First published in 1992. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Bringing together cutting-edge research from psychology and neuroscience, Kathleen Taylor puts the brain back into brainwashing and shows why understanding this mysterious phenomenon is vitally relevant in the twenty-first century.

Directed forgetting is a successful method for thought control whereas thought suppression is notoriously ineffective. We tested a specific hypothesis about what difference between the two paradigms causes the difference in outcomes. Both paradigms instruct participants to suppress certain thoughts, but in thought suppression experiments participants are also told to report intrusions of unwanted thoughts. We added a condition to the typical directed forgetting experiment that instructed participants to report intrusions. When participants tried to forget a (...) word list but also reported intrusions, forgetting did not occur. The results are important for understanding control of conscious contents and have implications for practicable applications of individual thought control. (shrink)

The ‘mineness’ of thoughts has often been accepted as indubitable in philosophy. However, the symptom of thought insertion in schizophrenia seems to be an empirical counterexample to the dictum that every introspected thought is one's own. We present a thorough conceptual analysis of mineness of thought, distinguishing between ownership and authorship . We argue that it is indeed a conceptual truth that introspected thoughts are owned by the introspector. However, there are everyday and pathological cases of thoughts, (...) for which we do not ascribe authorship to ourselves. To explain inserted thoughts, however, we need an additional factor which is constituted by the lack of control over inserted thoughts . We present a review of empirical data on thought control and thought insertion in the light of the conceptual analysis. We conclude with a summary of the most important future direction of research. (shrink)

The present research explores the role of repetitive thought in developing control deprivation deficits. The two main RT theories lead to diverging predictions. The response style theory suggests that RT in reaction to distress leads to negative effects in terms of emotional and cognitive functioning. However, the theory of Marin and Tesser and its elaboration by Watkins, suggest that the effects of RT depend on its form and that individuals who are not depression-prone usually adopt the constructive form (...) of RT that leads to positive effects. To test which of these predictions is true for control deprivation situation, two experimental studies were conducted. Participants after control deprivation were induced RT or distraction, followed by the measurement of their emotional and cognitive functioning. The results suggest that repetitive thought reduces both emotional and cognitive helplessness deficits and has no effect in no control deprivation condition. This supports the theory of Martin and Tesser and its elaboration by Watkins. (shrink)

The notion that there exists a fundamental need to exert control over or to influence one’s environment has enjoyed a long history in psychology (e.g., DeCharms, 1968; Heider, 1958) and has stimulated considerable theoretical work. Such a need has been characterized by theorists at multiple levels of analysis. Control motivation, for example, has been characterized broadly in terms of proactive (White, 1959) or reactive (e.g., Abramson, Seligman, & Teasdale, 1978; Brehm, 1966; Brehm & Brehm, 1981) strivings for (...) class='Hi'>control over general or specific (Brehm & Brehm, 1981) and central or peripheral outcomes (Thompson, 1993). Additionally, various types of control strategies used to gain or maintain a sense of personal control have been proposed (e.g., Averill, 1973; Heckhausen & Schulz, 1995; Rothbaum, Weisz, & Snyder, 1982; Thompson, 1981). Modes of control, for instance, have been categorized as either primary or secondary. Primary strategies involve direct action undertaken to produce desirable and avoid undesirable outcomes in the external world, whereas secondary strategies employ primarily cognitive processes undertaken to produce a change within the person. Recently, Heckhausen and Schulz (1995) have further delineated these primary and secondary forms of control according to whether they are based on veridical or illusory causal understandings of the world and whether they are functional or dysfunctional. While most control theorists view primary control as preferable to secondary control, the latter is viewed as critical in the process of adaptation to control failures and in the promotion of future primary control attempts. (shrink)

A seminal work on the unconscious and its mechanisms. Examines the interaction between voluntary (conscious) and involuntary (unconscious) human control mechanisms in terms of dissociation of divided consciousness. Delineates a neodissociation interpretation that recognizes historical roots without requiring commitment. Presents a wide range of data on possession states, fugues, multiple personalities, amnesia, dreams, hallucinations, automatic writing, and aggressions.

