Somatic Phenomena Research Articles

Linguocultorological reasons for the different levels of somatization of sadness in languages of the world

Considering their important role in human life the study of emotions is of great interest for linguistic science. This article is dedicated to the analysis of the phenomenon of somatization of sadness and the explanation of differences in the levels of such somatization as reflected in language. The analysis of literature has shown that expression of sadness with the help of somatic expressions is particularly prevalent in African, South-East Asian and Australian languages. Organs that are most often associated with emotions are the heart, liver and stomach and interoception plays a great role in creating an association between an organ and an emotion. With its help a person becomes aware of the physical changes taking place inside their body, which can be caused in particular by emotions. It was established that certain associations between organs and emotions come to exist due to “somatic bridges” while others form because of “semantic shift”. It was found that the frequency of the use of somatic expressions that express emotions was reduced in English during the industrialization and that similar changes are taking place today in Chinese. In order to explain the differences in the level of somatization it is useful to turn to the triadic structure of concepts, in accordance to which the concept “sadness” has an experiential side (an interoceptive characterization of the emotion), a notional side (a definition, verbal representation etc.) and an evaluative side. It is hypothesized that an important role of somatic expression in the expression of sadness points to the importance of the experiential side while the use of abstract words is indicative of the notional side being important. The fact that the experiential side of a concept is considered to predate the notional side explains the direction of the diachronic change from stronger somatization of emotions towards their expression with the help of more abstract notions.

Schelling’s Clara: Romantic Psychotherapy

Abstract Schelling’s unfinished novella/dialog from the early years of his turn to philosophy of spirit presents arguments for personal immortality, but in a narrative form. Characters that represent nature and mind try to rescue the usually equanimous Clara from psychological crisis occasioned by her husband’s death and consequent intellectual perplexities about personal survival. Their arguments illustrate Schelling’s reformulated Spinozistic metaphysics: expressivism. On this theory, a Wesenheit or creative essence manifests in both physical and psychic dimensions but is itself nothing other than the connection between the two. Clara, doctor, and pastor symbolize these three functions while their personae fashion arguments that psychic and somatic phenomena can never be separated, hence that death must signify a transformation into a more spiritual psychosomatic mode of being. The arguments are problematic at best, but the narrative invokes Romantic tropes such as the limits of conceptual language, the possibility of a natural style of communicating philosophy, and reference to then contemporary ‘empirical’ phenomena such as clairvoyance and hypnotic sleep. The unfinished character of the piece reinforces the impression of ineluctability of the self, which seems to exist only in diaspora as nostalgia or anticipation.

Art therapy as a comprehensive complementary treatment for Parkinson's disease.

Parkinson's disease (PD) is the second most prevalent neurodegenerative disease. Complementary and alternative therapies are increasingly utilized to address its complex multisystem symptomatology. Art therapy involves motoric action and visuospatial processing while promoting broad biopsychosocial wellness. The process involves hedonic absorption, which provides an escape from otherwise persistent and cumulative PD symptoms, refreshing internal resources. It involves the expression in nonverbal form of multilayered psychological and somatic phenomena; once these are externalized in a symbolic arts medium, they can be explored, understood, integrated, and reorganized through verbal dialogue, effecting relief and positive change. 42 participants with mild to moderate PD were treated with 20 sessions of group art therapy. They were assessed before and after therapy with a novel arts-based instrument developed to match the treatment modality for maximum sensitivity. The House-Tree-Person PD Scale (HTP-PDS) assesses motoric and visuospatial processing-core PD symptoms-as well as cognition (thought and logic), affect/mood, motivation, self (including body-image, self-image, and self- efficacy), interpersonal functioning, creativity, and overall level of functioning. It was hypothesized that art therapy will ameliorate core PD symptoms and that this will correlate with improvements in all other variables. HTP-PDS scores across all symptoms and variables improved significantly, though causality among variables was indeterminate. Art therapy is a clinically efficacious complementary treatment for PD. Further research is warranted to disentangle causal pathways among the aforementioned variables, and additionally, to isolate and examine the multiple, discrete healing mechanisms believed to operate simultaneously in art therapy.

