammatical, prosodic and gestural detail.

Temporal self-compression: Behavioral and neural evidence that past and future selves are compressed as they move away from the present

A basic principle of perception is that as objects increase in distance from an observer, they also become logarithmically compressed in perception (i.e., not differentiated from one another), making them hard to distinguish. Could this basic principle apply to perhaps our most meaningful mental representation: our own sense of self? Here, we report four studies that suggest selves are increasingly non-discriminable with temporal distance from the present as well. In Studies 1 through 3, participants made trait ratings across various time points in the past and future. We found that participants compressed their past and future selves, relative to their present self. This effect was preferential to the self and could not be explained by the alternative possibility that individuals simply perceive arbitrary self-change with time irrespective of temporal distance. In Study 4, we tested for neural evidence of temporal self-compression by having participants complete trait ratings across time points while undergoing functional MRI. Representational similarity analysis was used to determine whether neural self-representations are compressed with temporal distance as well. We found evidence of temporal self-compression in areas of the default network, including medial prefrontal cortex and posterior cingulate cortex. Specifically, neural pattern similarity between self-representations was logarithmically compressed with temporal distance. Taken together, these findings reveal a "temporal self-compression" effect, with temporal selves becoming increasingly non-discriminable with distance from the present.

Valence of Temporal Self-Appraisals: A Comparison Between First-Person Perspective and Third-Person Perspective.

Mental time travel is one of the most remarkable achievements of mankind. On the one hand, people perceive past self, present self, and future self as a continuous unity; on the other hand, people have the ability to distinguish among the three types of temporal selves because there are different representations of them. In this study, we used an adapted temporal self-reference paradigm to explore the processing mechanism of different temporal selves. Temporal self-reference was performed from the first-person perspective in Experiment 1 and from the third-person perspective in Experiment 2. The results indicated that people showed a more positive bias toward future self compared with past self and present self no matter in the first-person perspective or third-person perspective. There was no difference in recognition rate among past self, present self, and future self. Compared with the first-person perspective, present self-processing in the third-person perspective was more abstract and generalized, which may reflect that the third-person perspective has the same distancing function as time. This study can deepen understandings on temporal self-appraisals from different perspectives.

Smartphone Time Machine: Tech-Supported Improvements in Time Perspective and Wellbeing Measures.

Individuals with a balanced time perspective, which includes good thoughts about the past, awareness of present constraints and adaptive planning for a positive future, are more likely to report optimal wellbeing. However, people who have had traumas such as adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) are likely to have less balanced time perspectives and lower overall wellbeing when compared to those with fewer or no ACEs. Time perspective can be improved via time-travel narratives that support people in feeling connected to a wise and loving future version of themselves, an approach that has until now only been provided in counseling contexts. Our team used an iterative inclusive design process to shape a scalable time-travel narrative tool – a responsive and progressive web application called Time Machine. Among other functionalities, Time Machine allowed people to record and listen to messages as if they were from and to their past and future selves. Using pre-planned as well as post-hoc analyses, we analyzed quantitative and qualitative data from 96 paid design partners (participants) who were taken through a 26-day pilot study of the technology. Among other effects, the results revealed: (1) high engagement throughout the design process, (2) improvements in self-reported time perspective and overall wellbeing scores that were greater for those using Time Machine during an optional-use period, (3) twice as much improvement in overall wellbeing scores for design partners with high ACEs (16%) versus low ACEs (8%), and (4) feelings of unconditional love apparently mediating the relationship between scores on time perspective and overall wellbeing measures. We discuss the limitations of these results as well as implications for the future role of spiritually informed scalable time-travel narrative technologies in healthcare and wellness.