In their paper, “Autonomy and the ethics of biological behaviour modification”, Savulescu, Douglas, and Persson discuss the ethics of a technology for improving moral motivation and behaviour that does not yet exist and will most likely never exist. At the heart of their argument sits the imagined case of a “moral technology” that magically prevents people from developing intentions to commit seriously immoral actions. It is not too much of a stretch, then, to characterise their paper as a thought (...) experiment in service of a thought experiment. In order for an argument involving a thought experiment to progress debate in applied ethics three things must be true. First, the thought experiment must accurately represent and illuminate a pressing ethical dilemma. Second – and most obviously – the central claims of the argument regarding the thought experiment must be plausible. Third, it must be possible to apply or develop the arguments established with reference to the thought experiment to the real world cases the experiment is intended to illuminate. In this commentary, I argue that there are serious reasons to question the extent to which their argument meets each of these challenges involved in the use of thought experiments in applied ethics. While Savulescu et al. succeed in showing how behavioural modification might be compatible with freedom and autonomy – and perhaps justifiable even if it were not — in the fantastic case they consider, there is little we can conclude from this about any technology of “moral bioenhancement” in the foreseeable future. Indeed, there is a real danger that their argument will license attempts to manipulate behaviour through drugs and brain implants, which raise profound moral issues that they barely mention. (shrink)

This book is... a survey history of medicine from the earliest times, centered thematically on how changing concepts of disease have affected its management.... One finds a gratifying mastery of recent as well as classic scholarship in medical history and a careful sidestepping of positivistic excesses.... Disease and Its Control is a fresh and welcome synthesis of historical scholarship that will be accessible to interested laymen. (Annals of Internal Medicine).

The present study investigated relationships between counterfactual thinking, control motivation, and depression. Mildly depressed and nondepressed participants described negative life events that might happen again (repeatable event condition) or probably will not happen again (nonrepeatable event condition) and then made upward counterfactuals about these events. Compared to nondepressed participants, depressed participants made more counterfactuals about controllable than uncontrollable aspects of the events they described, and this effect was mediated by general control loss perceptions in the repeatable event condition. (...) Making more counterfactuals about controllable than uncontrollable aspects also enhanced retrospective control perceptions, but only in the repeatable event condition. Functional and dysfunctional implications of making counterfactuals about controllable features of events are discussed. (shrink)

People experiencing alien control report that their thoughts, movements, actions, and emotions have been replaced by those of an "other." The latter is commonly a perceived persecutor of the patient. Here I describe the clinical phenomenology of alien control, mechanistic models that have been used to explain it, problems inherent in these models, the brain deficits and functional abnormalities associated with this symptom, and the means by which disordered agency may be examined in this perplexing condition. Our current (...) state of knowledge implicates potentially reversible dysfunction in certain key brain regions (especially the right parietal cortex), which is temporally related to the presence of symptoms. Alien control is quintessentially a disorder of agency. (shrink)

Self-control has been described as the ability to master motivation that is contrary to one’s better judgement; that is, an ability that prevents such motivation from resulting in behaviour that is contrary to one’s overall better judgement (Mele, Irrationality: An essay on Akrasia, self-deception and self-control, p. 54, 1987). Recent discussions in philosophy have centred on the question of whether synchronic self-control, in which one exercises self-control whilst one is currently experiencing opposing motivation, is actional or (...) non-actional. The actional theorist maintains that such exercises are actions, whilst the non-actional theorist claims that synchronic self-control consists in the having of unmotivated thoughts which occur at times when agents experience recalcitrant motivations and which serve to attenuate the strength of those motivations. In this paper I discuss a class of cases which has been largely ignored in these discussions, cases which I argue are common synchronic self-control problems, but in which a lack of motivation is the characteristic symptom. I argue that such cases present problems for actional accounts and add some support to the non-actional approach. (shrink)

This article addresses questions about the sense of agency and its distinction from the sense of ownership in the context of understanding schizophrenic thought insertion. In contrast to “standard” approaches that identify problems with the sense of agency as central to thought insertion, two recent proposals argue that it is more correct to think that the problem concerns the subject’s sense of ownership. This view involves a “more demanding” concept of the sense of ownership that, I will argue, (...) ultimately depends on the sense of agency. In this regard, the sense of agency still appears to be the originating problem. (shrink)

Uttered language does not necessarily reflect the planned communications of schizophrenia patients, nor do their delusions necessarily reflect basic failures of inferential reasoning. The role of inhibitory failure in the production of speech and the role of primary experiences of discrepancy between intention and action, and between experience–based expectations and perceived realities account for many of the clinical phenomena that have led to the conclusion that these patients have a ‘thought’ disorder, or a ‘disturbed’ mind. The alternatives and the (...) evidence are summarized in this paper. (shrink)