Anorexie mentale et médiations somatiques : évaluations croisées de l’ostéopathie et de la psychomotricité sur les préoccupations corporelles

ObjectivesAnorexia nervosa is a psychosomatic disorder that mainly concerns women where body image and corporal sensations are questioned. For these patients, their morphology is an obsessional issue and they tend to ignore sensorial perceptions such as hunger or pain. Treatment remains extremely complex, in spite of the vast expanse of relevant specialities, and a close coordination of soma and psyche mediations is required. In fact, it has been proven that for anorexics, there is a strong link between the image of their degraded body and sensorial disorders. These phenomena also concern the structures of the interceptive system. Therefore, the body's perceived shape is a key issue not only in the pathology but also in the therapeutic intervention. To date, it has been established that self-perception can be modulated by interventions focused on touch. In this context and with the support of research in child psychiatry and psychology, we raise the question of the place of osteopathy as an aid in physico-psychic remediation. Our goal is to develop a therapeutic mediation covering the somatic phenomena induced by the muscular frame so as to demonstrate a possible improvement in how anorexics perceive their own morphology. Materials and methodsWe included 40 patients suffering from eating disorders in our experiment forming a heterogeneous age-group and respecting the minimum threshold. During the ten weeks of the trial, the group was divided into 4 subgroups of 10 non-randomized participants each and based on voluntary participation with one subgroup of 10 patients as a control group, one subgroup of 10 patients treated exclusively using psychomotricity, a third subgroup of 10 patients evaluated exclusively using osteopathy, and a fourth subgroup of 10 patients using a mixed approach. We relied on the “Body Shape Questionnaire” (BSQ-34) to conduct our comparative measurements. It is a reference psychometric tool for measuring bodily concerns, and the French version has been validated and is commonly used. ResultsAt the end of our ten-week treatment period, we observed positive results for psychomotricity (P < 0.05) and a double osteopathy-psychomotricity follow-up (P < 0.05), but osteopathy alone does not show sufficient improvement compared to the control group (P > 0.34). ConclusionIn view of the results obtained with our patients, the modulations of bodily concerns among those participants treated by touch appear to be effective in the intra-group, but our approach could require extended treatment for more than 10 weeks with regard to intergroup comparisons. Osteopathy must, like the other bodily mediations already involved in the follow-up of anorexia nervosa before it, establish the extent of its contribution to and value in this pathophysiology.

Depressive disorder in HIV patients

The article studies the relationship of the severity and frequency of depressive syndrome in HIV patients with the HIV severity and clinical stage. The study included 108 HIV patients aged 21 to 70 years with a major depressive episode and secondary depression due to somatic diseases and opportunistic infections. Patients in stage 4B (48 patients) prevailed. Stage 3 was diagnosed in 6 patients, stage 4A — in 23 patients, and stage 4C — in 31 patients. As a result of the study, a high score on the Hamilton Scale was observed in the group of patients with HIV dementia (23.4 points) and in patients with drug addiction (22.6 points), which, in addition to somatic phenomena, was also manifested by labile mood, suicidal thoughts, behavioral disinhibition, and increased impulsivity. The level of depression according to the Beck's Depression Inventory was high in drug addicts (56.72 points), in dementia patients (61.83), and in patients immediately after diagnosis (52.71 points).

FACTORS OF CYBERBULLYING IN ADOLESCENT ENVIRONMENT: THEORETICAL REVIEW

The article contains an analysis of the results of a theoretical analysis of the specific of cyberbullying factors in the adolescent environment and its consequences for the psychological well-being of this age representatives. The theoretical framework for understanding the concept of cyberbullying, the combination of the tendency of aggressive behavior and the specifics of the virtual environment in this phenomenon is defined. The results of studies reflecting the connections of cyberbullying with negative phenomena of the emotional sphere, a tendency to suicidal behavior, previous attitudes towards aggression, behavioral disorders and somatic phenomena were analyzed. Patterns of age, gender, and experience of participating in bullying situations as factors of cyberbullying for teenagers have been revealed.

Pain and fatigue in primary Sjögren's syndrome.

