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Depersonalization Disorder, Affective Processing and Predictive Coding

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Abstract

A flood of new multidisciplinary work on the causes of depersonalization disorder (DPD) provides a new way to think about the feeling that experiences “belong” to the self. In this paper I argue that this feeling, baptized “mineness”(Billon 2013, 2018a, b) or “subjective presence” (Seth, Trends in Cognitive Sciences 17(11): 565–573, 2013) emerges from a multilevel interaction between emotional, affective and cognitive processing. The “self” to which experience is attributed is a predictive model made by the mind to explain the modulation of affect as the organism progresses through the world. When the world no longer produces predicted affect the organism needs to explain this unpredicted absence of feeling. It is important to this account that cognition and perception are otherwise intact. Consequently the mind’s representation of the world and its emotionally salient properties are unchanged, leading the mind to predict a characteristic affective response. When that prediction is not fulfilled the organisms feels as if she is no longer present in experience. This is reported at the as feeling of depersonalization.

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Notes

  1. I am distinguishing affective from emotional processing on the basis that affects are felt. Affective processes are involved in the generation of such feelings. Emotional processes coordinate the components of an emotional episode (including feelings) by representing the goal-relevance of information.

  2. This idea is inconsistent with some conceptual theses about the nature of pain (that it is a form of immediate unstructured self awareness) that suggest that it is impossible to have pain without motivation or ownership. But apparently simple experiences have complex internal structure that can decompose under the conditions characteristic of certain pathologies.

  3. Such disorders are characteristic of problems with appraisal

  4. See e.g. Craig’s (2009a) explanation of the role of AIC “it generates an image of ‘the material me’ (or the sentient self) at one moment in time”

  5. the quotation is from an interview, his written work is far more complicated and subtle on the question, so Metzinger* refers to his interview persona).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Philosophy, University of Adelaide, Adelaide, SA, 5000, Australia

    Philip Gerrans

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  1. Philip Gerrans
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Gerrans, P. Depersonalization Disorder, Affective Processing and Predictive Coding. Rev.Phil.Psych. 10, 401–418 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13164-018-0415-2

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