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W Bucci

Publications and source records attributed to W Bucci.

6 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1989

Cyclical changes in emotional information processing in sleep and dreams.

Our scientific tools have rapidly advanced in recent decades. Urine tests and hormone assays allow us to know exactly where a woman is in her menstrual cycle and to document precisely her hormonal rhythms. Sleep-laboratory techniques allow us to know exactly when someone is dreaming so that we can obtain that communication that Freud prized so highly. Furthermore, we now have quantifiable means to measure accessibility to nonverbal mental representations, which derive from important advances in theory and method in cognitive psychology in the last several decades. None of the studies we surveyed combined these tools. The sleep-laboratory studies did not document menstrual-cycle phase with either temperature or hormone levels. Moreover, the relationship between their findings and daily functioning is still unclear. The psychoanalytic study by Benedek and Rubenstein carefully documented cycle phase, but statements about fantasy and conflict were large and sweeping and the focus was on drive-related rather than information processing effects. Careful work must be done by modern investigators before the field of medical psychoanalysis can address the basic questions of mind-body functioning that are at issue here. We have presented one approach to entering the communication network of mind-brain functioning, that is, the application of the dual-code model to dreams, in the context of the influence of hormones across the menstrual cycle. Although prior research has demonstrated cyclical fluctuations of psychodynamic themes in dream content (Baron, 1977; Benedek & Rubenstein, 1939a, b; Hertz & Jensen, 1975; Lewis & Burns, 1975; Swanson & Foulkes, 1968), the existence of a cyclical cognitive pattern as regulated by gonadal function has not previously been explored. While the findings are preliminary and limited, this is the first study to provide evidence that there are psycholinguistic styles characteristic of different phases in the menstrual cycle, and that this variation in verbal expression reflects a correspondence between hormone production and the ability to access and communicate nonverbal representations. Although the relationship between referential activity and phases of the menstrual cycle represents a statistical relationship and is hardly conclusive, the article does demonstrate how the dual-code model permits us to translate our psychoanalytic observations into operational terms. This provides one means of access to the network of communication between neuropeptides and mental representation, or in more general terms, between body and mind.

Adult↗
PubMed1985

Dual coding: a cognitive model for psychoanalytic research.

Four theories of mental representation derived from current experimental work in cognitive psychology have been discussed in relation to psychoanalytic theory. These are: verbal mediation theory, in which language determines or mediates thought; perceptual dominance theory, in which imagistic structures are dominant; common code or propositional models, in which all information, perceptual or linguistic, is represented in an abstract, amodal code; and dual coding, in which nonverbal and verbal information are each encoded, in symbolic form, in separate systems specialized for such representation, and connected by a complex system of referential relations. The weight of current empirical evidence supports the dual code theory. However, psychoanalysis has implicitly accepted a mixed model-perceptual dominance theory applying to unconscious representation, and verbal mediation characterizing mature conscious waking thought. The characterization of psychoanalysis, by Schafer, Spence, and others, as a domain in which reality is constructed rather than discovered, reflects the application of this incomplete mixed model. The representations of experience in the patient's mind are seen as without structure of their own, needing to be organized by words, thus vulnerable to distortion or dissolution by the language of the analyst or the patient himself. In these terms, hypothesis testing becomes a meaningless pursuit; the propositions of the theory are no longer falsifiable; the analyst is always more or less "right." This paper suggests that the integrated dual code formulation provides a more coherent theoretical framework for psychoanalysis than the mixed model, with important implications for theory and technique. In terms of dual coding, the problem is not that the nonverbal representations are vulnerable to distortion by words, but that the words that pass back and forth between analyst and patient will not affect the nonverbal schemata at all. Using the dual code formulation, and applying an investigative methodology derived from experimental cognitive psychology, a new approach to the verification of interpretations is possible. Some constructions of a patient's story may be seen as more accurate than others, by virtue of their linkage to stored perceptual representations in long-term memory. We can demonstrate that such linking has occurred in functional or operational terms--through evaluating the representation of imagistic content in the patient's speech.

Cognition↗