Chronic fatigue, pain and depression are common in patients with primary Sjögren's syndrome. These phenomena mutually affect each other and have a considerable impact on the patients' quality of life. While pain is usually regarded as a fairly somatic phenomenon, both fatigue and depression have traditionally been regarded as more-or-less of psychological origin. There is an increasing understanding that this picture is multifaceted; that there is a genetic foundation, and that biological mechanisms regulate the clinical expression through activation of evolutionary, deeply conserved neuronal pathways in the brain. This pattern is evident not only in primary Sjögren's syndrome, but also in other systemic inflammatory autoimmune diseases, in cancer and in neurodegenerative diseases like Parkinson's disease. This article will mainly focus on the biology of pain and fatigue. We describe how these factors influence each other, and act with the overarching purpose of defending the organism against harm and danger.

Critical and reasoned review of the psychosomatic question in French-speaking psychoanalysts

ABSTRACTEuropean psychosomatics, as a branch of psychoanalytic psychopathology, has existed for almost two centuries, but it is a constantly moving body of thought. From epistemology to aetiology, its questions are still evolving and concern the debate between the psyche/soma dualism and the monistic alternative, but also the psychic meaning that is to be attributed to somatic symptoms. In France, the discipline has not had its last word, for it is constantly seeking to position itself as a field of research and clinical practice within psychoanalysis. However, it still needs to affirm itself and open itself more towards other branches of knowledge, such as medicine, neuroscience, or the social sciences. In this context, are the processes of somatisation still to be thought of as boundary objects for psychoanalysis? On what epistemological, theoretical, methodological, and practical conditions is the psychosomatic question still or at last possible? In particular, is it possible to reintroduce the question of the “meaning” of the somatic phenomenon in order to breathe new life into it, without returning, however, to the symbolic interpretation of symptoms, while preserving the subjectivising approach of psychoanalysis and its logic of interpolation? Can we speak in the human sciences of a truly psychosomatic revolution in the image of psychoanalytic advances?

Fat, fashion and public shaming in the British long eighteenth century

Abstract Dieting as a fashionable undertaking in the public sphere appears throughout the course of the long eighteenth century. It was part of a shift in awareness to the public stigma of obesity, and marks the rise of a dieting culture focused on psychological effects rather than purely somatic phenomena. It is coterminous with the redefinition of the ‘reasonable’ (rational) person both in law as well as in the public sphere: ‘reasonableness’ comes to define the normal within the cult of the rational; obesity comes to mark that state beyond reasonableness. Such views led and continue to lead to a potential for psychological difficulties, which have come to be the hallmark of modern dieting practice.

Chronic fatigue phenomena – somatic and relational perspectives

This paper aims to develop therapeutic perspectives on relational and somatic phenomena but also difference and diversity dynamics associated with chronic fatigue as a presenting issue. In common with other complex and severe conditions, chronic fatigue will often appear as a single issue dominating the therapeutic space, a dynamic that may easily obscure sight of the person. The author reviews contemporary literature and considers dynamics associated with chronic fatigue phenomena commonly encountered in the therapeutic relationship. Autonomic nervous and sensory-motor systems also appear crucial for developing better understanding of, and sensitivity for, working with chronic fatigue phenomena.

Embodiment and the Therapeutic Relationship: Findings From a Heuristic Inquiry

Mental health practitioners of varied orientations experience somatic phenomena in therapeutic work with clients. Understanding embodiment from the body psychotherapist's viewpoint can illuminate its nature for mental health counselors who experience the phenomenon but question how to channel it to inform their work. Findings from a heuristic inquiry using creative, relational, and reflexive approaches illuminate the experiences of 6 body psychotherapists and perceived impact of embodiment on clients.

Examining differences in cognitive and affective theory of mind between persons with high and low extent of somatic symptoms: an experimental study