It has long been thought that control is necessary for moral responsibility. Call this the control condition. Given its pride of place in the free will debate, “control” has almost always been taken to be shorthand for voluntary control, an exercise of choice or will. Over the last few decades, however, many have been arguing for including a range of attitudes for which we seem to be responsible that, if controlled at all, must be controlled (...) via a very different mechanism, namely, evaluative judgment. Call this second type of control evaluative control. In this paper I will present and discuss in detail an additional agential stance—reasonish regard—for which we treat one another as responsible, but that is ungoverned by either of the first two types of control. If we want to require a control condition for responsibility, then, we will need to introduce and include a third type of control, what I call empathic control. (shrink)

Self-control is essential to the Buddhist soteriological project, but it is not immediately clear how we can make sense of it in light of the doctrine of no-self. Exercising control over our actions, thoughts, volitions, and emotions seems to presuppose a conception of self and agency that is not available to the Buddhist. Thus, there seems to be a fundamental mismatch in the practical instructions for exercising control in the Buddhist texts and the doctrine of no-self. In (...) this paper, we develop and defend a general account of self-control that coheres with Abhidarma Buddhism. We defend the Buddhist against recent arguments that self-control depends on an executive self; instead, for the Buddhist, the psychology of self-control must be ‘horizontal’ (for example, one desire winning out over another). However, the characterization of the psychological process isn’t sufficient for a Buddhist theory of self-control. For the Buddhist account is substantive. According to Buddhism, a paradigmatic instance of self-control is an episode in which the desire that wins is a desire that conforms to Buddhist values; by contrast, an episode is not an instance of self-control if the desire that wins is opposed to Buddhist values. We also argue that there are significant resources on which the Buddhist can draw for enhancing self-control despite the denial of self. (shrink)

This paper seeks to analyse an under-discussed kind of self-control, namely the control of thoughts and sensations. I distinguish first-order control from second-order control and argue that their central forms are intentional concentration and intentional mindfulness respectively. These correspond to two forms of meditation, concentration meditation and mindfulness meditation, which have been regarded as central both in the traditions in which the practices arose and in the scientific literature on meditation. I analyse them in terms of (...) their characteristic intentions, distinguish them from concentration and mindfulness in general, and examine the relations between them. Concentration involves keeping the mind focused on a single object, while mindfulness requires noticing whatever mental states occupy the focus of one’s consciousness. In the course of the investigation I examine the role of phenomenology and volition in the activity of meditating, and how they change as meditative capacities develop. (shrink)

T cells develop in the thymus by expressing a diverse repertoire of either αβ‐ or γδ‐T cell receptors (TCR). While many studies have elucidated how TCR signaling and gene expression control T cell ontogeny, the role of nutrient metabolism is just emerging. Here, we discuss how metabolic reprogramming and nutrient availability impact the fate of developing thymic T cells. We focus on how the PI3K/mTOR signaling mediates various extracellular inputs and how this signaling pathway controls metabolic rewiring during highly (...) proliferative and anabolic developmental stages. We highlight the role of the hexosamine biosynthetic pathway that generates metabolites that are utilized for N‐ and O‐linked glycosylation of proteins and how it impacts TCR expression during T cell ontogeny. We consider the dichotomy in metabolic needs during αβ‐ versus γδ‐T cell lineage commitment as well as how metabolism is also coupled to molecular signaling that controls cell fate. (shrink)

Political thought, from Aristotle to Lefebvre, has placed importance on the control of space as an activity of political power. Extraordinary measures taken by global policy-makers since the early 2020s as part of efforts to to combat the pandemic have included mass lock-downs, closed borders, social distancing and other forms of spatial control. Importantly, spaces dedicated to religious worship (churches, etc.) were subjected to extraordinary regulation. In the exercise of this new control of space, social (...) class='Hi'>control has played an important role (obligation to declare one’s health condition, incitement to denounce offenders...) fostered by the authorities through various means of new social education, generating new social habits in terms of the management of space. Religious freedom and the autonomy of the Church thus faced new challenges as a result of the extraordinary control of religious space by civil power and the pressure of social control. The new forms of control incorporated into our habits deserve to be critically reviewed in our search for true spaces of freedom that are not sacrificed in the name of supposed science. (shrink)

Drawing on theories of William James, Freud, and Dewey, as well as on studies in mood control, cognitive therapy, and artificial intelligence, this...

