Academic literature on the topic 'Psychic plasticity'

Durante el siglo XX, el concepto de plasticidad se desplazó desde la estética y la filosofía hacia el psicoanálisis y la neurología con el fin de caracterizar al sistema psíquico. Dicho desplazamiento se llevó a cabo de una manera simultáneamente muy cercana y muy diferente de aquellos conceptos previos. ¿Qué significa una ‘libido plástica’ o una ‘plasticidad cerebral’? ¿Puede ser esta una plasticidad destructiva? En el presente artículo se exploran las significaciones psicoanalíticas y neurológicas de la plasticidad, y se examina la posibilidad de pensar una plasticidad destructiva del cerebro y del psiquismo, teniendo en consideración el cambio de personalidad que se observa en ciertos sujetos con lesiones cerebrales. During the XXth Century, the concept of plasticity was moved from aesthetics and philosophy to psychoanalysis and neurology, in order to characterize the psychic system. Such displacement was performed at the same time in a very close and a very different way from those previous concepts. What does it means a ‘plastic libido’ or a ‘brain plasticity’? Could this be a destructive plasticity? This paper explores the psychoanalytical and neurological meanings of plasticity, and examines a chance to think a destructive plasticity of brain and psyche, taking into account the change of personality that is observed at certain brain damaged patients.

Durante el siglo XX, el concepto de plasticidad se desplazó desde la estética y la filosofía hacia el psicoanálisis y la neurología con el fin de caracterizar al sistema psíquico. Dicho desplazamiento se llevó a cabo de una manera simultáneamente muy cercana y muy diferente de aquellos conceptos previos. ¿Qué significa una ‘libido plástica’ o una ‘plasticidad cerebral’? ¿Puede ser esta una plasticidad destructiva? En el presente artículo se exploran las significaciones psicoanalíticas y neurológicas de la plasticidad, y se examina la posibilidad de pensar una plasticidad destructiva del cerebro y del psiquismo, teniendo en consideración el cambio de personalidad que se observa en ciertos sujetos con lesiones cerebrales. During the XXth Century, the concept of plasticity was moved from aesthetics and philosophy to psychoanalysis and neurology, in order to characterize the psychic system. Such displacement was performed at the same time in a very close and a very different way from those previous concepts. What does it means a ‘plastic libido’ or a ‘brain plasticity’? Could this be a destructive plasticity? This paper explores the psychoanalytical and neurological meanings of plasticity, and examines a chance to think a destructive plasticity of brain and psyche, taking into account the change of personality that is observed at certain brain damaged patients.

Backgroung: Neuroscientific research has provided great discoveries regarding the understanding of the brain functioning and its neural circuits. With advances in studies on fetal behavior, new discussions have arisen about the existence of a possible rudimentary psychic apparatus. Questioning the existence of a psychism in the fetus becomes doubly challenging. First, because of the controversy that exists in the field of neuroscience about the studies of epiphenomena. Second, because of the difficulty that psychoanalysis has in accepting the existence of a psychic structure before birth. This study was carried out considering all these controversies and scientific limitations, and for this reason it should be understood as a theoretical hypothesis and an invitation to a broad and transdisciplinary view on the complexity of human behavior. From an extensive review on the development of the nervous system and fetal synaptogenesis, and combining neurophysiological and neurophysical research, it was possible to create a link with the Freudian theory of psychic energy described in the Project for a scientific psychology. From these joints, questions were raised about fetal development, especially in the preterm phase, which would be composed of intense synaptic activities, especially in the somatosensory and thalamocortical regions that would receive exogenous and endogenous stimuli, both acting to generate an accumulation of psychic energy. Thus, it was hypothesized that this intense flow of energy would be the first sign of the development of the primitive psychic apparatus in the fetus. Thus, it was possible to assume that during the preterm period this cathected energy discharge could project directly onto the limbic and motor brain structures and leave unconscious memory traces of intrauterine life experiences. These influences of a psychic nature, together with epigenetic factors, would contribute to the appearance of certain behavioral and neurodevelopmental disorders. Therefore, suggesting an early transdisciplinary approach in at-risk infants exposed to environmental or epigenetic stressors during the gestational period, especially during the synaptic plasticity window, will provide a therapeutic opportunity through psychic reorganization and sensorimotor integration.