BackgroundMedically unexplained somatic symptoms are common, associated with disability and strongly related to depression and anxiety disorders. One interesting, but to date rarely tested, hypothesis is that deficits in both theory of mind (ToM) and emotional awareness may undergird the phenomenon of somatization. This study sought to investigate whether or not differences in ToM functioning and self-reported emotional awareness are associated with somatic symptoms in a sample from the general population.MethodsThe sample consisted of 50 healthy participants (37 females, 13 males) aged between 22 and 64 years (46.8 ± 11.7) of whom 29 reported a high extent of somatic symptoms (HSR), whereas 21 reported a low extent of somatic symptoms (LSR) based on the 30 highest and lowest percentiles of the Symptom List norms. The participants’ affective and cognitive ToM were assessed with two experimental paradigms by experimenters who were blind to the participants’ group membership. In addition, self-reports regarding emotional awareness, alexithymia, depressive and anxiety symptoms and current affect were collected.ResultsIn the experimental tasks, HSR showed lower affective ToM than LSR but the groups did not differ in cognitive ToM. Although HSR reported lower emotional awareness than LSR in the self-report measure, this group difference vanished when we controlled for anxiety and depression. Depression, anxiety, emotional awareness and alexithymia were correlated positively.ConclusionsThe data supported the hypothesis that deficits in affective ToM are related to somatic symptoms. Neither cognitive ToM nor self-reported emotional awareness were associated with somatic symptoms. Self-reported emotional awareness, alexithymia and symptoms of depression and anxiety shared a considerable amount of variance.

Every breath you take: physiology and the ecology of knowing in meditative practice

As a physiologist interested in contemplative practice and meditation I have enjoyed the opportunity of lecturing to students engaged in the study of contemplation. My pedagogic role was to expose them to some of what we know of the biological phenomena that are or may be taking place during various meditative states — explicating for them the details of how the human body actually works. In the course of working with students and faculty engaged in meditation I formulated the following questions relating biological science and contemplative practice: What should a practitioner or a teacher of meditation know about basic human anatomy and physiology? Is it necessary for someone engaging in contemplative practice to understand how the human organism is actually put together and how it works? Will knowledge of how the various organs work with one another enhance one's ability to meditate or can we dispense with this information and suffer no consequences in our practice? The fundamental importance of somatic or physical phenomena in meditative practice (for example in control of breath, heart rate, or metabolism) and most people's lack of understanding of basic human anatomy and physiology led me to answer yes to all of these questions. In this paper I outline the physiological knowledge and particular insights I have found useful for enhancing a person's understanding of how we breathe, how we regulate our heart rate, and how we control our metabolic rate in 'control' or non-meditative states and the kinds of changes we might expect in a meditating subject. I link what is perhaps the fundamental principle of physiology, the concept of 'homeostasis', with the balance and integration of the body systems sought by people engaged in contemplation. Mind-body harmony or an enhanced awareness of this linkage between the mind and the body can, in my opinion, be more fully realized when coupled with an understanding of what Hippocrates called, 'the nature of the body', that is, what the body actually does and how it does it.

Three Questions about Somatic Representations: A Response to Freedman’s “Akratic Believing”