How does thinking affect doing? There is a widely held view that thinking about what you are doing, as you are doing it, hinders performance. Once you have acquired the ability to putt a golf ball, play an arpeggio on the piano, or parallel-park, reflecting on your actions leads to inaccuracies, blunders, and sometimes even utter paralysis--that's what is widely believed. But is it true? After exploring some of the contemporary and historical manifestations of the idea, Barbara Gail Montero develops (...) a theory of expertise which emphasizes the role of the conscious mind in expert action. She aims to dispel various myths about experts who proceed without any understanding of what guides their action, and she analyzes research in both philosophy and psychology that is taken to show that conscious control and explicit monitoring of one's movements impedes well practiced skills. Montero explores a wide range of real-life examples of optimal performance, in sports, the performing arts, healthcare, the military, and other fields, and draws from psychology, neuroscience, and literature to offer a refreshing and persuasive view of expertise, according to which expert action generally is and ought to be thoughtful, effortful, and reflective. (shrink)

Sometimes it feels as though we can control our minds. We catch ourselves looking out the window when we should be paying attention to someone talking, for example, and we purposefully return our attention to the conversation. Or we wrest our minds away from the bothersome thought of an upcoming dental appointment to focus on anything we can find that makes us less nervous. Control attempts such as these can meet with success, leaving us feeling the masters (...) of our consciousness. Yet at other times.. (shrink)

The ability to stop unwanted memories from coming to mind is theorised to be essential for maintaining good mental health. People can employ intentional strategies to prevent conscious intrusions of negative memories, and repeated attempts to stop retrieval both reduces the frequency of intrusions and improves subsequent emotions elicited by those memories. However, it is still unknown whether memory control can improve negative emotions immediately, at the time control is attempted. It is also not clear which strategy is (...) most beneficial for emotion regulation; clearing the mind of any thoughts of negative memories via direct suppression, or substituting memory recall with alternative thoughts. Here, we provide novel evidence that memory control immediately regulates negative emotions associated with autobiographical memories of morally wrong actions. Repeated control significantly improved negative emotions over time, regardless of the strategy used to implement control. Thought substitution involving either positive diversionary thinking or counterfactual thinking both induced positive feelings, whereas direct suppression neutralised emotions, regardless of whether memories were positive or negative. These empirical findings have implications for clinical practice as they indicate that memory control strategies could be effective emotion regulation methods for real-world intrusive memories. (shrink)

Studies of transcriptional control sequences responsible for regulated and basal‐level RNA synthesis from promoters of Drosophila melanogaster retrotransposons reveal novel aspects of gene regulation and lead to identification of trans‐acting factors that can be involved in RNA polymerase II transcription not only of retrotransposons, but of many other cellular genes. Comparisons between promoters of retrotransposons and some other Drosophila genes demonstrate that there is a greater variety in basal promoter structure than previously thought and that many promoters may (...) contain essential sequences downstream from the RNA start site. (shrink)

Over the last 20 years the comparator model for delusions of control has received considerable support in terms of empirical studies. However, the original version clearly needs to be replaced by a model with a much greater degree of sophistication and specificity. Future developments are likely to involve the specification of the role of dopamine in the model and a generalisation of its explanatory power to the whole range of positive symptoms. However, we will still need to explain why (...) symptoms can be so variable and we still do not understand the origin of the most mysterious symptom of all: thought insertion. (shrink)

Judgments of blame for others are typically sensitive to what an agent knows and desires. However, when people act negligently, they do not know what they are doing and do not desire the outcomes of their negligence. How, then, do people attribute blame for negligent wrongdoing? We propose that people attribute blame for negligent wrongdoing based on perceived mental control, or the degree to which an agent guides their thoughts and attention over time. To acquire information about others’ mental (...) control, people self-project their own perceived mental control to anchor third-personal judgments about mental control and concomitant responsibility for negligent wrongdoing. In four experiments (N = 841), we tested whether perceptions of mental control drive third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing. Study 1 showed that the ease with which people can counterfactually imagine an individual being non-negligent mediated the relationship between judgments of control and blame. Studies 2a and 2b indicated that perceived mental control has a strong effect on judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing and that first-personal judgments of mental control are moderately correlated with third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing. Finally, we used an autobiographical memory manipulation in Study 3 to make personal episodes of forgetfulness salient. Participants for whom past personal episodes of forgetfulness were made salient judged negligent wrongdoers less harshly compared to a control group for whom past episodes of negligence were not salient. Collectively, these findings suggest that first-personal judgments of mental control drive third-personal judgments of blame for negligent wrongdoing and indicate a novel role for counterfactual thinking in the attribution of responsibility. (shrink)

