Proposed Revision | APA DSM-5. Brian Rice's Contributor Profile - Associated Content - associatedcontent.com. 7 Signs You're An Empath. 5. Do you feel compelled to care for anyone in pain, no matter who they are and what they’ve done to you? A true Empath cannot walk past someone suffering and not feel a need to stop and help that person. Homeless people can be particularly difficult, as they are everywhere and little can be done to help them unless the Empath has an occupation related to this. A true Empath feels compelled to go to anyone they feel pain from, be it angst or something physical.
And a true Empath's compassion will usually be accepted on the spot: People in pain, regardless of how they might normally react to strangers, will receive an Empath with open arms. They know instinctively that their pain matters to them. 6. Some Empaths are the new-agey peace-loving types who want to hold hands with everyone, but many just want to be alone because they have difficulty processing everything they absorb from other people. 7. Most Empaths have the ability to heal. You're not crazy! Rare but Real: People Who Feel, Taste and Hear Color. When Ingrid Carey says she feels colors, she does not mean she sees red, or feels blue, or is green with envy.
She really does feel them. She can also taste them, and hear them, and smell them. The 20-year-old junior at the University of Maine has synesthesia, a rare neurological condition in which two or more of the senses entwine. Numbers and letters, sensations and emotions, days and months are all associated with colors for Carey. The letter "N" is sienna brown; "J" is light green; the number "8" is orange; and July is bluish-green. The pain from a shin split throbs in hues of orange and yellow, purple and red, Carey told LiveScience.
Colors in Carey's world have properties that most of us would never dream of: red is solid, powerful and consistent, while yellow is pliable, brilliant and intense. Scientific acceptance The cause remains a mystery, however. Technology lags Like other scientists, Laeng also questions whether synesthesia needs such extra neural connections in order to occur. Scientists Say Everyone Can Read Minds.
Empathy allows us to feel the emotions of others, to identify and understand their feelings and motives and see things from their perspective. How we generate empathy remains a subject of intense debate in cognitive science. Some scientists now believe they may have finally discovered its root. We're all essentially mind readers, they say. The idea has been slow to gain acceptance, but evidence is mounting. Mirror neurons In 1996, three neuroscientists were probing the brain of a macaque monkey when they stumbled across a curious cluster of cells in the premotor cortex, an area of the brain responsible for planning movements.
The cluster of cells fired not only when the monkey performed an action, but likewise when the monkey saw the same action performed by someone else. Because the cells reflected the actions that the monkey observed in others, the neuroscientists named them "mirror neurons. " Theory theory Theory theory describes children as budding social scientists. Natural mind readers. Study: People Literally Feel Pain of Others. A brain anomaly can make the saying "I know how you feel" literally true in hyper-empathetic people who actually sense that they are being touched when they witness others being touched. The condition, known as mirror-touch synesthesia, is related to the activity of mirror neurons, cells recently discovered to fire not only when some animals perform some behavior, such as climbing a tree, but also when they watch another animal do the behavior.
For "synesthetes," it's as if their mirror neurons are on overdrive. "We often flinch when we see someone knock their arm, and this may be a weaker version of what these synesthetes experience," University College London cognitive neuroscientist Jamie Ward said. Now scientists find these synesthetes possess an unusually strong ability to empathize with others. Further research into this condition might shed light on the roots of empathy, which could help better understand autism, schizophrenia, psychopathy and other disorders linked with empathy. The University of Chicago Magazine. A basic human impulse affecting the course of history, culture, and personal connections, empathy is also a neuro-logical fact—and one that’s increasingly understood.
TO NEUROSCIENTIST JEAN DECETY, empathy resembles a sort of minor constellation: clusters of encephalic stars glowing in the cosmos of an otherwise dark brain. “See how they flash,” Decety says, pointing to the orange-lit anterior cingulate cortex and anterior insula on an fMRI scan. “This person is witnessing another person in pain. ... What’s interesting is that this network of regions is also involved in the firsthand experience of pain.” The capacity to separate self from other is a key component of empathy; otherwise, the sight of another’s pain can become paralyzing, says neuros cientist Jean Decety, here with his collected replicas of early hominid skulls. Empathy is one of those human impulses that defy easy explanation.
But empathy is also learned. Everywhere Decety looks, empathy abides. Empathy > The Study of Cognitive Empathy and Empathic Accuracy. Besides a growing interest in person perception among psychologists in the 1950's (e.g., Heider (1958)), researchers from the counseling and therapeutic milieu were keen on investigating empathic accuracy, since empathy was seen as being essential for successful therapy.
