Neuroexistentialism: A New Search for Meaning

Owen Flanagan and Gregg D. Caruso
The Philosopher's Magazine
Originally published November 6, 2018

Existentialisms are responses to recognisable diminishments in the self-image of persons caused by social or political rearrangements or ruptures, and they typically involve two steps: (a) admission of the anxiety and an analysis of its causes, and (b) some sort of attempt to regain a positive, less anguished, more hopeful image of persons. With regard to the first step, existentialisms typically involve a philosophical expression of the anxiety that there are no deep, satisfying answers that make sense of the human predicament and explain what makes human life meaningful, and thus that there are no secure foundations for meaning, morals, and purpose. There are three kinds of existentialisms that respond to three different kinds of grounding projects – grounding in God’s nature, in a shared vision of the collective good, or in science. The first-wave existentialism of Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, and Nietzsche expressed anxiety about the idea that meaning and morals are made secure because of God’s omniscience and good will. The second-wave existentialism of Sartre, Camus, and de Beauvoir was a post-Holocaust response to the idea that some uplifting secular vision of the common good might serve as a foundation. Today, there is a third-wave existentialism, neuroexistentialism, which expresses the anxiety that, even as science yields the truth about human nature, it also disenchants.

Unlike the previous two waves of existentialism, neuroexistentialism is not caused by a problem with ecclesiastical authority, nor by the shock of coming face to face with the moral horror of nation state actors and their citizens. Rather, neuroexistentialism is caused by the rise of the scientific authority of the human sciences and a resultant clash between the scientific and humanistic image of persons. Neuroexistentialism is a twenty-first-century anxiety over the way contemporary neuroscience helps secure in a particularly vivid way the message of Darwin from 150 years ago: that humans are animals – not half animal, not some percentage animal, not just above the animals, but 100 percent animal. Everyday and in every way, neuroscience removes the last vestiges of an immaterial soul or self. It has no need for such posits. It also suggest that the mind is the brain and all mental processes just are (or are realised in) neural processes, that introspection is a poor instrument for revealing how the mind works, that there is no ghost in the machine or Cartesian theatre where consciousness comes together, that death is the end since when the brain ceases to function so too does consciousness, and that our sense of self may in part be an illusion.

The info is here.

Companies Tout Psychiatric Pharmacogenomic Testing, But Is It Ready for a Store Near You?

Jennifer Abbasi
JAMA Network
Originally posted October 3, 2018

Here is an excerpt:

According to Dan Dowd, PharmD, vice president of medical affairs at Genomind, pharmacists in participating stores can inform customers about the Genecept Assay if they notice a history of psychotropic drug switching or drug-related adverse effects. If the test is administered, a physician’s order is required for the company’s laboratory to process it.

“This certainly is a recipe for selling a whole lot more tests,” Potash said of the approach, adding that patients often feel “desperate” to find a successful treatment. “What percentage of the time selling these tests will result in better patient outcomes remains to be seen.”

Biernacka also had reservations about the in-store model. “Generally, it could be helpful for a pharmacist to tell a patient or their provider that perhaps the patient could benefit from pharmacogenetic testing,” she said. “[B]ut until the tests are more thoroughly assessed, the decision to pursue such an option (and with which test) should be left more to the treating clinician and patient.”

Some physicians said they’ve found pharmacogenomic testing to be useful. Aron Fast, MD, a family physician in Hesston, Kansas, uses GeneSight for patients with depression or anxiety who haven’t improved after trying 2 or 3 antidepressants. Each time, he said, his patients were less depressed or anxious after switching to a new drug based on their genotyping results.

Part of their improvements may stem from expecting the test to help, he acknowledged. The testing “raises confidence in the medication to be prescribed,” Müller explained, which might contribute to a placebo effect. However, Müller emphasized that the placebo effect alone is unlikely to explain lasting improvements in patients with moderate to severe depression. In his psychiatric consulting practice, pharmacogenomic-guided drug changes have led to improvements in patients “sometimes even up to the point where they’re completely remitted,” he said.

The info is here.

