 And if you truly believe that you are thinking straight, then you are not thinking straight. Listen to the rest of this video to understand what hinders, obstructs, impedes and deforms your process of thinking, even if you are completely healthy and normal. Get alone if you have a personality disorder or some mental illness or mental health issue. This is the topic of today's video. Cognitive deficits, cognitive biases, cognitive distortions, the multifarious ways in which cognition can go awry, can go wrong and how we are affected by it. To get a proper cognitive deficit, my name is Sam Baknin and I am the author of Malignan Self-Love, Narcissism, a former visiting professor of psychology and currently on the faculty of the esteemed SEAPS, Commonwealth Institute for Advanced Professional Studies, Canada, United Kingdom, Cambridge and an outreach campus in Lagos, Nigeria. Let us delve right in, me thinks, ok shoshanim and the few shoshanot left. Cognition is a mental action, it's a mental process, it's about knowledge. In other words, cognition is epistemic, it's about how we understand the world. We use many tools to understand the world because understanding the world is a prerequisite, a precondition for survival. If you don't understand the world well, if your reality testing is impaired, sooner or later you're going to find yourself in trouble or you're going to lose yourself altogether. So we use many tools to somehow grasp the world as accurately as we can. We use thought or thinking, experience and of course, sensor, input via the senses, sensory inputs. But cognition is not only thinking, although the end result of cognition is always new knowledge or the affirmation of existing knowledge or the negation of existing knowledge, anything to do with knowledge, anything to do with epistemology. Still, cognition is not only thinking, that's a common mistake. I hear many self-styled experts describe cognition as the thinking process. It's not. All intellectual functions and processes are cognitive. Attention for example, memory, decision making, planning, reasoning, judgment, perception or the comprehension of perception, use of language, visual and spatial functions, spatial like space, they're all cognitive. Cognitive processes use existing knowledge, generate new knowledge as I said and sometimes vitiate or negate existing knowledge, but they use multiple tools. Still, one thing that many scholars miss, let alone self-styled experts, is the fact that cognition is language. You cannot generate knowledge without the use of language. Never mind which tools you use, use attention, use memory, use perception, never mind which cognitive tool or instrument you are using, ultimately you will have to convert everything into language. So we could easily say that cognition is the awareness of language, the conscious part, the overt text as opposed to the hidden or occult text. Cognition evokes awareness, awareness of thinking itself and the thinking self. In other words, cognition is another name for introspection actually, because cognition makes you aware of who you are, aware of the fact that you are thinking and this awareness coalesces in due time into an identity. Cognition is at the very core of identity and arguably perhaps your cognition is your identity. When the thinking self is absent, for example in narcissism, narcissists don't have a constellated integrated self or ego, whatever you want to call it. When the thinking self is not there or in the case of identity disturbance, when the identity changes diametrically and radically, sometimes from one hour to the next, this creates a problem with cognition because as I said, cognition is the awareness of the thinking self, of the thinking process and consequently of one's identity and identity is being embedded in reality and the environment. The narcissist lacks a thinking self and he lacks reality testing, he is not aware of his environment or of himself because there's no self. So when this happens, awareness of the language becomes an orphan, is orphaned, it's not linked to anything. In healthy cognition, the process of thinking is intimately and automatically linked to the thinking self which then interacts with the environment but in narcissism there's the language, there's the thinking but it's not linked to any thinking self, any self that does the thinking and so consequently the bridge to the environment is broken, disrupted and destroyed and this leads to attribution errors. When the language is orphaned and there's no thinking self, the language desperately or the consciousness desperately tries to find a self-substitute, something to attribute the thinking to, something to cohere with the language, to trace the origin of the thinking process and the language it uses to something. In healthy people, this is traced back to a thinking self. In narcissists, since there is no thinking self there, it is traced back to fantasies, to idealizations, to grandiosity, to substitute realities and they serve in the function of the thinking self but of course they are not. The narcissist fantasy provides a narcissist with the illusion of a self with the feeling, the erroneous feeling of an existing identity where there's none. This grandiosity is ostensibly about the narcissist when actually it is not, it is about a false self which has very little to do with the actual narcissist. Similarly idealization has nothing to do with the object of idealization so when the narcissist idealizes himself or others, there's nobody there, the narcissist is interacting with a totally concocted imaginary figmental construct, the idealized avatar or the idealized internal object and the language also known as cognition, also known as consciousness latches onto these reality substitutes because it was unable to spot a thinking self. There's a vacuum there and yet attribution