Borrett, Kelly, and Kwan follow the lead of Merleau-Ponty and develop a theory of neural-network modeling that emerges out of what they find wrong with current approaches to thought and action. Specifically, they take issue with "cognitivism" and its tendency to model cognitive agents as controlling, representational systems. While attempting to make the point that pre-predicative experience/action/place (i.e. grasping) involves neither representation nor control, the authors imply that control-theoretic concepts and representationalism necessarily go hand-in-hand. The purpose of (...) the present paper is to demonstrate that this is not the case. Rather, it will be argued that such necessity is only assumed because the authors attempt to apply the control theory of servo-mechanisms to the behavior of organisms. By adopting this engineering control-theoretic perspective, the authors are led, as are most of the cognitivists with whom they disagree, to overlook critical aspects of how it is that biological systems do what they do. It is the ignoring of these critical aspects of biological control, due to the acceptance of an engineering approach to control, that makes it appear as though control theory and representationalism necessarily go hand-in-hand. (shrink)

This article summarizes a National Institute of Mental Health workshop that was convened to address the ethical and methodological issues that arise when conducting controlled psychosocial interventions research and introduces 6 thoughtful and inspiring papers prepared by workshop participants. These papers, on topics ranging from informed consent to ethnic minority issues, reflect the depth and breadth of expertise represented by the multidisciplinary group of scientists and ethicists present at the meeting. More extensive follow-up, particularly from federal research applications and publications, (...) of how investigators balance the need for strong research design with ethical considerations may help advance the science of psychosocial intervention research. (shrink)

The truth of the matter is that our deficiency does not lie in the want of well-verified "facts." What we lack is our bearings. The contemporary experience of things technological has repeatedly confounded our vision, our expectations, and our capacity to make intelligent judgments. Categories, arguments, conclusions, and choices that would have been entirely obvious in earlier times are obvious no longer. Patterns of perceptive thinking that were entirely reliable in the past now lead us systematically astray. Many of our (...) standard conceptions of technology reveal a disorientation that borders on dissociation from reality. And as long as we lack the ability to make our situation intelligible, all of the "data" in the world will make no difference.;From the Introduction. (shrink)

In `Underestimating Self-Control' (1997a), I argued that Jeanette Kennett and Michael Smith (1996) underestimate our capacity for synchronic self-control. They argued for a solution to a puzzle about such self-control that features non-actional exercises' of self-control. I argued in response that `a more robust, actional exercise of self-control is open to agents in scenarios of the sort in question' (1997a: 119). They disagree (Kennett and Smith 1997).In Mele 1997a, I resisted the temptation to criticize Kennett (...) and Smith's attempted resolution, because I thought it better to concentrate on sketching an alternative resolution. Here, I will argue that the resolution they offer is problematic and reply to their criticism (1997) of my suggested resolution. (shrink)

Akratic actions are often being thought to instantiate a paradigmatic self-control failure. . If we suppose that akrasia is opposed to self-control, the question is how akratic actions could be free and intentional. After all, it would seem that it is only if an action manifests self-control that it can count as free. My plan is to explore the relation between akrasia and self-control. The first section presents what I shall call the standard conception, according (...) to which akrasia and self-control are contraries, and introduces the puzzle that this conception raises. The second section turns to the arguments for and against the possibility of free and intentional akratic actions. The third section questions the claim that akratic actions are necessarily opposed to actions manifesting self-control. (shrink)

Self-control is considered broadly important for many domains of life. One of its unfortunate features, however, is that it tends to wane over time, with little agreement about why this is the case. Recently, there has been a push to address this problem by looking to the literature in exercise physiology, specifically the work on the central governor model of physical fatigue. Trying to explain how and why mental performance wanes over time, the central governor model suggests that exertion (...) is throttled by some central nervous system mechanism that receives information about energetic bodily needs and motivational drives to regulate exertion and, ultimately, to prevent homeostatic breakdown, chiefly energy depletion. While we admire the spirit of integration and the attempt to shed light on an important topic in psychology, our concern is that the central governor model is very controversial in exercise physiology, with increasing calls to abandon it altogether, making it a poor fit for psychology. Our concerns are threefold. First, while we agree that preservation of bodily homeostasis makes for an elegant ultimate account, the fact that such important homeostatic concerns can be regularly overturned with even slight incentives (e.g., a smile) renders the ultimate account impotent and points to other ultimate functions for fatigue. Second, despite the central governor being thought to take as input information about the metabolic needs of the body, there is no credible evidence that mental effort actually consumes inordinate amounts of energy that are not already circulating in the brain. Third, recent modifications of the model make the central governor appear like an all-knowing homunculus and unfalsifiable in principle, thus contributing very little to our understanding of why people tend to disengage from effortful tasks over time. We note that the latest models in exercise physiology have actually borrowed concepts and models from psychology to understand physical performance. (shrink)