Introduction: Anxiety disorders (AD) are brain disturbances related to neurotransmitter circuits and neuroanatomic changes that are aggravated by unhealthy lifestyle. In turn, the brain derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF), a neurotrophin responsible for cerebral plasticity, is related to alteration volume in some brain structures and it can be explained by some lifestyle factors. Objective: to analyze the relationship between BDNF and AD and describe possible damage to the psychic functions in individuals with these disorders. Methods: this was an integrative review of the literature of articles published between 2008 and 2018, selected in the bibliographic databases of PubMed, SciElo and LILACS. Results: In total, 28 articles were selected, of studies conducted with humans and animals. The relationship between levels of BDNF, and AD was observed to have been approached, showing that the neurotrophic hypothesis could contribute to the physiopathology of ADs, including volumetric changes in regions of the brain, comprising psychic functions. Furthermore, studies have shown that the BDNF levels may reflect the effect of antidepressant or neuromodulation therapy, and that exposure to stressful factors may be related to individuals with this genetic variant being more vulnerable to developing AD. Conclusions: The data obtained in this research pointed towards an inverse relationship between BDNF levels and AD, and to the contribution of the neurotrophic hypothesis to the neurobiology of these disturbances, including damage to the psychic functions. Whereas considering that other studies to not show this relationship, further studies need to be conducted to validate a possible association.

Introduction. Comorbid psychiatric disorders are frequent among patients affected by tinnitus. There are mutual clinical influences between tinnitus and psychiatric disorders, as well as neurobiological relations based on partially overlapping hodological and neuroplastic phenomena. The aim of the present paper is to review the evidence of alterations in brain networks underlying tinnitus physiopathology and to discuss them in light of the current knowledge of the neurobiology of psychiatric disorders.Methods. Relevant literature was identified through a search on Medline and PubMed; search terms included tinnitus, brain, plasticity, cortex, network, and pathways.Results. Tinnitus phenomenon results from systemic-neurootological triggers followed by neuronal remapping within several auditory and nonauditory pathways. Plastic reorganization and white matter alterations within limbic system, arcuate fasciculus, insula, salience network, dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, auditory pathways, ffrontocortical, and thalamocortical networks are discussed.Discussion. Several overlapping brain network alterations do exist between tinnitus and psychiatric disorders. Tinnitus, initially related to a clinicoanatomical approach based on a cortical localizationism, could be better explained by an holistic or associationist approach considering psychic functions and tinnitus as emergent properties of partially overlapping large-scale neural networks.

A FÍSICA E A COMUNICAÇÃO ESPÍRITA Resumo: quando sentimos e pensamos1, estamos emitindo um fluxo de energia constituído de ondas, de um plasma tênue, altamente eletrizado e de um feixe de fótons. Neste fluxo de energia, as ondas são as responsáveis pela sintonia psíquica, os fótons são originários das vibrações dos constituintes atômicos - núcleos e elétrons e podem alterar o campo espiritual. O plasma possui uma plasticidade ilimitada e é o agente causal das correntes elétricas mentais, que dão origem aos fenômenos da indução mental e da magnetização do corpo espiritual. Palavras-chave: Fluxo, Energia, Ondas, Fótons, Elétrons, Magnetização, Espírito. Abstract: When we feel and think, we are emitting a flux of energy consisting of waves, a thin, highly electrified plasma, and a beam of photons. In this flow of energy, waves are responsible for psychic attunement and the photons originated from the vibrations of atomic constituents, nucleis and electrons, can modify the spiritual field. Plasma has an unlimited plasticity and is the causal agent of the mental electric currents, which give rise to the phenomena of mental induction and magnetization of the spiritual body Keywords: Flow, Energy, Waves, Photons, Electrons, Nucleis, Magnetization, Spirit.

