Comment on If a person with multiple personalities threatens suicide, is it considered a hostage situation?

• AnarchoEngineer@lemmy.dbzer0.com ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

  While I’m a big fan of philosophical pragmatism, I don’t think it applies here because if the identities are truly separate, it seems less likely you’d be able to treat this kind of mental illness.

  It’s much easier to teach people better coping methods than it would be to go about trying to reunify identities since… well where would you even start?

  As a testable hypothesis, truly separate personalities would not share all memories but a person presenting them as facades wouldn’t be able to keep the information separate perfectly. Chances are you would be able to design an experiment to trip them up.

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  • Delta_V@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨month⁩ ago

    Its been done.

    Patients with Dissociative Identity Disorder (DID) frequently report episodes of interidentity amnesia, that is amnesia for events experienced by other identities. The goal of the present experiment was to test the implicit transfer of trauma-related information between identities in DID. We hypothesized that whereas declarative information may transfer from one identity to another, the emotional connotation of the memory may be dissociated, especially in the case of negative, trauma-related emotional valence. An evaluative conditioning procedure was combined with an affective priming procedure, both performed by different identities. In the evaluative conditioning procedure, previously neutral stimuli come to refer to a negative or positive connotation. The affective priming procedure was used to test the transfer of this acquired valence to an identity reporting interidentity amnesia. Results indicated activation of stimulus valence in the affective priming task, that is transfer of emotional material between identities. r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

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