Mental health practitioners’ reported barriers to prescription of exercise for mental health consumers

KirstenWay, Lee Kannis-Dymand, Michele Lastella, Geoff P. Lovell
Mental Health and Physical Activity
Volume 14, March 2018, Pages 52-60

Abstract

Exercise is an effective evidenced-based intervention for a range of mental health conditions, however sparse research has investigated the exercise prescription behaviours of mental health practitioners as a collective, and the barriers faced in prescribing exercise for mental health. A self-report survey was completed online by 325 mental health practitioners to identify how often they prescribe exercise for various conditions and explore their perceived barriers to exercise prescription for mental health through thematic analysis. Over 70% of the sample reported prescribing exercise regularly for depression, stress, and anxiety; however infrequent rates of prescription were reported for conditions of schizophrenia, bipolar and related disorders, and substance-related disorders. Using thematic analysis 374 statements on mental health practitioners' perceived barriers to exercise prescription were grouped into 22 initial themes and then six higher-order themes. Reported barriers to exercise prescription mostly revolved around clients' practical barriers and perspectives (41.7%) and the practitioners' knowledge and perspectives (33.2%). Of these two main themes regarding perceived barriers to exercise prescription in mental health, a lack of training (14.7%) and the client's disinclination (12.6%) were initial themes which reoccurred considerably more often than others. General practitioners, mental health nurses, and mental health managers also frequently cited barriers related to a lack of organisational support and resources. Barriers to the prescription of exercise such as lack of training and client's disinclination need to be addressed in order to overcome challenges which restrict the prescription of exercise as a therapeutic intervention.

The research is here.

Moral Injury and Religiosity in US Veterans With Posttraumatic Stress Disorder Symptoms

Harold Koenig and others
The Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease: February 28, 2018

Abstract

Moral injury (MI) involves feelings of shame, grief, meaninglessness, and remorse from having violated core moral beliefs related to traumatic experiences. This multisite cross-sectional study examined the association between religious involvement (RI) and MI symptoms, mediators of the relationship, and the modifying effects of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) severity in 373 US veterans with PTSD symptoms who served in a combat theater. Assessed were demographic, military, religious, physical, social, behavioral, and psychological characteristics using standard measures of RI, MI symptoms, PTSD, depression, and anxiety. MI was widespread, with over 90% reporting high levels of at least one MI symptom and the majority reporting at least five symptoms or more. In the overall sample, religiosity was inversely related to MI in bivariate analyses (r = −0.25, p < 0.0001) and multivariate analyses (B = −0.40, p = 0.001); however, this relationship was present only among veterans with severe PTSD (B = −0.65, p = 0.0003). These findings have relevance for the care of veterans with PTSD.

The paper is here.

Mental Health Crisis for Grad Students

Colleen Flaherty
Inside Higher Ed
Originally published March 6, 2018

Several studies suggest that graduate students are at greater risk for mental health issues than those in the general population. This is largely due to social isolation, the often abstract nature of the work and feelings of inadequacy -- not to mention the slim tenure-track job market. But a new study in Nature Biotechnology warns, in no uncertain terms, of a mental health “crisis” in graduate education.

“Our results show that graduate students are more than six times as likely to experience depression and anxiety as compared to the general population,” the study says, urging action on the part of institutions. “It is only with strong and validated interventions that academia will be able to provide help for those who are traveling through the bioscience workforce pipeline.”

The paper is based on a survey including clinically validated scales for anxiety and depression, deployed to students via email and social media. The survey’s 2,279 respondents were mostly Ph.D. candidates (90 percent), representing 26 countries and 234 institutions. Some 56 percent study humanities or social sciences, while 38 percent study the biological and physical sciences. Two percent are engineering students and 4 percent are enrolled in other fields.

Some 39 percent of respondents scored in the moderate-to-severe depression range, as compared to 6 percent of the general population measured previously with the same scale.

The article is here.