In 90th of 20 Russian psychiatrist Y.A. Alexandrovsky expressed opinion of presence the group of so-called social-stress disorders that was determined like psychogenic-actual for most people in definite social, economic and political situation.Used the method of clinic-psychopathological interview with patients who applied outpatient psychological consultation on the chair of psychiatry.The main changes in psychic state include following behaviors and clinical implications: loss of the value of human life, which is manifested in indifference to death in lowering caution when hazardous situations, willingness to sacrifice lives without any ideals. There is unrestrained lost for pleasure and moral promiscuity, exacerbation of personality typological traits, development of hyperstenic reactions (to self-destructive non-expedient behavior), hypostenic disorders, panic reactions, depression, dissociative and conversive irregularities, loss of communicational plasticity, loss of the ability to adapt to what happens with the preservation prospects of targeted actions, manifestations of cynicism, the tendency to antisocial actions. Patients had complaints on increase anxiety, pessimistic attitudes, existential vacuum, sense of uselessness and loss of perspectives, tendency to irrational perception of reality with including mechanisms of autistic and archaic thinking.Thus, psychological status of the population of Ukraine is a model of social-stress disorder and can be considered like a basis, which leads to the decreasing of the individual barrier of mental adaptation with the next manifestation of different forms of psychological maladjustment.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

Objective. The study of gender specificities in adaptive transformation of regular neurodynamic (EEG) processes and also the development of maladaptation and mental disorders among men and women with HIV infection.Materials and methods. The research includes 46 men and 54 women, aged 18 and 60, on follow-up care in St. Petersburg Center of AIDS who didn’t get antiretroviral therapy. Clinical infectious, clinical psychiatric, experimental psychological, instrumental functional diagnostics (EEG). To describe neurodymanic processes, EEG spectral analysis was applied, as well as based on graph theory analysis of the structure of interaction (mutual transition of opposite) between wave components of basic EEG rhythms.Results and discussion. In the group of HIV-infected women the rate of mental illness is higher than in the men’s one. It is revealed the men and women have progressing frequency-dependent EEG changes due to neurotic, stress-related and organic mental disorders. Developing of HIV-encephalopathy among the women is accompanied by the growth of spectral power fluctuation in beta range and among the men — in alfa range of EEG frequency. These changes were most pronounced in the frontal and posttemporal areas both with the men and women that may reflect growing pathological process in structures of limbic system. Comparing to men, HIVinfected women have a higher EEG organization, characterized by high-frequency (beta) core formation of functional EGG rhythm interaction, representing decrease in the plasticity level of self-regulation process and developing stable pathological condition.Conclusion. Тhere are gender differences of psychic reaction on HIV infection, thus, it is necessary to have a personalized approach to patient care, taking into account a higher demand of women in psychocorrectional and psychopharmacological help.

Contrary to common psychosurgical practice in the 1950s, Dr. Jean Talairach had the intuition, based on clinical experience, that the brain connectome and neuroplasticity had a role to play in psychosurgery. Due to the remarkable progress of pharmacology at that time and to the technical limits of neurosurgery, these concepts were not put into practice. Currently, these concepts are being confirmed by modern techniques such as neuroimaging and computational neurosciences, and could pave the way for therapeutic innovation in psychiatry.Psychosurgery commonly uses a localizationist approach, based on the idea that a lesion to a specific area is responsible for a deficit opposite to its function. To psychosurgeons such as Walter Freeman, who performed extensive lesions causing apparently inevitable deficit, Talairach answered with clinical data: complex psychic functions cannot be described that simply, because the same lesion does not provoke the same deficit in different patients. Moreover, cognitive impairment did not always follow efficacious psychosurgery. Talairach suggested that selectively destructing part of a network could open the door to a new organization, and that early psychotherapy could encourage this psychoplasticity. Talairach did not have the opportunity to put these concepts into practice in psychiatric diseases because of the sudden availability of neuroleptics, but connectomics and neuroplasticity gave rise to major advances in intraparenchymal neurosurgery, from epilepsy to low-grade glioma. In psychiatry, alongside long-standing theories implicating focal lesions and diffuse pathological processes, neuroimaging techniques are currently being developed. In mentally healthy individuals, combining diffusion tensor imaging with functional MRI, magnetoencephalography, and electroencephalography allows the determination of a comprehensive map of neural connections in the brain on many spatial scales, the so-called connectome. Ultimately, global neurocomputational models could predict physiological activity, behavior, and subjective feeling, and describe neuropsychiatric disorders.Connectomic studies comparing psychiatric patients with controls have already confirmed the early intuitions of Talairach. As a striking example, massive dysconnectivity has been found in schizophrenia, leading some authors to propose a “dysconnection hypothesis.” Alterations of the connectome have also been demonstrated in obsessive-compulsive disorder and depression. Furthermore, normalization of the functional dysconnectivity has been observed following clinical improvement in several therapeutic interventions, from psychotherapy to pharmacological treatments. Provided that mental disorders result from abnormal structural or functional wiring, targeted psychosurgery would require that one be able: 1) to identify the pathological network involved in a given patient; 2) to use neurostimulation to safely create a reversible and durable alteration, mimicking a lesion, in a network compatible with neuroplasticity; and 3) to predict which functional lesion would result in adapted neuronal plasticity and/or to guide neuronal plasticity to promote recovery. All these conditions, already suggested by Talairach, could now be achievable considering modern biomarkers and surgical progress.

