Stepan Davtian - Academia.edu (original) (raw)

Papers by Stepan Davtian

Psihiatriâ, psihoterapiâ i kliničeskaâ psihologiâ, Nov 27, 2023

IQ tests work well in a stable situation when living conditions remain unchanged. In times of glo... more IQ tests work well in a stable situation when living conditions remain unchanged. In times of global life change mental functions as derivatives of the cultural environment may change. Analyzing the direct and reversed Flynn eff ects the authors come to the conclusion that the structure of intelligence is currently changing, and off er their own "geometric" model of understanding intelligence as the "area of a triangle" with angles representing diff erent types of mind (Polymath, Thinker, Inventor). The larger the area of the triangle, the smarter the person. The shape of the triangle determines the intellectual emploi of a person-by the largest angle. Polymath is a historically important person, a bearer of knowledge. However, the value of P-intelligence has steadily declined with the invention of writing, printing, and media. In the era of mobile Internet, P-devaluation has become rapid. Inventor is hardly noticeable in stable times of civilizational development. The value of I-intelligence increases during periods of knowledge crisis: a successful inventor changes the world. The need for T-intelligence also grows in times of change. The element of the Thinker is the search for explanations. He pays tribute to the facts, but above all appreciates theories, being the link between old and new knowledge. The fl uctuations in IQ level revealed over the past decades refl ect the dynamics of structural components of intelligence: the Flynn eff ect refl ects an increase in P, the reverse eff ect of Flynn-its reduction. Measuring P-intelligence (gradually losing its role as a key characteristic of the mind) is well standardized, while there are no reliable tools for assessing T-and I-intelligence. Our time with its general crisis of understanding, is inexorably changing the shape of the intellectual triangle, expanding I and narrowing P: the value of facts is falling while the value of their understanding is growing.

Вестник психиатрии и психологии Чувашии, 2009

Zhurnal Nevrologii I Psikhiatrii Imeni S S Korsakova, 1992

Fiziologiia cheloveka, 2004

Human Physiology, Jul 1, 2004

The interhemispheric interactions in perception of Russian prosody were studied in the norm and i... more The interhemispheric interactions in perception of Russian prosody were studied in the norm and in schizophrenia as a clinical model of impaired hemispheric interactions. Monaural presentation of stimuli and binaural presentation in a free acoustical field were used. Sentences with main variants of Russian prosodic intonations were used as stimuli. The response time and the number of erroneous responses were recorded. In binaural listening without headphones, no significant difference in the percent of errors in identifying the emotional prosody was found between healthy subjects and schizophrenics. Compared with the healthy subjects, the patients made more errors in understanding the logical stress and fewer errors in understanding the syntagmatic segmentation. By response time, a significant dominance of the left ear was revealed in the healthy subjects during monaural listening to sentences with emotional prosody and complete or incomplete sentences, whereas no significant ear dominance was found in the schizophrenics. During monaural listening to sentences with logical stress, the response time was shorter when stimuli were presented to the right ear both in the healthy subjects and in the schizophrenics. The results testified that the functional brain asymmetry in schizophrenics is flattened. The flattening was less evident in the perception of a logical stress in a sentence and did not significantly affect the efficiency of identification of emotional prosody and syntagmatic segmentation of a sentence.

Sign Systems Studies, Oct 1, 2003

The main obstacle to the development of a reliable taxonomy of mental disorders is an incorrectly... more The main obstacle to the development of a reliable taxonomy of mental disorders is an incorrectly formulated problem: natural classification requires discrete elements, while the clinical picture of diseases does not meet this requirement. An alternative project is proposed, the essence of which is to create a map of the psychopathological landscape based on discrete landscape-forming factors, by analogy with models successfully used in climatology.