is needed for language, consciousness and cognition to yield any outcomes internal or external, attribution is a precondition. Without attribution language remains moot and mute, consciousness is disrupted, the subconscious has no attribution and so there is attribution error in narcissism, misattribution, the cognitive processes translated by a language give rise to consciousness of many things which are not the narcissist because the narcissist is not there, there's no thinking self. So the narcissist's language, cognition, consciousness give rise to a recognition of an interaction with a fantasy, not the narcissist. Cognition as I said is about language and so cognition precedes consciousness, precedes experience and is a condition for consciousness and a condition for experience, it shapes them when cognition is more self-efficacious than action the result is fantasy, when the cognition is weaker than action the result is reality orientation or reality testing. Let me explain this, there is a fine balance between cognition and cognition is just another name for language, another name for consciousness, there is a fine balance between cognition and action, cognition conceptualizes the world, cognition allows you to use language in order to generate consciousness of your thinking self, of your cognitive self and of reality and then once you have recognized both yourself and reality you're able to act because action is always one directional, it's always from the self to the environment, from the self onto the world, if you don't recognize the self you cannot act and if you don't recognize the world you cannot act, there's an action deficit, so in such people for example narcissists who do not possess a self and whose reality testing is impaired so they don't recognize reality, in such people cognition is much more powerful than action, essentially the narcissist is incapacitated, unable to act, so all that is left is the fantasy, the target of the cognition, the attribution error, so the narcissist cognition is much more powerful than his action and that's a hallmark of pathology because this creates a propensity for a proclivity for and a preference for fantasy over reality, self-efficacy is critical here, when cognition is more self-efficacious than action the result is being embedded in fantasy and denying or ignoring reality, but what does it mean to be self-efficacious in this context? In this context self-efficacy is both internal and external, internal self-efficacy for example is reducing anxiety, external self-efficacy is extracting favorable outcomes from the environment acting in and on the world, so in a healthy person in a normal person cognition and action have to be balanced and self-efficacious, they have to generate internal and external outcomes which are efficacious and favorable, but with the narcissist action is missing, he is missing in action, missing in in in action, so action is missing and cognition towers over everything, it's a cognition metastasizes, it's like cancer, it's malignant, narcissist has malignant cognition, cognition takes over and that's why the narcissist lives in fantasy, not in reality, this renders the narcissist not self-efficacious, the narcissist is unable on his own to guarantee internal and external outcomes, the narcissist is totally reliant on other people to regulate his internal environment and to accomplish outcomes in the external environment, his dependency is maximal, although of course all narcissists would deny this, even when reality testing is intact which is not the case with narcissists, even then cognition is shaped and framed in order to maintain equilibrium and homeostasis, in other words we lie to ourselves, even healthy people, even normal people, they have psychological defense mechanisms, essentially a way to self-deceive, ways to self-deceive, these mechanisms are cognitive, so our cognition constantly shape shifts, is refrained, recast, rewritten in order to allow us to maintain ego-syntony, to feel comfortable with ourselves and this is in healthy people, now when the cognition is metastatic when it is cancerous, as is the case with the narcissist, then of course the cognition is fallacious, it relies mostly on misinformation in accuracies, distortions, biases, deficits and so on and so forth, and this is the topic of today's video, gradually cognition expands in healthy people, normal people, cognition expands to incorporate other minds within the internal working model to create a theory of other people's minds, a theory of mind via introjection, but in the case of the narcissist this never happens, there's a problem with others, the narcissist is unable to incorporate other minds in his internal world, he rejects external objects, he regards another as a threat, if the other is perceived in early childhood as unsafe, the phase of othering fails and solipsism ensues, in other words narcissism is a failure to recognize the separateness and externality of other people, because early on in the narcissist's life the only other people in his life, for example mother, they have been abusive, traumatizing, instrumentalizing, parentifying, in short unsafe, the narcissist could not internalize these people, he could not other them, could not recognize them as external, both solutions represented a threat, so narcissism evolves by rejecting the existence of other people, and so cognition in the case of the narcissist, albeit metastatic, albeit all pervasive, is also very primitive, infantile, regressive, because he does not incorporate other minds, it's not integrated with object relations, now incorporating other minds by recognizing them as external, in the narcissist's case there is introspection and incorporation and identification and internalization of other people, but as internal objects, which have nothing to do with the external