La traite négrière et l’esclavage transatlantique, basés sur une idéologie raciste, représentent plusieurs siècles de violences interpersonnelles et de traumatismes répétés. Déshumanisant, l’esclavage a induit au niveau psychologique des processus de destruction massifs. Cette thèse en psychologie clinique analyse les traces de ce passé fondateur de la culture antillaise : elle explore les racines traumatiques de l’héritage de l’esclavage ainsi que ses manifestations contemporaines. Elle présente les résidus psychiques de ce traumatisme historique à travers l’élaboration de la culture créole, de l’identité antillaise et des pratiques sociales. Les anciennes colonies sont traversées par une prégnance de la violence dans le lien social, qui traduit tout autant un recours privilégié à la violence qu’une aptitude psychique à la traiter. Nous abordons cette tendance sous l’angle de la plasticité psychique. S’étayant sur la plasticité cérébrale, elle mobilise des défenses pour préserver l’homéostasie psychique selon la culture du sujet. Nos travaux concernent deux îles françaises, la Martinique et la Guadeloupe, et deux îles anglaises, la Dominique et Sainte-Lucie. Nous étudions leurs héritages par un croisement de disciplines (psychologie, psychanalyse, sociologie, anthropologie, neurosciences, histoire), dans une perspective épistémologique. Une recherche psycho-historique sur chaque île a permis de reconstituer la phylogenèse psychique, révélant l’archaïque de matrices identitaires enfouies. Elle dévoile l’ancrage d’un signifiant d’identité collective, qui repose sur plusieurs symboles issus du vécu des populations durant la période esclavagiste. En parallèle de ces vestiges identitaires propres à chaque île, on retrouve des stigmates psychiques transiliens qui contaminent le lien social. Arrimés à la culture, qui leur offre une voie de déploiement transgénérationnel, ils convoquent une répétition symptomatique des souffrances à travers certaines pratiques familiales et sociales. La culture antillaise, forte de ses adages créoles qui incitent à ne pas s’effondrer, soutiendrait aussi une plasticité psychique spécifique. L’étude quantitative en psychopathologie mesure l’effet de la culture antillaise sur l’impact psychologique de violences physiques répétées. Cette culture favorise le maintien d’un équilibre psychologique à travers un vécu de violences hautement traumatogènes. Les sujets antillais semblent être héritiers d’éléments de résistance psychique et de résilience efficaces face au trauma. L’étude qualitative en anthropologie sociale établit un état des lieux de l’appréhension de cet héritage aujourd’hui par les descendants d’esclaves. Par l’analyse de leurs discours et de leurs représentations de l’esclavage et de la traite négrière aux Antilles, elle amène à déterminer les vecteurs et les facteurs généraux qui façonnent le rapport des descendants à leur héritage. Ainsi, la présente thèse offre de nouvelles perspectives de compréhension des implications psychologiques de l’esclavage transatlantique et de la traite négrière. D’une part, en dévoilant la pluralité des héritages aux Petites Antilles et leurs contours singuliers. D’autre part, en présentant l’héritage commun sous un angle novateur : dans sa valence psychotraumatique, mais aussi en tant que transmission de ressources psychiques. Aussi, les signifiants d’identités collectives sont fédérateurs : ils fondent un héritage partagé, qui élude les divisions socioraciales. Enfin, nos travaux sur les blessures psychologiques des descendants pointent des pistes afin d’agir pour l’apaisement. La reconnaissance de ces blessures représente désormais un enjeu international. Une réflexion populaire et politique s’est engagée au niveau mondial, dans une dynamique de décolonisation et de réparation. Nos recherches s’inscrivent dans cette actualité : elles éclairent les traces du passé pour mieux répondre aux besoins psychologiques et sociétaux du présent
The slave trade and transatlantic slavery, based on a racist ideology, represent several centuries of interpersonal violence and repeated trauma. Dehumanizing, slavery induced massive psychological destruction. This thesis in clinical psychology analyzes the traces of this founding past of West Indian culture: it explores the traumatic roots of the legacy of slavery, as well as its contemporary manifestations. She presents the psychic residues of this historical trauma through the development of Creole culture, West Indian identity and social practices. The former colonies are marked by a pervasiveness of violence in the social bond, which reflects both a privileged recourse to violence and a psychic ability to deal with it. We approach this tendency from the angle of psychic plasticity. Based on brain plasticity, it mobilizes defenses to preserve psychic homeostasis according to the subject's culture. Our work focuses on two French islands, Martinique and Guadeloupe, and two English islands, Dominica and Saint Lucia. We study their heritages through a cross-disciplinary approach (psychology, psychoanalysis, sociology, anthropology, neuroscience, history), from an epistemological perspective.Psycho-historical research on each island has enabled us to reconstitute psychic phylogenesis, revealing the archaic nature of buried identity matrices. It reveals the anchoring of a collective identity signifier, based on several symbols derived from the experience of the populations during the slavery period. Alongside these identity vestiges specific to each island, we find transilians' psychic stigmas contaminating the social bond. Attached to culture, which offers them a means of transgenerational deployment, they summon a symptomatic repetition of suffering through certain family and social practices. West Indian culture, with its Creole adages encouraging people not to collapse, also supports a specific psychic plasticity. Quantitative studies in psychopathology have measured the effect of West Indian culture on the psychological impact of repeated physical violence. This culture favors the maintenance of psychological equilibrium through the experience of highly traumatizing violence. West Indian subjects seem to have inherited elements of psychic resistance and resilience that are effective in the face of trauma. This qualitative study in social anthropology takes stock of how the descendants of slaves understand this heritage today. By analyzing their discourse and representations of slavery and the slave trade in the French West Indies, it helps to determine the vectors and factors that generate and perpetuate this legacy.This thesis offers new insights into the psychological implications of transatlantic slavery and the slave trade. On the one hand, by revealing the plurality of heritages in the Lesser Antilles and their singular contours. Secondly, by presenting the common heritage from an innovative angle: in its psychotraumatic valence, but also as a transmission of psychic resources. Also, the signifiers of collective identities are federators: they form the basis of a shared heritage, which eludes socio-racial divisions. Finally, our work on the psychological wounds of descendants points the way to action to heal them. Recognition of these wounds is now an international issue. A popular and political debate is underway around the world, as part of a process of decolonization and reparation. Our research is part of this current trend: it sheds light on the traces of the past to better respond to the psychological and societal needs of the present