Sign Systems Studies, 2003

Umwelt, as elaborated by Jakob von Uexküll, is a model (as developed by Thomas Sebeok), a model o... more Umwelt, as elaborated by Jakob von Uexküll, is a model (as developed by Thomas Sebeok), a model of the world, or, better, the worlds, as there are innumerable models constructed by different inhabitants of our planet. Everything has it's own Umwelt adapted to its specific needs (Uexküll 1928). Non-human signs are everywhere, investigated by different branches of semiotics endeavoring to understand stars and rocks, plants and animals (Hoffmeyer 1996; Kull 1998, 2001). However, humans are the only living beings who know that there are signs, i.e. who have the ability to engage in acts of reflection and self-reflection thereby creating a semiosphere of a specific character (Lotman 1984, 1990). As Deely puts it when discussing Peirces's views all thought is in signs (Deely 1998). Ethosemiotics, or teleosemiotics, was proposed by Ponzio & Petrilli (2003) when elaborating upon an earlier idea of the semiotic self (Sebeok, 1979; Sebeok, Petrilli, Ponzio 2001); and autosemiosis was defined as a universal principle of Nature to reflect itself (Seppänan 2003) making biosemiotic space still richer. Is there any relation between semiotics and psychiatry? Is semiotics essential for an understanding of the causes of mental disorders? Psychosemiotics, acknowledged by many authors as a branch of the biosemiotic sciences, is a domain that fills a huge but very important gap in our knowledge of human nature and its deviations. "In terms of semioses, we can conceive our world as a permanent dialogue between self and non-self. The world appears, then, as answers from non-self to questions of self and answers of self to questions of non-self" according to Jakob Von Uexküll (Uexküll 1999). The idea of 'symptom' as a sign that in pre-Newtonian days made medicine a semiotic discipline seems to be in need of further elaboration now, when a crisis of biomechanical paradigms has become evident. It has also become evident that Peirce's (1931-1958), Bakhtin's and Lotman's concepts of dialogue as a basis for any informational process are of the utmost importance when we attempt to understand semiosis as arising from the need for an interpreter (metainterpretation in Uexküll's terms). As Tarasti

The article presents a transdisciplinary research model of a human being in postnonclassical scie... more The article presents a transdisciplinary research model of a human being in postnonclassical scientific paradigm and shows its heuristic potential to explain mechanisms of development of psychopathology.

Neurology Bulletin

The paper shows correlation of empirical and theoretical levels of knowledge in psychiatry by ana... more The paper shows correlation of empirical and theoretical levels of knowledge in psychiatry by analyzing a single text written by a patient. The patients text is analyzed three times. The first analysis performed by a linguist demonstrates how informative for a clinician can be an attentive attitude to the patients Word. The second analysis is a standard procedure for psychiatric phenomenological diagnostics. It is shown that the formulation of a clinical diagnosis from epistemological positions is equivalent to establishing a scientific fact (completion of empirical research): there is no theoretical modeling of pathological processes in psychiatry today; it all ends at the stage of recognizing the symptoms, without any attempt to understand them. The third analysis demonstrates the advantages in understanding pathological mechanisms provided by the explanatory model (interpretation of the text from the perspective of the bipersonal model of personality).

В статье выдвигается гипотеза о том, что языковое поведение психотических больных выражает чувств... more В статье выдвигается гипотеза о том, что языковое поведение психотических больных выражает чувство неблагополучия протопатического уровня при помощи наиболее соответствующих этому древнему уровню чувствования лексических средств, а именно – старой языковой игры, возрождаемой больным, благодаря стихийно действующим механизмам реметафоризации (возрождающим «потухшие» метафоры и возвращающим «эмоциональные» слова к их старым «телесным» корням).
Ключевые слова: эмоции, телесные ощущения, метафора, протопатический сдвиг, семантический сдвиг, реметафоризация.

Sign System Studies. An international journal of semiotics and sign processes in culture and nature. Tartu, 2003