Polluted Morality: Air Pollution Predicts Criminal Activity and Unethical Behavior

Jackson G. Lu, Julia J. Lee, Francesca Gino, Adam D. Galinsky
Psychological Science 
First Published February 7, 2018

Abstract

Air pollution is a serious problem that affects billions of people globally. Although the environmental and health costs of air pollution are well known, the present research investigates its ethical costs. We propose that air pollution can increase criminal and unethical behavior by increasing anxiety. Analyses of a 9-year panel of 9,360 U.S. cities found that air pollution predicted six major categories of crime; these analyses accounted for a comprehensive set of control variables (e.g., city and year fixed effects, population, law enforcement) and survived various robustness checks (e.g., balanced panel, nonparametric bootstrapped standard errors). Three subsequent experiments involving American and Indian participants established the causal effect of psychologically experiencing a polluted (vs. clean) environment on unethical behavior. Consistent with our theoretical perspective, results revealed that anxiety mediated this effect. Air pollution not only corrupts people’s health, but also can contaminate their morality.

The research is here.

If you cannot get to the article, you can download it from here.

Loneliness Might Be a Killer, but What’s the Best Way to Protect Against It?

Rita Rubin
JAMA. 2017;318(19):1853-1855.

Here is an excerpt:

“I think that it’s clearly a [health] risk factor,” first author Nancy Donovan, MD, said of loneliness. “Various types of psychosocial stress appear to be bad for the human body and brain and are clearly associated with lots of adverse health consequences.”

Though the findings overall are mixed, the best current evidence suggests that loneliness may cause adverse health effects by promoting inflammation, said Donovan, a geriatric psychiatrist at the Center for Alzheimer Research and Treatment at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.

Loneliness might also be an early, relatively easy-to-detect marker for preclinical Alzheimer disease, suggests an article Donovan coauthored. She and her collaborators recently reported in JAMA Psychiatry that loneliness was associated with a higher cortical amyloid burden in 79 cognitively normal elderly adults. Cortical amyloid burden is being investigated as a potential biomarker for identifying asymptomatic adults with the greatest risk of Alzheimer disease. However, large-scale population screening for amyloid burden is unlikely to be practical.

Regardless of whether loneliness turns out to be a marker for preclinical Alzheimer disease, enough is known about its health effects that physicians need to be able to recognize it, Holt-Lunstad says.

“The cumulative evidence points to the benefit of including social factors in medical training and continuing education for health care professionals,” she and Brigham Young colleague Timothy Smith, PhD, wrote in an editorial.

The article is here.

Why You Don’t See the Forest for the Trees When You Are Anxious: Anxiety Impairs Intuitive Decision Making

Carina Remmers and Thea Zander
Clinical Psychological Science
First Published September 27, 2017

Abstract

Intuitive decisions arise effortlessly from an unconscious, associative coherence detection process. Hereby, they guide people adaptively through everyday life decision making. When people are anxious, however, they often make poor decisions or no decision at all. Is intuition impaired in a state of anxiety? The aim of the current experiment was to examine this question in a between-subjects design. A total of 111 healthy participants were randomly assigned to an anxious, positive, or neutral multimodal mood induction after which they performed the established semantic coherence task. This task operationalizes intuition as the sudden, inexplicable detection of environmental coherence, based on automatic, unconscious processes of spreading activation. The current findings show that anxious participants showed impaired intuitive performance compared to participants of the positive and neutral mood groups. Trait anxiety did not moderate this effect. Accordingly, holistic, associative processes seem to be impaired by anxiety. Clinical implications and directions for future research are discussed.

The article is here.

Prince Harry: mental health should be at heart of armed forces training

Caroline Davies
The Guardian
Originally posted October 9, 2017

Prince Harry has said mental health strategies for armed forces personnel are crucial to create a “more confident, focused and, ultimately, more combat-ready military”.

In a speech at the Ministry of Defence, the 33-year-old prince, who spent 10 years in the army, said that as the number of active-duty personnel had been reduced there was a premium on “every individual being fighting fit and deployable”.

Announcing a joint initiative between the MoD and the Royal Foundation, created by the prince and the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge to tackle mental health issues, Harry said mental health strategies needed to be at the forefront of armed forces personnel training.