In conceiving of a client centered therapy, Rogers defines empathy early on as the ability to “ perceive the internal frame of reference of another with accuracy and with the emotional components and meanings which pertain thereto as if one were the person, but without ever losing the ‘as if’ conditions” (1959, 210-11). In his later works he more fully analyzes it as the ability to enter If empathy is central for the success of therapy, as Rogers claims, then it would be good if one could rank the applicants for the counseling profession according to their empathic abilities.
Person's A empathic ability is then determined by the degree to which A's answers to (iii) and (iv) corresponds to B's answer to (i) and (ii). Cross-cultural reflections on the mirror self-recognition test. The performance of young children on the 'mirror self-recognition test' varies hugely across cultures, a new study has shown. This is the test that involves surreptitiously putting a mark on a child's forehead and then seeing how they react when presented with their mirror image.
Attempts by the child to touch or remove the mark are taken as a sign that he or she recognises themselves in the mirror. Studies in the West suggest that around half of all 18-month-olds pass the test, rising to 70 per cent by 24 months. Chimps, orangutans, dolphins and elephants have also been shown to pass the test, and there's recent debate over whether monkeys can too. Tanya Broesch and her colleagues began by taking a simplified version of the mirror self-recognition test to Kenya, where they administered it to 82 children aged between 18 to 72 months.
So, what's going on? Are children in these non-Western nations seriously delayed in their mirror self-recognition. Empathic people remember your smell. If you're an empathic person, able to tune into other people's feelings, then the chances are you've also got a keen sense of what other people smell like! We've known for some time that the brain areas involved in empathy and recognising facial emotions partially overlap with the brain areas associated with smell.
Wen Zhou's and Denise Chen's new finding shows that this overlap extends to behavioural performance. Forty-four female university students were twice tasked with smelling three t-shirts and picking out the one that belonged to their room-mate. The t-shirts had been carefully prepared - worn overnight for an average of eight hours, after the owner had used scent-free toiletries for the previous two days.
Based on their performance, the students were arranged in three groups: 21 of them failed both times to pick out the correct t-shirt; 10 of them picked the correct t-shirt once; and 13 of them picked the correct t-shirt both times. Zhou W, & Chen D (2009). Are people with borderline personality really more empathic? People with borderline personality disorder (BPD) are emotionally fragile, impulsive, suffer from low mood, have intense unstable personal relationships and - according to a handful of studies - they also have enhanced empathy.
But new research by Judith Flury and colleagues shows the idea that BPD patients have enhanced empathy is a spurious finding reflecting the methodological design of prior studies combined with the fact BPD patients are particularly difficult to read. The 76 lowest and highest scorers on the Borderline Syndrome Index were selected from among 789 students. These 76 were then arranged into pairs of low and high borderline participants. The members of each pair were videoed chatting to each other for ten minutes, after which each person completed a personality questionnaire about themselves, and about how they thought their partner saw themselves. FLURY, J., ICKES, W., SCHWEINLE, W. (2008). Post written by Christian Jarrett (@psych_writer) for the BPS Research Digest. Find your Spirit Animal - an online quiz - Jeri Smith-Ready. Discover your Spirit Animal! Find out which Spirit Animal would bestow its magic on you. Pick the best answers from the choices below, then click "Find My Animal!
" to see your results. Disclaimer This quiz is for entertainment purposes only. Discerning a person's true Animal Spirit is way beyond the abilities of a mere novelist, who, let's face it, makes things up for a living. For more information on spirit animals, check out these additional resources: BOOKS by Jeri Lust for Life — December 2012 Final book in the award-winning WVMP series Ciara must battle vengeful vampires and her own demons to win her ultimate happy ending.
"Let It Bleed — June 2012 Free WVMP novella A can't-miss "bridge" between BRING ON THE NIGHT and LUST FOR LIFE! Shine — May 2012 Final book in the award-winning SHADE trilogy When tragedy spikes a worldwide fear of ghosts, Aura will do anything to save her generation's freedom—and the life of the boy she loves.