Diagnostics of mental disorder completely bases on estimation of patient’s behavior, verbal behav... more Diagnostics of mental disorder completely bases on estimation of patient’s behavior, verbal behavior being the most important. The behavior, in turn, is ruled by a situation expressed as a system of signs. Perception of a situation could be seen as a function, which depends on context resulting from the previous situations, structuring personal world. So the world is not given – it’s being formed while the person is in action. We argue that distinctive features of behavior, including its abnormal variants, can be explained not in categories of characters and diseases but in terms of situations taking place in individual worlds. The situation in which a person perceives himself is not simply a site in a three-dimensional space at a certain moment, but a part of the world and an episode of his life. Like with a text consisting of words, individual world is composed of situations. Each of them needs certain context to cope with ambiguity. This context is induced by the world as a whole. And the world, in turn, is presented as a chain of situations. If the context cannot help to interpret a situation adequately, uncertainty can be eliminated by actions clarifying a situation, which is changed in a predictable way. Thus, purposeful activity, skills to make predictions and corrections of one’s own actions are crucial. Weakness of any of them inevitably leads to the distortion of the presentation of the world, to wrong evaluation of the situation and, as a result, to inadequate actions. Thus, the lack of activity becomes the key factor in disorder development, being simultaneously its cause and effect. In periods of insufficient activity conditions for violated sign processing arise. We offer a new semiotical approach based on the following variants of sign malfunction: oligosemia (reduction of the number of perceivable signs); hyposemia (decrease of significance of signs); hypersemia (increase of significance of some signs at the expense of others); ambisemia (uncertainty of sign, when situation remains unclear); cryptosemia (recognition of signs not obvious for other observers) and parasemia (perverted interpretation of signs influenced by a false context).

Psychiatry Research, 2015

Schizophrenia is a debilitating psychiatric disorder, affecting approximately 1% of the human pop... more Schizophrenia is a debilitating psychiatric disorder, affecting approximately 1% of the human population. Mostly genetic factors contribute to schizophrenia, but the genetics are complex and various aspects of brain functioning and structure, from development to synapse plasticity, seem to be involved in the pathogenesis. The goal of the study was to look for novel mutations in genes, implicated in molecular networks, important in schizophrenia. In the study four candidate genes taking part in the WNT signaling pathway were analyzed by sequencing in a cohort of 87 schizophrenia patients from Saint Petersburg, Russia. The gene list included CTNNB1 (beta-catenin), GSK3B, WNT2B and WNT7B. The impact of discovered variants on the protein function was analyzed in silico. We found three variants in the genes CTNNB1 and WNT7B, absent in healthy controls, including 212 controls from the same geographic area. The novel mutation c.1943A>G (p.N648S) in CTNNB1 seems to be the best candidate for disease-associated mutation in this study, as it damages the protein product in silico. This is the first study reporting mutations in CTNNB1 in schizophrenia.

Psychiatric Genetics, 2014

Schizophrenia is a severe psychiatric disorder, affecting ∼1% of the human population. The geneti... more Schizophrenia is a severe psychiatric disorder, affecting ∼1% of the human population. The genetic contribution to schizophrenia is significant, but the genetics are complex and many aspects of brain functioning, from neural development to synapse structure, seem to be involved in the pathogenesis. A novel way to study the molecular causes of schizophrenia is to study the genetics of left-right (LR) brain asymmetry, the disease feature often observed in schizophrenic patients. In this study, we analyzed by sequencing five candidate LR cerebral asymmetry genes in a cohort of 95 schizophrenia and schizotypal disorder patients from Saint Petersburg, Russia. The gene list included LMO4, LRRTM1, FOXP2, the PCDH11X/Y gene pair, and SRY. We found 17 previously unreported variants in the genes LRRTM1, FOXP2, LMO4, and PCDH11X in the 3'-UTR and 5'-UTR. The variants might contribute toward an altered mRNA processing, which could lead to altered mRNA amounts in developing neurons of the brain and establishment of an incorrect LR asymmetry profile. This is the first study in which multiple candidate genes for cerebral LR asymmetry and schizophrenia have been analyzed by sequencing. The approach to study the genetics of schizophrenia from the perspective of an LR cerebral asymmetry disturbance deserves more attention.

Arm. Journal of Mental Health, Yerevan, 2011

Аннотация. В первой части статьи содержится критический анализ фундаментальных проблем психиатрии... more Аннотация. В первой части статьи содержится критический анализ фундаментальных проблем психиатрии, препятствующих её успешному развитию, порожденных доминированием устаревших биомеханических представлений о природе человека, рассматриваемых сквозь призму современных синергетических подходов к изучению сложных систем. Вторая часть статьи посвящена обоснованию принципа реальности как методологической основе постижения человека (как в норме, так и при патологии), согласно которой человек понимается как реальность, описанная его языком.
Ключевые слова: парадигма, синергетика, классификация, человек, реальность.