objects, idealized or devalued at internal objects, it's totally, it's a totally delusional way of interacting with other people, so narcissism and cognitive impairment go together, and today I'm going to discuss all the ways that cognition can go bad, can go wrong, and can go awry, start with cognitive deficit, it's a term banded about and used much, much used, abused and misused, cognitive deficit is simply the impairment of different domains of cognition, it's not limited to any particular disease or condition, it is one of the manifestations of other underlying conditions, it's a kind of symptom if you wish, but it's not limited to any one mental illness or mental health diagnosis, now cognitive deficit and cognitive impairment are the same, these are synonyms, and typically cognitive deficits are actually short term, not permanent, in other cases cognitive deficits evolve progressively and become permanent, cognitive deficits are part and parcel of what is known as cognitive disorders, in the diagnostic and statistical manual edition 5 there's a whole chapter titled neurocognitive disorders and cognitive disorders is a part of these, they're defined as any disorder that significantly impairs the cognitive functions of an individual to the point where normal functioning in society is impossible without treatment, of course examples are the whole family of dementias, Alzheimer's and so that's an example and I have a video dedicated to this, but we are not going to use the term cognitive impairment or cognitive deficit in this video because these are neurological bodily conditions and they are not typical of narcissists, except narcissists with dementia, so any self-styled expert online who uses the term cognitive deficit is wrong, they are I say, instead we should use the terms cognitive bias and cognitive distortion, the distortion is of course an inaccuracy of perception, cognition, memory and so on and so forth, it could be either the unconscious process of altering emotions and thoughts that are unacceptable to the individual psyche or the continuous misrepresentation of facts and this serves the same underlying purpose of disguising unacceptable rejected parts in the individual, so distortion precedes projection, cognitive distortion is a condition for projection, when we project something, when we attribute to someone else our own traits that we reject, if we hate some things about ourselves, if we reject some aspects of ourselves, if we don't like some of our traits, if we find some things shameful or unacceptable and then we attribute them to other people, not to us, we deny that these things exist in us, we say I'm not weak, she is weak, I'm not evil, she is abusing etc etc that's projection and it's always preceded by cognitive distortion, now you understand why narcissists project all the time, because grandiosity is a cognitive distortion, the major cognitive distortion, it's an inaccuracy of perception or the interpretation of perception via cognition and memory, now in psychoanalytic theory distortion is the outcome of dream work that modifies forbidden thoughts and wishes to make them more acceptable to the ego and so I will not go into it right now because that is not the sense that I'm using distortion in this lecture, what's the difference between distortion and bias, bias is an inclination or predisposition for or against something, tendency, preference, so bias is not cognitive distortion, bias may require cognitive distortion to work but it's not the same, a cognitive bias is a systematic pattern of deviation from norm or from rationality, in other words bias is non-normative or anomic, it rejects norms, conventions, mores, sometimes the law, regulations and so on and so forth and it's usually irrational, that's why it's called bias, individuals create their own subjective reality from perceptions of inputs, a variety of inputs, this is true for healthy people as well and when an individual constructs reality it usually is based only partly on objective input even though it dictates behavior in the work, it dictates reactions to the environment and so cognitive biases is when the objective input is minimal, the subjective input is maximal and this leads to perceptual distortions, inaccurate judgments, illogical interpretations, irrationality, conspiracy theories are examples of the outcomes of cognitive bias, still cognitive bias is not the same as cognitive distortion, cognitive distortion is much more severe, cognitive bias is mostly about opinions and judgments, the perception is distorted in order to support some kind of value judgment or some kind of opinion, cognitive distortion is automatic, usually unconscious and it's totally, it's total, it's all pervasive, so it distorts all of reality in order to conform to some narrative, for example the narrative I'm godlike, I'm a genius, that's a narcissistic narrative and all of reality will be distorted to support this narrative and whenever reality pushes back and intrudes and whenever my cognitive distortion is challenged or undermined the narcissist then reacts with narcissistic injury and rage and if this is done in public, in front of significant peers or significant others this generates modification, bias, if a bias is challenged or undermined it can, it can result in fisticuffs or an argument, if a distortion is bias, is a challenge or undermined it results in extreme mental health or mental illness reactions such as depression, anxiety and suicidality and so cognitive biases are shortcuts, they allow you, they are like rules of thumb, they're heuristics, they allow you to reach decisions faster and studies have shown that cognitive biases are actually very useful because sometimes you need to make decisions fast even if they have the wrong decisions, not making a decision is worse, has worse outcomes than making the wrong decision, so