Cette recherche propose de porter un regard sur les dynamiques psychiques en jeu, dans les mouvements transférentiels qui émergent lorsque l’enseignant est confronté à la réalité de la rencontre avec l’élève porteur de troubles du comportement. De l’incompréhensible à l’insupportable, de la difficulté à la souffrance, le trouble élève fait effraction dans l’expérience subjective de l’enseignant et génère des « ruptures identificatoires», esquissant une certaine rigidité psychique dans sa posture professionnelle. L’ « extrapolation » des concepts de transfert et de contre-transfert issus du champ de la psychanalyse, permet de dessiner les contours d’un contre-transfert spécifique à l’enseignant dans une relation pédagogique troublée. En tant que sujet désirant, il mobilise des attitudes contre-transférentielles, observables dans leurs effets, relevant soit d’un déjà-là, soit d’une réactivité d’intensité variable, au regard de dysharmonies dans l’articulation de ses désirs et de ses représentations construites et prescrites, caractérisant ses filtres interprétatifs. Comprendre l’économie des dynamiques psychiques de l’enseignant en souffrance professionnelle, dans une approche clinique d’orientation psychanalytique, constitue une assise pour envisager de repenser l’interprétation de son expérience subjective, en faveur d’une Plasticité Posturale Psychique de l’Enseignant
This research proposes to look at the psychodynamic interactions at play in the transference movements that emerge when a teacher encounters the reality of a pupil with behavioural disorders. From the incomprehensible to the unbearable, from the difficulty to the suffering –the troubled pupil intrudes into the teacher's subjective experience and generates « identity breakdowns », hinting at a certain psychic rigidity in one's professional position. The « extrapolation » of the concepts of transference and counter-transference from the field of psychoanalysis outlines the contours of a counter-transference specific to the teacher in a troubled teaching relationship. As a desired subject, he mobilises counter-transferential attitudes, observable in their effects, falling under either an already-existing responsiveness or one of varying intensity in terms of disharmony in the articulation of his desires, and constructed and prescribed representations characterising his interpretative filters. Understanding the economics of the psychodynamics of the teacher with regard to professional distress, in a clinical approach with a psychoanalytical orientation, constitutes a foundation to consider rethinking the interpretation of his subjective experience in favour of a Psychic Postural Plasticity of the Teacher