The first part of the article contains a critical analysis (through the prism of modern synergetic approaches to investigation of complex systems) of fundamental problems interfering with successful development of psychiatry derived from dominance of outdated biomechanical conceptions of human nature. The second part is devoted to substantiation of the reality principle as a methodological base for comprehension of man (both in norm and pathology) with the man understood as a reality described by means of his language.
Keywords: paradigm, synergetics, classification, reality.

Известия Иркутского государственного университета, серия "Психология", 2013

Диагностика психического заболевания основана на оценке поведения больного (включая речевое пове... more Диагностика психического заболевания основана на оценке поведения больного (включая речевое поведение), управляемого ситуацией, представленной как система знаков. Восприятие ситуации, в свою очередь, зависит от контекста, формирующегося из опыта предыдущих ситуаций, структурирующих индивидуальный мир. Таким образом, мир не задан – он формируется в процессе целенаправленной активности: различные формы поведения, включая аномальные варианты, могут быть объяснены не с позиции особенностей личности или состояний, а в категориях ситуаций, разворачивающихся в индивидуальных мирах. Подобно тексту, состоящему из слов, мир складывается из ситуаций, каждая из которых нуждается в определенном контексте для преодоления неоднозначности (присущей всякой знаковой системе вследствие полисемии). Этот контекст порождается миром как целостностью. Если контекст не помогает интерпретации ситуации, неопределенность устраняется путем активных действий, проясняющих ситуацию. Следовательно, исключительную важность приобретает целенаправленная активность, способность прогнозировать и корректировать свои действия: слабость любого из этих звеньев неизбежно ведет к искажению представлений о мире, неверной оценке ситуаций и, как результат, – к неадекватному поведению, закрепляющему (замыкая круг) неадекватную структуру мира.

Ключевые слова: многомирие, синергетика, семиотика, депрессивная реальность, параноидная реальность.

Psihiatriâ, psihoterapiâ i kliničeskaâ psihologiâ, Nov 27, 2023

IQ tests work well in a stable situation when living conditions remain unchanged. In times of glo... more IQ tests work well in a stable situation when living conditions remain unchanged. In times of global life change mental functions as derivatives of the cultural environment may change. Analyzing the direct and reversed Flynn eff ects the authors come to the conclusion that the structure of intelligence is currently changing, and off er their own "geometric" model of understanding intelligence as the "area of a triangle" with angles representing diff erent types of mind (Polymath, Thinker, Inventor). The larger the area of the triangle, the smarter the person. The shape of the triangle determines the intellectual emploi of a person-by the largest angle. Polymath is a historically important person, a bearer of knowledge. However, the value of P-intelligence has steadily declined with the invention of writing, printing, and media. In the era of mobile Internet, P-devaluation has become rapid. Inventor is hardly noticeable in stable times of civilizational development. The value of I-intelligence increases during periods of knowledge crisis: a successful inventor changes the world. The need for T-intelligence also grows in times of change. The element of the Thinker is the search for explanations. He pays tribute to the facts, but above all appreciates theories, being the link between old and new knowledge. The fl uctuations in IQ level revealed over the past decades refl ect the dynamics of structural components of intelligence: the Flynn eff ect refl ects an increase in P, the reverse eff ect of Flynn-its reduction. Measuring P-intelligence (gradually losing its role as a key characteristic of the mind) is well standardized, while there are no reliable tools for assessing T-and I-intelligence. Our time with its general crisis of understanding, is inexorably changing the shape of the intellectual triangle, expanding I and narrowing P: the value of facts is falling while the value of their understanding is growing.

