Hyperreflexivity, understood as intensified self-consciousness in which subjects disengage from normal forms of involvement with nature and society, often considering themselves as objects of focal awareness, is proposed here as a condition of mental disorders, without which they would not exist. This thesis is argued from a dual perspective: clinical and historical. In the clinical perspective...

BACKGROUND Research literature on problematic smartphone use, or smartphone addiction, has proliferated. However, relationships with existing categories of psychopathology are not well defined. We discuss the concept of problematic smartphone use, including possible causal pathways to such use. METHOD We conducted a systematic review of the relationship between problematic use with psychopath...

Humans mind-wander quite intensely. Mind wandering is markedly different from other cognitive behaviors because it is spontaneous, self-generated, and inwardly directed (inner thoughts). However, can such an internal and intimate mental function also be modulated externally by means of brain stimulation? Addressing this question could also help identify the neural correlates of mind wandering i...

Dalenberg et al. (2012) argued that convincing evidence (a) supports the longstanding trauma model (TM), which posits that early trauma plays a key role in the genesis of dissociation; and (b) refutes the fantasy model (FM), which posits that fantasy proneness, suggestibility, cognitive failures, and other variables foster dissociation. We review evidence bearing on Dalenberg et al.'s 8 predict...

Developmental psychopathology is increasingly recognizing the importance of distinguishing causal processes (i.e., the mechanisms that cause a disease) from developmental outcomes (i.e., the symptoms of the disorder as it is eventually diagnosed). Targeting causal processes early in disordered development may be more effective than waiting until outcomes are established and then trying to rever...

Studies on the effect of iron deficiency on children's cognition and behavior are selectively reviewed, looking for evidence of a causal relationship. Most correlational studies have found associations between iron-deficiency anemia and poor cognitive and motor development and behavioral problems. Longitudinal studies consistently indicate that children anemic in infancy continue to have poorer...

This work presents a defense of causal contrastivism based on contexualism. As argued, our proposal contextualism is compatible with both and binarism, including explanations why in which sense secondary counterfactuals are relevant.

There are many reports of relations between age and cognitive variables and of relations between age and variables representing different aspects of brain structure and a few reports of relations between brain structure variables and cognitive variables. These findings have sometimes led to inferences that the age-related brain changes cause the age-related cognitive changes. Although this conc...