The Breech Baby Study is a mixed methods study which combines qualitative and quantitative inquiry. This study explores psycho-social-cultural risk factors for breech presentation from an evolutionary perspective. The quantitative component of the study uses Florida birth certificate and Medicaid data sets from 1992-2003 to evaluate the influence of ethnicity and socio-economic status on breech presentation. Ethnicity and socio-economic status account for less than two percent of the variance of risk factors for breech presentation. The qualitative study includes 114 mothers of breech and cephalic presentation babies who completed the State Trait Personality Inventory and a socio-demographic survey. Of these, 52 mothers of cephalic presentation babies and 23 mothers of breech presentation also participated in an in-depth interview about formative life experiences and peri-conception through delivery. The primary data analysis found mothers of breech presentation babies exhibit psycho-social-cultural characteristics unlike those found in mothers of cephalic presentation babies. These characteristics include being idealistic, analytical, polished, overextended, and fearful. Mothers of cephalic presentation babies were better equipped to adapt to unexpected situations and to be pragmatic in the face of unresolvable circumstances. Mothers of breech presentation babies were further separated into two categories. One category is achievement focused woman while the other is non-present focused woman. While both sets of breech presentation mothers were idealistic, the achievement focused mothers were more likely to be analytical, polished, and overextended. In contrast, the non-present focused mothers had a history of abuse and were more likely to have an unresolved pregnancy outcome or to be fearful. Breech presentation is interpreted by attachment theory, evolutionary ecological reproductive theory, and developmental plasticity theory as a fetal strategy to adapt to the intra-uterine relationship environment and an attempt to predict the extra-uterine relationship environment.

Malabou argues in this chapter for a non-teleological sense of materialist formation. Malabou develops via Althusser and Darwin an understanding of materialism— both politically and biologically—that cannot be limited to the incarnation of a preformed essence. Rather, the formation of matter also materializes its ‘essence.’ As a result, this essay occupies a crucial space in Malabou’s oeuvre, since in it she draws a direct connection between the scientific operations of cellular plasticity and the ontological dimensions of plasticity’s political import. Not only does this essay therefore justify Malabou’s commitment to materialism across her writings; it also, within the context of this volume, accounts for the inseparability of plasticity’s political, biological, psychic, and philosophic heritages and lives.

American literary history tends to discount Civil War elegies as unvaryingly predictable and, with a few canonical exceptions, unworthy of sustained attention. Chapter 3 proposes instead that we reconsider the genre as an essential archive of white plasticity and incorporation. When considered together, the hundreds of elegies to the Civil War dead printed and reprinted between 1861 and the turn of the century constitute perhaps the best archive we have for assessing, first, the conflicted nature of Northern white feeling in response to sectional reconciliation and, second, the capacity for white nationalism to transform such dissent into a technology for supremacist belonging. As a genre, Civil War elegies thus organized those psychic, social, and political incorporations that enabled the white subject to assert misrecognition without disrupting belonging, dissent from nationalism’s projections without disrupting citizenship, and occupy several competing strands of attachment without disrupting white supremacy’s defining claim to racial exceptionalism.

This chapter reviews five empirically supported principles of personality development: cumulative continuity (i.e., increasing trait stability across development), maturity (i.e., persons grow more socially adapted across development), social investment (i.e., commitment to socially conventional roles promotes maturity), corresponsiveness (i.e., persons choose environments that support their personalities), and plasticity (i.e., personality change can occur throughout the life course). Evidence for each of these principles is reviewed. Finally, implications for psychopathology are drawn.