Вестник психиатрии и психологии Чувашии, 2009

Zhurnal Nevrologii I Psikhiatrii Imeni S S Korsakova, 1992

Fiziologiia cheloveka, 2004

Human Physiology, Jul 1, 2004

The interhemispheric interactions in perception of Russian prosody were studied in the norm and i... more The interhemispheric interactions in perception of Russian prosody were studied in the norm and in schizophrenia as a clinical model of impaired hemispheric interactions. Monaural presentation of stimuli and binaural presentation in a free acoustical field were used. Sentences with main variants of Russian prosodic intonations were used as stimuli. The response time and the number of erroneous responses were recorded. In binaural listening without headphones, no significant difference in the percent of errors in identifying the emotional prosody was found between healthy subjects and schizophrenics. Compared with the healthy subjects, the patients made more errors in understanding the logical stress and fewer errors in understanding the syntagmatic segmentation. By response time, a significant dominance of the left ear was revealed in the healthy subjects during monaural listening to sentences with emotional prosody and complete or incomplete sentences, whereas no significant ear dominance was found in the schizophrenics. During monaural listening to sentences with logical stress, the response time was shorter when stimuli were presented to the right ear both in the healthy subjects and in the schizophrenics. The results testified that the functional brain asymmetry in schizophrenics is flattened. The flattening was less evident in the perception of a logical stress in a sentence and did not significantly affect the efficiency of identification of emotional prosody and syntagmatic segmentation of a sentence.

Sign Systems Studies, Oct 1, 2003

The main obstacle to the development of a reliable taxonomy of mental disorders is an incorrectly... more The main obstacle to the development of a reliable taxonomy of mental disorders is an incorrectly formulated problem: natural classification requires discrete elements, while the clinical picture of diseases does not meet this requirement. An alternative project is proposed, the essence of which is to create a map of the psychopathological landscape based on discrete landscape-forming factors, by analogy with models successfully used in climatology.

Sign Systems Studies, 2003

Umwelt, as elaborated by Jakob von Uexküll, is a model (as developed by Thomas Sebeok), a model o... more Umwelt, as elaborated by Jakob von Uexküll, is a model (as developed by Thomas Sebeok), a model of the world, or, better, the worlds, as there are innumerable models constructed by different inhabitants of our planet. Everything has it's own Umwelt adapted to its specific needs (Uexküll 1928). Non-human signs are everywhere, investigated by different branches of semiotics endeavoring to understand stars and rocks, plants and animals (Hoffmeyer 1996; Kull 1998, 2001). However, humans are the only living beings who know that there are signs, i.e. who have the ability to engage in acts of reflection and self-reflection thereby creating a semiosphere of a specific character (Lotman 1984, 1990). As Deely puts it when discussing Peirces's views all thought is in signs (Deely 1998). Ethosemiotics, or teleosemiotics, was proposed by Ponzio & Petrilli (2003) when elaborating upon an earlier idea of the semiotic self (Sebeok, 1979; Sebeok, Petrilli, Ponzio 2001); and autosemiosis was defined as a universal principle of Nature to reflect itself (Seppänan 2003) making biosemiotic space still richer. Is there any relation between semiotics and psychiatry? Is semiotics essential for an understanding of the causes of mental disorders? Psychosemiotics, acknowledged by many authors as a branch of the biosemiotic sciences, is a domain that fills a huge but very important gap in our knowledge of human nature and its deviations. "In terms of semioses, we can conceive our world as a permanent dialogue between self and non-self. The world appears, then, as answers from non-self to questions of self and answers of self to questions of non-self" according to Jakob Von Uexküll (Uexküll 1999). The idea of 'symptom' as a sign that in pre-Newtonian days made medicine a semiotic discipline seems to be in need of further elaboration now, when a crisis of biomechanical paradigms has become evident. It has also become evident that Peirce's (1931-1958), Bakhtin's and Lotman's concepts of dialogue as a basis for any informational process are of the utmost importance when we attempt to understand semiosis as arising from the need for an interpreter (metainterpretation in Uexküll's terms). As Tarasti

The article presents a transdisciplinary research model of a human being in postnonclassical scie... more The article presents a transdisciplinary research model of a human being in postnonclassical scientific paradigm and shows its heuristic potential to explain mechanisms of development of psychopathology.