“Quite simply, these men and women are prized assets which need to be continually invested in. We surely have to think of them as high-performance athletes, carrying all their kit, equipment and a rifle,” he said. “Crucially, fighting fitness is not just about physical fitness. It is just as much about mental fitness too.”

The MoD said the move would build upon a recently launched government strategy aimed at improving mental health among military workers, civilian staff, their families and veterans.

The article is here.

Burnout at Work Isn’t Just About Exhaustion. It’s Also About Loneliness

Emma Seppala and Marissa King
Harvard Business Review

First published June 29, 2017

More and more people are feeling tired and lonely at work. In analyzing the General Social Survey of 2016, we found that, compared with roughly 20 years ago, people are twice as likely to report that they are always exhausted. Close to 50% of people say they are often or always exhausted due to work. This is a shockingly high statistic — and it’s a 32% increase from two decades ago. What’s more, there is a significant correlation between feeling lonely and work exhaustion: The more people are exhausted, the lonelier they feel.

This loneliness is not a result of social isolation, as you might think, but rather is due to the emotional exhaustion of workplace burnout. In researching the book The Happiness Track, we found that 50% of people — across professions, from the nonprofit sector to the medical field — are burned out. This isn’t just a problem for busy, overworked executives (though the high rates of loneliness and burnout among this group are well known). Our work suggests that the problem is pervasive across professions and up and down corporate hierarchies.

Loneliness, whether it results from social isolation or exhaustion, has serious consequences for individuals. John Cacioppo, a leading expert on loneliness and coauthor of Loneliness: Human Nature and the Need for Social Connection, emphasizes its tremendous impact on psychological and physical health and longevity. Research by Sarah Pressman, of the University of California, Irvine, corroborates his work and demonstrates that while obesity reduces longevity by 20%, drinking by 30%, and smoking by 50%, loneliness reduces it by a whopping 70%. In fact, one study suggests that loneliness increases your chance of stroke or coronary heart disease — the leading cause of death in developed countries — by 30%. On the other hand, feelings of social connection can strengthen our immune system, lengthen our life, and lower rates of anxiety and depression.

The article is here.

Informed Patient? Don’t bet on it

Mikkael Sekeres and Timothy Gilligan
The New York Times
Originally posted March 1, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

The secret is that informed consent in health care is commonly not-so-well informed. It might be a document we ask you to sign, at the behest of our lawyers, in case we end up in court if a bad outcome happens. Unfortunately, it’s often not really about informing you. In schools, teachers determine what students know through tests and homework. The standard is not whether the teacher has explained how to add, but instead whether the student can add. If we were truly invested in whether you were informed, we’d give you a quiz, or at least ask you to repeat back to us what you heard so we could assess its accuracy.

The article is here.

Why Some People Get Burned Out and Others Don't

Kandi Wiens and Annie McKee
Harvard Business Review
Originally posted November 23, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

What You Can Do to Manage Stress and Avoid Burnout

People do all kinds of destructive things to deal with stress—they overeat, abuse drugs and alcohol, and push harder rather than slowing down. What we learned from our study of chief medical officers is that people can leverage their emotional intelligence to deal with stress and ward off burnout. You, too, might want to try the following:

Don’t be the source of your stress. Too many of us create our own stress, with its full bodily response, merely by thinking about or anticipating future episodes or encounters that might be stressful. People who have a high need to achieve or perfectionist tendencies may be more prone to creating their own stress. We learned from our study that leaders who are attuned to the pressures they put on themselves are better able to control their stress level. As one CMO described, “I’ve realized that much of my stress is self-inflicted from years of being hard on myself. Now that I know the problems it causes for me, I can talk myself out of the non-stop pressure.”

Recognize your limitations. Becoming more aware of your strengths and weaknesses will clue you in to where you need help. In our study, CMOs described the transition from a clinician to leadership role as being a major source of their stress. Those who recognized when the demands were outweighing their abilities, didn’t go it alone—they surrounded themselves with trusted advisors and asked for help.