biases help us with this, one form of bias is the stereotype, racial stereotype, whatever, so it seems that cognitive biases as distinct from cognitive distortions are a byproduct of the limitations, limitations of human processing, it's like we say to ourselves I can't know everything so I'm going to confine myself to very few facts and I'm going to form my own hypothesis or theory even if it doesn't tally 100% good reality it's still better, I would still be better off than not having a theory or not having a hypothesis and this is known as bounded rationality and another thing which often leads to biases is known as embodied cognition, it's your biological state and your capacity for information processing in the brain, they both interact all the time to signal to you that you need to stop exposing yourself to new information and that you need to apply whatever limited tools you have to the small set of data that you had acquired and this creates of course bias, now there are dozens of cognitive biases so I will not go into this, biases create prejudice, it's a negative attitude towards another person or group formed ahead of any experience without any experience with that person or group, prejudices usually include an effective component for example discomfort, nervousness, anger, contempt, pity, hatred coupled with a cognitive component, assumptions and beliefs about people and groups including stereotypes, prejudice is manifested typically behaviorally and it generates discriminatory behavior, prejudices are cognitive biases and they're resistant to change because they distort perception of information and so it's very difficult to change, you need to change the thinking process and and the underlying information to negate or alter the prejudice, prejudice therefore is somewhere between a cognitive distortion and a bias, biases give rise to prejudices in the absence of experience, now this is very important, do you remember how I opened this video when we were all much much younger and a lot less tired, a lot less exhausted, I told you that the narcissist has no access to reality because the narcissist has no access to reality his cognition goes haywire, metastasizes in a desperate attempt to link itself to some anchor to something, there's no self, Nazis has no self, so his cognition goes looking for something that would resemble a self, it could be the false self, grandiosity, cognitive distortion, it could be a fantasy, similarly a cognitive bias which is not coupled with experience leads to a cognitive distortion, we could therefore summarize and say that narcissism is a prejudice about oneself and a prejudice about others, the prejudice in the case of the narcissist amounts to full-fledged cognitive distortion and it emanates from a series of biases these biases flourish and blossom and take over like so much wild weeds, they body snatch and mind snatch because they are not exposed to reality, they are not confronted by experience, this lack of friction allows the cognition to go completely berserk and the narcissist with it now one thing that is common to both biases and distortions and prejudices is what is known as confirmation bias, technically it's a cognitive bias, confirmation bias is a tendency to gather evidence that confirms pre-existing expectations typically by emphasizing or pursuing supporting evidence while dismissing or failing to seek contradictory evidence, in narcissism confirmation bias has been replaced with falsification, confabulation, reframing, confirmation bias in healthy people, in normal people, typically is indicative of a cognitive bias or in extreme cases prejudice like racism or sexism or ageism or ableism or whatever and he isn't, in the case of the narcissist, confirmation bias is supplanted by overactive infantile primitive defense mechanisms such as splitting, such as projection, such as projective identification, such as rationalization and so on so what happens with the narcissist is not that he collects information that supports his biases and prejudices or even his distortions, that's not the case the narcissist does not collect information at all, he simply invents information, he falsifies reality to the extent that it no longer exists and this is what we know as a fantasy defense, the narcissist comes up with a paracosm, with a virtual reality, a world that has no bearing on reality itself, cognitive distortions are internal mental filters, extended biases, they, in the case of the narcissist they're protective, they fire on the narcissist from reality because the narcissist has learned as a child that reality is unsafe, it's dangerous and so it ossifies and fossilizes, becomes a narcissist's main feature, narcissism's main feature, now of course the main, the principal reason for all these cognitive problems, cognitive disorders, cognitive malfunctions is what is known as dissonance reduction, the process by which we reduce the uncomfortable psychological state that results from inconsistency among elements of the cognitive system, inconsistency known as cognitive dissonance, when you have two beliefs, two thoughts, two pieces of information, two emotions even, that conflict with each other, you're in a state of dissonance and usually the dissonance is cognitive and this generates anxiety, discomfort at the very least and you want to get rid of it, it's intolerable, it's unbearable, you want to, you want to restore the previous equilibrium or balance and you do this via dissonance reduction, the dissonance can be reduced by making one or more inconsistent elements consistent with other elements in the system, by decreasing the perceived importance of an inconsistent element or by adding new consistent elements to the system, I've dealt with this in other videos about cognate about dissonances, finally we will go into it a bit later but self-affirmation theory