The chapter summarizes current research on individual and sex differences in personality and cognitive abilities and reviews the main evolutionary processes that produce and maintain individual variation. Since psychopathology is inextricably linked to normal variation in personality and cognition, a unified approach to mental disorders must incorporate a sophisticated understanding of both individual and sex differences. The chapter describes the structure of personality and cognitive ability and examines their evolutionary and neurobiological underpinnings. The final section considers the interplay of genetic and environmental factors in the development of individual differences and discusses recent models of developmental plasticity and genotype–environment interactions.

Psychotic disorders such as schizophrenia are serious, common, and highly disabling illnesses. Their pathophysiologies remain unclear, and have been a subject of many theories. In recent years, there has been considerable progress in understanding the pathophysiology of the early course of psychoses, as it pertains to the adolescent onset of these illnesses. This chapter summarizes recent literature and the authors’ work in the neurobiology of early-course psychotic disorders using neurocognitive, structural, functional, and spectroscopic neuroimaging, as well as electrophysiological and sleep studies. Extant literature and the authors’ studies suggest alterations in cognition, brain structure, function, and neurochemistry in the early course of psychotic illnesses and in young relatives at risk for this illness. The literature points to alterations in grey matter volumes and white matter connectivity across several key brain regions, aberrations in task and default network function. Spectroscopy and PET studies suggest alterations in glutamatergic and dopaminergic neurotransmission. These alterations begin around early adolescence and progress during the early phases of psychotic illnesses. Pathophysiology might be related to a neurodevelopmental derailment involving aberrations in programmed synaptic refinement and plasticity processes. Recent genetic data point to the involvement of developmental, immune, glutamatergic, and dopaminergic function. These emerging insights may suggest novel targets for prevention and early intervention.

Chapter 2 presents the theory behind Goal Focused Positive Psychotherapy (GFPP), a technique that facilitates clients’ thriving by creating a happier, meaningful life. Psychotherapy can help clients to enjoy a lifetime of well-being and growth toward their meaningful, virtuous goals through positive emotions. The Broaden-and-Build Theory of positive emotions serves as the change mechanism for GFPP. It is important to select goals for therapy based upon client values and personal meaning (approach goals and intrinsic goals). Using clients’ personal strengths (including their culture) is of central importance, as is the promotion of hope in usually demoralized clients. The implicit theory of personal change or the growth mindset includes the belief in neural or brain plasticity. Self Determination Theory sets out competence, relatedness, and autonomy as the three determinants of motivation and the fundamental psychological needs.

Schizophrenia is a complex disorder where risk genes involved in neuroplasticity are interacting with environmental risk factors. Schizophrenia and related psychotic illnesses are not degenerative in origin, but are disturbances of regenerative/plastic processes of the brain, involving neurogenetic events in the dentate region focusing on oligodendrocyte- and synaptogenesis-related processes. In order to prevent psychosis, persons at risk need to be identified at the early phases of the illness in order to initiate a phase-specific treatment. Therefore, understanding the mechanisms underlying the development of psychosis and strengthening the plasticity of the brain could effectively stop the progression of psychosis from the early at-risk mental state (ARMS) to the full picture of schizophrenia.

There is no single way of ageing, but different types of ageotypes have been identified. Frailty is the most problematic expression of the ageing population. The understanding of the route linking ageing, frailty and 2nd order criticalities open new and intriguing operational perspectives. Indeed, frailty might be reversible or attenuated by interventions put in place to avoid its evolution over time. This is most true when traditional therapeutic approaches are combined with the promotion of healthy lifestyles. Not only the European Innovation Partnership on Active and Healthy (EIP-AHA) is actively involved in the promotion of healthy and active ageing, but a more aware geriatric culture toward a new medicine of complexity is spreading. The fight against frailty takes place in a lifespan and multisystemic perspective. Indeed, every individual is a dynamic, interacting, adaptable system in which the disease triggers a cause-and-effect model that cannot be considered linear. Frailty in the elderly requires therefore a customized multidimensional approach according to the principle of “taking care of the patient and not only of the disease”. A bio-psycho-social model can help us to define the most appropriate interventions to promote health in terms of the best possible quality of life.