The article is here.

The A.I Anxiety

by Joel Achenbach
The Washington Post
Originally published December 27, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

But the discussion reflects a broader truth: We live in an age in which machine intelligence has become a part of daily life. Computers fly planes and soon will drive cars. Computer algorithms anticipate our needs and decide which advertisements to show us. Machines create news stories without human intervention. Machines can recognize your face in a crowd.

New technologies — including genetic engineering and nanotechnology — are cascading upon one another and converging. We don’t know how this will play out. But some of the most serious thinkers on Earth worry about potential hazards — and wonder whether we remain fully in control of our inventions.

The article is here.

Editor's Note: What if a form of consciousness emerges from AI? There are many reasons, except for anthropomorphic bias, to expect a form of consciousness to surface from highly complex, synthetic, artificial intelligence.  What then?  This concern is not addressed in the article.

White Coat

By Nancy Etcoff
Harvard Design Magazine
No. 40

Here is an excerpt:

Others wonder if the white coat is out of step in a culture of informality, and should be abandoned like the wigs of court dress in the United Kingdom—a topic of ongoing contention. Symbols of power and authority make people nervous, causing their blood pressure to rise (“white coat syndrome”) and their thoughts to shut down. Doctors seek compliance and trust. Today, they are taught to read emotional signals and are given empathy training. They no longer want to be intimidating authorities issuing orders, but providers offering services to clients. Fittingly, some are now wearing business attire.

But if some doctors are shedding the white coat, people in other professions are eager to put them on. They are showing up on different sorts of body experts, those found at cosmetic counters, spas, and salons, who are eager to align themselves with symbols of power and authority, and with the aura of objectivity, truth, and service.

The entire article is here.

Withstanding moral disengagement: Attachment security as an ethical intervention

By Dolly Chugh, Mary C. Kern, Zhu Zhu, and Sujin Lee
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 51 (2014) 88–93.

Highlights

• We propose an ethical intervention with the potential to reduce unethical decision-making.
• We challenge the relationship between moral disengagement and unethical decision-making.
• We use attachment theory as the basis for the ethical intervention.
• Individuals primed with attachment anxiety experience the usual effects of moral disengagement.
• However, individuals primed with attachment security are able to withstand moral disengagement.

Abstract

We propose an ethical intervention leading to improved ethical decision-making. Moral disengagement has long been related to unethical decision-making. We test an ethical intervention in which this relationship is broken.  Our ethical intervention consisted of priming individuals to be securely-attached, in which they recalled a past instance of relational support and acceptance. We predicted and found an interaction between attachment state and moral disengagement, in which individuals primed with attachment security were able to withstand moral disengagement.
In Study 1, we demonstrate that the securely attached behave more ethically than the anxiously attached in an achievement context. In Study 2, we show that secure attachment overrides one's natural propensity to morally disengage. In Study 3, we find that secure attachment minimizes the impact of the propensity to morally disengage through the mechanism of threat construal. Within both student and working adult samples and using both judgment and behavioral dependent variables, we show that the priming of secure attachment is a relatively simple and effective intervention that managers, educators, and organizations can use to reduce unethical behavior.

The entire article is here.

What Are The Real Effects Of Cyberbullying?

DNews
Originally published on Oct 31, 2014

Cyberbullying is a serious issue, and the effects it can have on a person can last a lifetime. Join Trace as he discusses the extent of the negative effects.




The three-minute segment is video worth watching.  It includes issues related to kids as well as adults.

Anxious, Threatened, and Also Unethical: How Anxiety Makes Individuals Feel Threatened and Commit Unethical Acts

By Kouchaki, Maryam; Desai, Sreedhari D.
Journal of Applied Psychology, Sep 22 , 2014

Abstract

People often experience anxiety in the workplace. Across 6 studies, we show that anxiety, both induced and measured, can lead to self-interested unethical behavior. In Studies 1 and 2, we find that compared with individuals in a neutral state, anxious individuals are more willing (a) to participate in unethical actions in hypothetical scenarios and (b) to engage in more cheating to make money in situations that require truthful self-reports. In Studies 3 and 4, we explore the psychological mechanism underlying unethical behaviors when experiencing anxiety. We suggest and find that anxiety increases threat perception, which, in turn, results in self-interested unethical behaviors. Study 5 shows that, relative to participants in the neutral condition, anxious individuals find their own unethical actions to be less problematic than similar actions of others. In Study 6, data from subordinate–supervisor dyads demonstrate that experienced anxiety at work is positively related with experienced threat and unethical behavior. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.