Three Questions about Somatic RepresentationsA Response to Freedman’s “Akratic Believing” Claire L. Pouncey (bio) I thoroughly enjoyed Dr. Freedman’s paper on “Akratic Believing.” Often, philosophy of psychiatry offers insights to clarify psychological and psychiatric concepts. Less frequently, it involves a real dialogue between philosophy and psychological science. Dr. Freedman’s account of what is bothersome, rather than just philosophically wrong-headed, about the concept of epistemic akrasia demonstrates that, at least where anxiety is concerned, the a posteriori world may have a great deal to offer theoretical philosophy. Freedman argues that understanding somatic responses to trauma, or more broadly construed, to anxiety, dissolves the problem of why there seems to be more to the problem of epistemic akrasia than first and second order beliefs simply “coming apart,” which Freedman finds incoherent. Drawing on a feeling of discomfort that she persuasively argues occurs in cases of both practical and epistemic akrasia, Freedman uses her own experience of anxiety to explore why she cannot convince herself of her own safety despite intellectually reasoning about why she ought to believe she is safe. This first-personal case augments examples of epistemic akrasia that Freedman draws from the literature. In each example, anxiety interferes with the agent’s ability to believe what she thinks she ought. Friedman explains this apparent paradox using evidence from the psychological trauma literature, which identifies a host of somatic responses that can result from trauma. Freedman argues that these responses are often experienced as cognitions, although they are actually subcortical, and thus non-cognitive. Freedman concludes that true epistemic akrasia is conceptually impossible. She explains why we experience situations that seem to speak against that impossibility as having doxastic merit or force, when in fact they do not. The conclusion that non-cognitive experiences influence our thoughts and actions, and therefore are not epistemically dismissible, is an important challenge to the personally sterile, prefeminist epistemology of the rationalist tradition. Freedman’s discussion inspires a number of questions for me, but I use this space to ask the three that I find most compelling. First, I question whether the phenomena Freedman describes [End Page 347] as the source of epistemically funny feelings are best characterized as “somatic representations.” Second, I wonder what she thinks they entail for epistemology generally. Third, I challenge Freedman’s claim that one cannot reason with such non-cognitive phenomena, for this is the basic premise of a number of psychotherapies. I address these in turn. I begin with a terminological concern: I wonder whether Freedman’s term “somatic representation” does the work she needs it to do, because the phenomena of interest may be not be limited to the somatic, and they may not be representations. The psychology literature Freedman cites does not limit post-traumatic responses to the cognitive. Although what interests Freedman are somatic phenomena that seem to the agent to be cognitive, the psychological trauma literature she uses to support her position also addresses non-somatic, subcortical processes in the limbic system that affect behaviors, such as hippocampal or amygdala activation. These non-cognitive relays initiate but do not constitute somatic anxiety responses, leading me to wonder whether Freedman includes them among the phenomena of interest, because they are neither cortical nor somatic. If she is not interested in the non-somatic subcortical events related to anxiety memories, I am curious to hear why not. Philosophically, I have a hard time conceiving representations as anything but cognitive. Whether representations are ideas, propositions, formulas, drawings, or models, they act as cognitive placeholders for lived experiences and perceptions. Representations alone do not provide either reasons for belief or action in the present, or post hoc justifications. But qua representations, they are cognitive experiences. Freedman may be saying that cognitive representations of somatic phenomena have doxastic weight, or lend credibility, or some such, but there seems to be an intermediate step missing from her argument that would link the phenomenological experience to cognitive content. If the experience is somatic it is not cognitive, and if not cognitive it is not representational. My bias may not undermine Freedman’s argument, but I do need to hear how she characterizes non-cognitive representations. These...

The Fat Person on the Edgware Road Omnibus: Fat, Fashion, and Public Shaming in the British Long Eighteenth Century.

Dieting as a fashionable undertaking in the public sphere appears in the course of the long eighteenth century. It is part of a shift to an awareness of the public stigma of obesity and marks the rise of a dieting culture focused on psychological rather than a purely somatic phenomenon. It is coterminous with the redefinition of the "reasonable" (rational) person both in law as well as in the public sphere.Reasonableness comes to define the normal within a cult of the rational; obesity comes to mark that state beyond reasonableness. Such views led and lead to the potential for psychological difficulties that come to be the hallmark of modern dieting practice.

All in My Head: Beckett, Schizophrenia and the Self.

This article will explore the representation of certain mental and somatic phenomena in Beckett’s trilogy of novels Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable, exploring how his understanding of schizophrenia and psychosis informs his representation of the relationship between mind and body. It will also examine recent phenomenological and philosophical accounts of schizophrenia (Louis Sass, Josef Parnas, Shaun Gallagher) that see the condition as a disorder of selfhood and concentrate in it on the disruption to ipseity, a fundamental and pre-reflective awareness of self that leads to a loss of ‘grip’ (in the term of Merleau-Ponty) on concepts and percepts. Beckett’s writing might, it is argued, make such disruptions more tangible and intelligible. The article will also consider John Campbell’s argument that immunity of the first person to error—Sydney Shoemaker’s foundational philosophical idea that we cannot misspeak the first person pronoun—is revoked in states of psychosis, and relate such states to the moments in Beckett’s writing where this immunity is challenged, and quasi-psychotic experiences represented.