Neurology Bulletin

The paper shows correlation of empirical and theoretical levels of knowledge in psychiatry by ana... more The paper shows correlation of empirical and theoretical levels of knowledge in psychiatry by analyzing a single text written by a patient. The patients text is analyzed three times. The first analysis performed by a linguist demonstrates how informative for a clinician can be an attentive attitude to the patients Word. The second analysis is a standard procedure for psychiatric phenomenological diagnostics. It is shown that the formulation of a clinical diagnosis from epistemological positions is equivalent to establishing a scientific fact (completion of empirical research): there is no theoretical modeling of pathological processes in psychiatry today; it all ends at the stage of recognizing the symptoms, without any attempt to understand them. The third analysis demonstrates the advantages in understanding pathological mechanisms provided by the explanatory model (interpretation of the text from the perspective of the bipersonal model of personality).

В статье выдвигается гипотеза о том, что языковое поведение психотических больных выражает чувств... more В статье выдвигается гипотеза о том, что языковое поведение психотических больных выражает чувство неблагополучия протопатического уровня при помощи наиболее соответствующих этому древнему уровню чувствования лексических средств, а именно – старой языковой игры, возрождаемой больным, благодаря стихийно действующим механизмам реметафоризации (возрождающим «потухшие» метафоры и возвращающим «эмоциональные» слова к их старым «телесным» корням).
Ключевые слова: эмоции, телесные ощущения, метафора, протопатический сдвиг, семантический сдвиг, реметафоризация.

Sign System Studies. An international journal of semiotics and sign processes in culture and nature. Tartu, 2003

Diagnostics of mental disorder completely bases on estimation of patient’s behavior, verbal behav... more Diagnostics of mental disorder completely bases on estimation of patient’s behavior, verbal behavior being the most important. The behavior, in turn, is ruled by a situation expressed as a system of signs. Perception of a situation could be seen as a function, which depends on context resulting from the previous situations, structuring personal world. So the world is not given – it’s being formed while the person is in action. We argue that distinctive features of behavior, including its abnormal variants, can be explained not in categories of characters and diseases but in terms of situations taking place in individual worlds. The situation in which a person perceives himself is not simply a site in a three-dimensional space at a certain moment, but a part of the world and an episode of his life. Like with a text consisting of words, individual world is composed of situations. Each of them needs certain context to cope with ambiguity. This context is induced by the world as a whole. And the world, in turn, is presented as a chain of situations. If the context cannot help to interpret a situation adequately, uncertainty can be eliminated by actions clarifying a situation, which is changed in a predictable way. Thus, purposeful activity, skills to make predictions and corrections of one’s own actions are crucial. Weakness of any of them inevitably leads to the distortion of the presentation of the world, to wrong evaluation of the situation and, as a result, to inadequate actions. Thus, the lack of activity becomes the key factor in disorder development, being simultaneously its cause and effect. In periods of insufficient activity conditions for violated sign processing arise. We offer a new semiotical approach based on the following variants of sign malfunction: oligosemia (reduction of the number of perceivable signs); hyposemia (decrease of significance of signs); hypersemia (increase of significance of some signs at the expense of others); ambisemia (uncertainty of sign, when situation remains unclear); cryptosemia (recognition of signs not obvious for other observers) and parasemia (perverted interpretation of signs influenced by a false context).

Psychiatry Research, 2015

Schizophrenia is a debilitating psychiatric disorder, affecting approximately 1% of the human pop... more Schizophrenia is a debilitating psychiatric disorder, affecting approximately 1% of the human population. Mostly genetic factors contribute to schizophrenia, but the genetics are complex and various aspects of brain functioning and structure, from development to synapse plasticity, seem to be involved in the pathogenesis. The goal of the study was to look for novel mutations in genes, implicated in molecular networks, important in schizophrenia. In the study four candidate genes taking part in the WNT signaling pathway were analyzed by sequencing in a cohort of 87 schizophrenia patients from Saint Petersburg, Russia. The gene list included CTNNB1 (beta-catenin), GSK3B, WNT2B and WNT7B. The impact of discovered variants on the protein function was analyzed in silico. We found three variants in the genes CTNNB1 and WNT7B, absent in healthy controls, including 212 controls from the same geographic area. The novel mutation c.1943A>G (p.N648S) in CTNNB1 seems to be the best candidate for disease-associated mutation in this study, as it damages the protein product in silico. This is the first study reporting mutations in CTNNB1 in schizophrenia.

