Trends in Neurosciences
OpinionSelf as Object: Emerging Trends in Self Research
Section snippets
Self as Object
What is the nature of the self? This question has been central to a range of disciplines for centuries. In the early days of scientific psychology, William James proposed the existence of different aspects of the self: the ‘Me’ and the ‘I’ [1]. The former can be considered as ‘self as object’, whereas the latter refers to ‘being an agent’. The ‘Me’ self further comprises a physical, social, and spiritual self [1]. Sigmund Freud conceived of the self in terms of the ego, mediating between basic
New Paradigms for Measuring the Self
In this section, we review new paradigms related to self-processing from experimental psychology, neuroeconomics, embodied cognition, and social neuroscience, and argue that this work can provide a new quantitative approach to understanding the self in mental function and dysfunction.
Neural Model of the Self as Object
Based on the literature reviewed above, we propose a neural framework of the ‘self as object’, which considers the self as an emerging property of interactions between brain networks implementing the ‘core self’, cognitive control, and salience processing (Figure 3) [28]. These interactions across the networks reflect the relations between the strengths of cognitive representation and emotional response related to the self.
This neural model is built on the integrative property of the self. At
Concluding Remarks
We have proposed that by adopting the ‘self as object’ framework, it is possible to provide quantitative measures to characterize the self using emerging paradigms, such as perceptual matching, the trust game, embodied self, and social neuroscience paradigms. These emerging objective measures of the self can be used as a proxy for self-representation, and is supported by a proposed neural framework that considers interactions between brain networks responding to the core self, cognitive
Glossary
- Alexithymia
- a condition marked by impaired awareness of self emotions.
- Bayesian inference
- a statistical inference method in which Bayes’ theorem is used to update the probability for a hypothesis as one accumulates more evidence or information.
- Computational psychiatry
- an emerging interdisciplinary field that seeks to characterize mental disorders in terms of aberrant computations at multiple scales.
- Embodied cognition (embodiment)
- a theory that suggests that mental processes are shaped by aspects of
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