高中生生活事件、心理弹性与躯体化的关系

目的：探讨躯体化的现状、影响因素及其作用机制。方法：采用青少年生活事件量表、心理弹性量表、症状自评量表躯体化分量表对某重点高中400名高中生进行测验。利用统计软件进行相关分析与逐步回归分析，从而进行中介效应分析。结果：1) 生活事件正向预测躯体化，心理弹性负向预测躯体化。2) 心理弹性在生活事件对躯体化的影响中起到部分中介作用，中介效应占总效应的28.79%。结论：高中生压力躯体化现象普遍，心理弹性在生活事件对躯体化的影响中有重要作用。 Objective: To discuss the status and influencing factors and mechanism of the phenomenon of so-matization. Methods: 400 high school students were assessed by Adolescent Self-Rating Life Events Check List, Resilience Scale for Adolescents and Symptoms Check List 90 (SCL-90). Correlation analysis and stepwise regression analysis were constructed as the bases of the mediating effect analysis and the construction of the path model. Results: 1) Life events can positively forecast somatization; resilience can negatively forecast somatization. 2) Resilience exerts the mediating effect between life events and somatization. Conclusion: Somatization is a common phenomenon among high school students; resilience plays an important role in the relationship between life events and somatization.

Актуализация феномена сакрального в ситуации кризиса современной культуры

The article presents an analysis of the processes of resacralization occurring in culture and art in parallel with the desacralization, which is the ontologicalfoundation of modern culture and postmodern art and has a worldview character, because the lack of spirituality in modern art and culture, spiritual and essential desolation of grounds of cultural sphere in general is associated on our view with the loss of the transcendent beginning or foundations that characterized all previous traditional classical culture and aesthetics. It was found that the resacralization takes different forms, leading to different types of shamanism (real and virtual) and sacralization of materiality, cruelty, somatic and libidinal phenomena in art, through which a person can go beyond their being, which leads to, respectively, shamanism in art, materialism, physicality, sexuality, violence in mass-to-date art, electronic digital media and specific artistic search and expressions in virtual art. Revealed that the process of resacralization is made possible by the fact that at the heart of the sacred there are deep archetypes of human consciousness, which define and interchange the sacred. However, modern culture has become a sacredly empty simulacrum, a shell without a high spiritual content, form and meaning, not presenting high and spiritual content, but rather suggesting low-lying values, because it is filled by the meanings and contents which have become relevant in the modern era. It is concluded that modern art makes sacred predominantly everyday and even baser postmodern phenomena and trends of today.

Introduction to Translation.

We introduce here the inaugural issue of the new scientific journal Translation. The overarching aim of this endeavor is to establish a new forum for a broad spectrum of research in the area of protein synthesis in living systems ranging from structural biochemical, evolutionary and regulatory aspects of translation to the fundamental questions related to post-translational control of somatic phenomena in multicellular organisms including human behavior and health. The journal will publish high quality research articles, provide novel insights, ask provocative questions and discuss new hypothesis in this emerging field. Launching a new journal is always challenging. We hope that strong criteria for the peer-review process, transparency of the editorial policy and the scientific reputation of its founders, editors and editorial board assure the success of Translation; and we rely on continuing support of the scientific community in all aspects of the journal’s activity.

Fronto-thalamic volumetry markers of somatic delusions and hallucinations in schizophrenia

Although the psychotic phenomena of schizophrenia have been extensively investigated, somatic delusions and hallucinations have seldom been reported and their mechanisms are substantially unexplored. Here, we aimed to identify the brain structural correlates of somatic psychotic phenomena using combined volumetry and diffusivity structural neuroimaging techniques. Seventy-five individuals with a DSM-IV-TR diagnosis of schizophrenia and 75 healthy controls (HC) underwent a comprehensive clinical assessment, a high-resolution T1-weighted magnetic resonance imaging and a diffusion tensor imaging protocol using a 3T MRI scanner. Voxel-based volumetry and mean diffusivity (MD) of gray matter (GM) and fractional anisotropy (FA) of white matter (WM) of the whole brain were calculated for each subject. Reduced left fronto-insular GM volume was found in patients with somatic delusions compared with patients without somatic delusions and HC. Increased GM volume was found in the bilateral thalami, primarily in the right ventral-anterior thalamic nucleus projecting to the prefrontal-temporal cortices and the bilateral pars triangularis of the inferior frontal lobe, of patients with somatic hallucinations and HC compared with patients without somatic hallucinations. No differences emerged in GM MD and in WM FA between patients with and without psychotic somatic phenomena (i.e. delusions or hallucinations). These findings provide the first evidence that a frontal-thalamic structural perturbation mediates somatic psychotic phenomena in schizophrenia.