JELLINEK Y EL PRIMER TRIBUNAL CONSTITUCIONAL PARA AUSTRIA:

Further evidence that mood is significant in BPD comes from exploring one further clinical feature of BPD in light of some theories of moods. As I mentioned in chapter 1, most current theories of moods are non-intentional. According to Lormand, positing their non-intentionality responds to the Intentionality Condition that he argued for as a constraint 154 _{Kroll 1993.}

155 _{See Birnbaum 2004 for a summary of this debate. See Smith et al. 2004 for an argument in favour of BPD}

on theories of moods. Of these non-intentional accounts, most aim to explain what Lormand called the Pervasiveness Condition. The Pervasiveness Condition arises out the feature of moods whereby they influence and affect our experience very broadly. Metaphorically, when we are in a mood, it ‘colours’ everything we experience, typically resulting in selective attention, particularly to phenomena that reinforce the extant mood. I agree that this is a key feature of mood phenomena. Concern for this feature has influenced a number of

philosophical and psychological theories of moods.

Lormand, for example, characterises moods as ‘sieves’ for our entire experience. For him, moods determine upon which of our intentional states (beliefs, desires and emotions) we dwell.156 Using a computer metaphor, Paul Griffiths argues that moods are higher-order functional states that determine which lower-order states (e.g. emotions and cognitions) the person is in.157 Laura Sizer offers a similar ‘computational’ theory of moods arguing that moods bias our cognitive operations.158 Consistent with these philosophical views is the “mood congruency hypothesis,” argued for by a number of psychologists, notably Gordon Bower and Matthias Siemer. They characterise moods as enhancing the processing of other affects or cognitions that are congruent with the original mood.159

This feature – of biases or dispositions toward certain congruent affective or cognitive states – is precisely what is observed with BPD. Consider the research performed by Lauren

156 _{Lormand 1985.}

157 _{Griffiths 1997, 248-257.} 158 _{Sizer 2000.}

Korfine and Jill Hooley.160 They investigated the extent to which subjects diagnosed with BPD would show biased information processing, relative to controls. Subjects were exposed to three types of words: borderline, neutral, and positive. ‘Borderline’ words are words that are supposed to be especially salient to persons diagnosed with BPD, e.g. words associated with abandonment or rejection. (See symptom 1 for confirmation of the centrality of these themes with BPD.) Of course, if I am right that BPD is connected with the irritation / depression mood blend, then it should come as no surprise that abandonment and rejection are BPD themes. With each word exposure, the subjects were instructed to either remember or forget the word. While there was no difference in remembering rates for words subjects were instructed to remember, subjects diagnosed with BPD showed a significantly greater tendency to remember the borderline words they were instructed to forget. This selective attending, associated with greater recall, is just what we would expect if BPD is importantly associated with moods, and moods have the features discussed above, that is, pervasive, mood-congruent effects on how their experiencer perceives the world.

Further evidence for this analysis comes from Arnoud Arntz’s lab in the Netherlands, where a team of researchers are exploring the unique cognitive and affective features of BPD. From this large research project, Sieswerda et al. have also found evidence of cognitive biases in BPD.161 They asked subjects to play a video game. Within the game, they created scenarios that were more or less bad for the subjects’ game representative. Subjects diagnosed with BPD were more likely to see their situations as negative compared with control subjects. The researchers characterised the BPD subjects as having a ‘negative

160 _{Korfine and Hooley, 2000.} 161 _{Sieswerda et al. 2005.}

evaluative style.’162 Also from the Arntz lab, Veen and Arntz exposed research subjects to film clips with different emotional themes.163 Some of these themes were characterised as BPD themes (as with the Korfine and Hooley research, these include abandonment and rejection). Subjects diagnosed with BPD showed emotional reactions that were more extreme that control subjects.

It seems to me that the theories of moods that are responsive to the pervasiveness of moods – Lormand’s ‘sieve’ theory, Sizer and Griffiths’ computational theories, Bower and Siemer’s ‘mood congruency’ hypothesis – capture something important about moods. Moreover, BPD sufferers routinely experience the same phenomena that these mood theories aim to explain. Their experiences are ‘coloured,’ ‘filtered,’ ‘framed’ and ‘biased’ in

particular, negative, directions. The direction of bias is consistent with the mood blend of irritation / depression I have posited. I think this provides another indirect piece of evidence that moods are significant in BPD – sufferers of BPD experience what experiencers of these negative moods would experience. But of course, all of these theories just discussed take moods to be non-intentional. Given that I am arguing for an intentional account of moods, it might seem that I should not invoke these non-intentional analyses. Recall, however, from my first chapter that I argued that these theories of moods were not, in fact, incompatible with intentionality. Although their proponents start from a non-intentional position, the bulk of their analyses are consistent with the intentional position that I am arguing for. On my view, these theories are concerned to explain the way that moods take immediate (apparent) intentional objects of moods (given that these theories are non-intentional, they would surely

162 _{This characterisation was endorsed earlier by v. Ceumern-Lindenstjerna et al. 2002.} 163 _{Veen and Arntz 2000.}

resist the possibility that intentional objects are involved). The intentional account I will be offering focuses instead on occasioning intentional objects and is compatible with theories that describe the effects of moods once those moods come into existence.