Psychiatric Genetics, 2014

Schizophrenia is a severe psychiatric disorder, affecting ∼1% of the human population. The geneti... more Schizophrenia is a severe psychiatric disorder, affecting ∼1% of the human population. The genetic contribution to schizophrenia is significant, but the genetics are complex and many aspects of brain functioning, from neural development to synapse structure, seem to be involved in the pathogenesis. A novel way to study the molecular causes of schizophrenia is to study the genetics of left-right (LR) brain asymmetry, the disease feature often observed in schizophrenic patients. In this study, we analyzed by sequencing five candidate LR cerebral asymmetry genes in a cohort of 95 schizophrenia and schizotypal disorder patients from Saint Petersburg, Russia. The gene list included LMO4, LRRTM1, FOXP2, the PCDH11X/Y gene pair, and SRY. We found 17 previously unreported variants in the genes LRRTM1, FOXP2, LMO4, and PCDH11X in the 3'-UTR and 5'-UTR. The variants might contribute toward an altered mRNA processing, which could lead to altered mRNA amounts in developing neurons of the brain and establishment of an incorrect LR asymmetry profile. This is the first study in which multiple candidate genes for cerebral LR asymmetry and schizophrenia have been analyzed by sequencing. The approach to study the genetics of schizophrenia from the perspective of an LR cerebral asymmetry disturbance deserves more attention.

Arm. Journal of Mental Health, Yerevan, 2011

Аннотация. В первой части статьи содержится критический анализ фундаментальных проблем психиатрии... more Аннотация. В первой части статьи содержится критический анализ фундаментальных проблем психиатрии, препятствующих её успешному развитию, порожденных доминированием устаревших биомеханических представлений о природе человека, рассматриваемых сквозь призму современных синергетических подходов к изучению сложных систем. Вторая часть статьи посвящена обоснованию принципа реальности как методологической основе постижения человека (как в норме, так и при патологии), согласно которой человек понимается как реальность, описанная его языком.
Ключевые слова: парадигма, синергетика, классификация, человек, реальность.

The first part of the article contains a critical analysis (through the prism of modern synergetic approaches to investigation of complex systems) of fundamental problems interfering with successful development of psychiatry derived from dominance of outdated biomechanical conceptions of human nature. The second part is devoted to substantiation of the reality principle as a methodological base for comprehension of man (both in norm and pathology) with the man understood as a reality described by means of his language.
Keywords: paradigm, synergetics, classification, reality.

Известия Иркутского государственного университета, серия "Психология", 2013

Диагностика психического заболевания основана на оценке поведения больного (включая речевое пове... more Диагностика психического заболевания основана на оценке поведения больного (включая речевое поведение), управляемого ситуацией, представленной как система знаков. Восприятие ситуации, в свою очередь, зависит от контекста, формирующегося из опыта предыдущих ситуаций, структурирующих индивидуальный мир. Таким образом, мир не задан – он формируется в процессе целенаправленной активности: различные формы поведения, включая аномальные варианты, могут быть объяснены не с позиции особенностей личности или состояний, а в категориях ситуаций, разворачивающихся в индивидуальных мирах. Подобно тексту, состоящему из слов, мир складывается из ситуаций, каждая из которых нуждается в определенном контексте для преодоления неоднозначности (присущей всякой знаковой системе вследствие полисемии). Этот контекст порождается миром как целостностью. Если контекст не помогает интерпретации ситуации, неопределенность устраняется путем активных действий, проясняющих ситуацию. Следовательно, исключительную важность приобретает целенаправленная активность, способность прогнозировать и корректировать свои действия: слабость любого из этих звеньев неизбежно ведет к искажению представлений о мире, неверной оценке ситуаций и, как результат, – к неадекватному поведению, закрепляющему (замыкая круг) неадекватную структуру мира.

Ключевые слова: многомирие, синергетика, семиотика, депрессивная реальность, параноидная реальность.