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The findings in this article tell us something new and fundamental about people's behavior when they are under the influence of experienced anxiety. Our findings demonstrate that compared with people in a neutral state, those who experience anxiety tend to behave unethically when the situation permits. This unethical behavior is mediated by perceived threat.

The article is here.

Scientific faith: Belief in science increases in the face of stress and existential anxiety

Miguel Fariasa, Anna-Kaisa Newheiserb, Guy Kahanec, and Zoe de Toledo
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology
Volume 49, Issue 6, November 2013, Pages 1210–1213

Abstract

Growing evidence indicates that religious belief helps individuals to cope with stress and anxiety. But is this effect specific to supernatural beliefs, or is it a more general function of belief — including belief in science? We developed a measure of belief in science and conducted two experiments in which we manipulated stress and existential anxiety. In Experiment 1, we assessed rowers about to compete (high-stress condition) and rowers at a training session (low-stress condition). As predicted, rowers in the high-stress group reported greater belief in science. In Experiment 2, participants primed with mortality (vs. participants in a control condition) reported greater belief in science. In both experiments, belief in science was negatively correlated with religiosity. Thus, some secular individuals may use science as a form of “faith” that helps them to deal with stressful and anxiety-provoking situations.

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The suggested parallels between religious belief and belief in science may seem to be in tension with recent work emphasizing the intuitive character of religious belief. Tasks involving more analytic processing were shown to decrease religious belief (Gervais & Norenzayan, 2012), whereas the stimulation of a more intuitive mindset led to a greater belief in God (Shenhav, Rand, & Greene, 2012). Contrary to religion, scientific practice is defined by analytical thinking; rational enquiry and weighing of evidence are given precedence even when they conflict with intuition. But when it comes to believing, even if it is a belief in the scientific method as opposed to divine revelation, the underlying mechanism may be similar.

The entire article is here.

College Counseling Centers Turn to Teletherapy to Treat Students for Anxiety

By Jared Misner
Sunoikisis via the Chronicle of Higher Education
Posted September 26, 2014

At the University of Florida, students struggling with anxiety can visit its counseling center and, after an initial, in-person consultation with a counselor, can elect to start a seven-week program called Therapist Assisted Online. The program works like an online course, complete with videos and online activities. Once a week, students meet with their specific counselor, one on one, through a videoconference for 10 to 15 minutes to discuss their anxiety.

That means students visit the counseling center only once and can do the rest from the comfort of their dormitory room. “They like the idea of being at home,” Brian C. Ess, a counselor at Florida’s Counseling and Wellness Center, says.

The entire article is here.

Please visit the Ethics and Psychology podcasts for Episodes 15 and 16, which addresses Ethics and Telepsychology.

In Medical Decisions, Dread Is Worse Than Fear

Procrastination, on the other hand, may not be so bad.

By Gabriella Rosen Kellerman
The Atlantic
Originally published April 15, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

One of the solutions Rosenberg proposed was “interventions aimed at improving risk communication.” Meaning that, perhaps if healthcare providers can help patients more rationally assess the risks for now versus later, they can help them avoid unnecessary suffering. To do so, providers will have to help patients address the assumptions that enable get-it-out-of-the-way decision-making.

What, for example, is the "it" in "get-it-out-of-the-way" thinking? The pain or consequence one wishes to avoid are often moving, even unknowable, targets. In pathological anxiety states, estimations of what “it” is are part of what goes awry. Patients with phobias consistently overestimate the degree of unpleasantness of a particular exposure.

The entire article is here.