Shift — May 2011 Sequel to the critically acclaimed SHADE. Dissociative Identity Disorder (Multiple Personality Disorder): Signs, Symptoms, Treatment. Dissociative identity disorder (previously known as multiple personality disorder) is thought to be a complex psychological condition that is likely caused by many factors, including severe trauma during early childhood (usually extreme, repetitive physical, sexual, or emotional abuse). What Is Dissociative Identity Disorder? Most of us have experienced mild dissociation, which is like daydreaming or getting lost in the moment while working on a project. However, dissociative identity disorder is a severe form of dissociation, a mental process which produces a lack of connection in a person's thoughts, memories, feelings, actions, or sense of identity.
Dissociative identity disorder is thought to stem from a combination of factors that may include trauma experienced by the person with the disorder. Is Dissociative Identity Disorder Real? You may wonder if dissociative identity disorder is real. What Are the Symptoms of Dissociative Identity Disorder? Continued Depersonalization. Technology Review: A Working Brain Model. An ambitious project to create an accurate computer model of the brain has reached an impressive milestone. Scientists in Switzerland working with IBM researchers have shown that their computer simulation of the neocortical column, arguably the most complex part of a mammal’s brain, appears to behave like its biological counterpart. By demonstrating that their simulation is realistic, the researchers say, these results suggest that an entire mammal brain could be completely modeled within three years, and a human brain within the next decade.
“What we’re doing is reverse-engineering the brain,” says Henry Markram, codirector of the Brain Mind Institute at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, in Switzerland, who led the work, called the Blue Brain project, which began in 2005. (See “IBM: The Computer Brain.”) The model of part of the brain was completed last year, says Markram.
“It’s amazing work,” says Thomas Serre, a computational-neuroscience researcher at MIT. The Human Brain Project - Denmark. The Human Brain Project - Homepage. Proposed Revision | APA DSM-5. ASPERGER'S SYNDROME AND ADULTS - DEFINITION OF ASPERGER'S SYNDROME AND RELATED DEVELOPMENTAL DISORDERS. What is Aspergers Syndrome? - Diagnostic Criteria and Links to Other Definitions. From DSM IV (p77): Diagnostic Criteria FOR 299.80 Asperger's Disorder A. Qualitative impairment in social interaction, as manifested by at least two of the following: marked impairments in the use of multiple nonverbal behaviors such as eye-to-eye gaze, facial expression, body postures, and gestures to regulate social interaction failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to developmental level a lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interests, or achievements with other people (e.g. by a lack of showing, bringing, or pointing out objects of interest to other people) lack of social or emotional reciprocity B.
D. There is no clinically significant general delay in language (e.g., single words used by age 2 years, communicative phrases used by age 3 years) E. F. (All six criteria must be met for confirmation of diagnosis.) A More Down-to-Earth Description by Lois Freisleben-Cook. NOTE:(This was originally a post to the bit.listserv.autism newsgroup/listserv) by Roger Meyer. Asperger's disorder - children, causes, DSM, functioning, therapy, adults, person, people, used, medication, brain, personality, skills, health, traits, Definition, Description. Photo by: Cheryl Casey Definition Asperger's disorder, which is also called Asperger's syndrome (AS) or autistic psychopathy, belongs to a group of childhood disorders known as pervasive developmental disorders (PDDs) or autistic spectrum disorders. The essential features of Asperger's disorder are severe social interaction impairment and restricted, repetitive patterns of behavior and activities. It is similar to autism , but children with Asperger's do not have the same difficulties in acquiring language that children with autism have.
In the mental health professional's diagnostic hand book, the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders fourth edition text revised, or DSM-IV-TR , Asperger's disorder is classified as a developmental disorder of childhood. Description AS was first described by Hans Asperger, an Austrian psychiatrist , in 1944. Asperger's disorder is one of the milder pervasive developmental disorders. Causes and symptoms Causes Symptoms Diagnosis. Free Personality Test by LearnMyself.
Telling apart SPD vs Asperger's? : Schizoid Personality Disorder Forum. A few years ago, I was diagnosed with Asperger's. However, through some browsing at Wikipedia, I've come across SPD, and calling myself "SPD, Languid subtype" seems to describe my behaviour much better than pure Asperger's does. (According to the quiz at , my most Aspie-like qualities are 'talent/special interests' (21 of 23), Social (27 of 34), with the rest at best middling.) The trouble is, the official diagnosis criteria for SPD seem to say that you have to first rule out Asperger's. Is it your experience that you can only be one or the other, but not both; or the contrary?
And, since this is my first post, I might as well, by way of introduction, paste my notes to myself on my SPD-like qualities: * I prefer solitary activities, such as reading, writing, watching TV, and hiking. Borderline Personality Disorder Forum. Report.