postulates that merely affirming some valued aspect of the self, even if it is not directly relevant to the inconsistency, can reduce dissonance, that's precisely what the narcissist does, he emphasizes some valued aspect of himself, regrettably in the case of narcissism, there is no self, so the valued aspect that is emphasized is totally imaginary, it's a fantasy and we will deal with it when we discuss bolstering of an attitude and the false compliance effect, the false compliance effect is the tendency of a person who has behaved in a way that contradicts their attitude to subsequently alter the attitude to be consistent with their behavior, it is a way to reduce cognitive dissonance by changing yourself and it is at the core of identity disturbance, this is known also as the induced compliance effect, so sometimes the narcissist or the borderline will behave in ways which contradict their self-image or self-perception or their attitude or their motivation and rather than admit to a mistake, rather than feel guilty or ashamed, rather than experience remorse or regret, especially if the narcissist is highly antisocial, rather than do any of this, they simply switch on identity, they suddenly become someone else completely and they concoct elaborate stories as to why they have changed, they have changed because the environment changed or they have changed because this would make them a better person or they have changed because of you, you're guilty or whatever, it's always an external locus of control with alloplastic defense but the change is actually intended to preserve ego-syntony, intended to prevent the narcissist from falling apart and this is linked to something called bolstering of an attitude, it's a method of reducing cognitive dissonance by generating new cognitive elements that are consistent with an existing attitude and this is presumed to offset the dissonance resulting from an inconsistent element and this is the core of fantasy, the fantasy defense generates new cognitive elements most of which are not embedded in reality just in order to justify the cognitive distortion of grandiosity for example or some attitude or some commitment made in public or some belief however insane or inane or irrational and so on and so forth so the narcissist's hyperactive cognition which is cancerous is malignant keeps generating new elements out of thin air just to justify the narcissist, just in order to justify the narcissist, narcissist is always right, could never be wrong, narcissist doesn't have what we call the cognitive click, the cognitive click is the aha moment, the light bulb moment in which it becomes suddenly clear that your thinking is incorrect and you must change your attitudes or beliefs or thinking this never happens to the narcissist and so the narcissist never experiences cognitive closure, cognitive closure is a state when you recognize that you have achieved an understanding of something also known as insight, the final stage of figuratively seeing the total picture and now all the pieces in this total picture fit together, narcissist never has this experience, now there are various theories about cognitive dissonance and how we resolve it, the first one is the cognitive dissonance theory appropriately named, it's a theory that proposes that people have a fundamental motivation to maintain consistency among elements in their cognitive systems, so memory and identity and perception and thinking they all should intermesh fit together without friction without contradiction should be cohesive and coherent, when inconsistency occurs people experience an unpleasant psychological state and this motivates them to reduce the dissonance in a variety of ways that I've mentioned before, so there are quite a few variants of this of this theory and I'm going to deal with with a few of them, first there is the cognitive consistency theory it's a broad class of theories it's misnamed it's not a single theory it's a few theories and they postulate that attitude change is a result of the desire to maintain consistency among elements of a cognitive system, it's closely aligned with what is known as balance theory or congruity theory, balance theory is a particular cognitive consistency theory that says that people prefer elements within a cognitive system to be internally consistent with one another, in other words balanced, balanced systems are assumed to be more stable and psychologically pleasant than imbalanced systems, the theory has been specified and tested within the context of systems which involve three elements and these systems are referred to as the p-o-x triads or pox triads, p is person o is other person and x some stimulus or event, the cognitive dissonance theory the father of a cognitive dissonance theory is of course leon festinger and the father of the balance theory is fritz heider and they came came up with these theories more or less at the same time heider came up with his theory in 1946 and heider's theory includes the principle of othering the other congruity theory is another cognitive consistency theory it was proposed by psychologist Charles Osgood and Percy Tannenbaum and congruity theory focuses on the role of persuasive communication in attitude change how communication changes attitude congruity theory is similar to balance theory it postulates that people tend to prefer elements within a cognitive system to be internally consistent with one another all these theories agree about this accordingly if a person receives a persuasive communication and he has a negative attitude towards the content of the message but a positive attitude to the source of the message or vice versa then the recipient would be motivated to revise both of these attitudes in some degree in order to restore congruity so if you think ill of someone if you dislike someone or really hate someone or criticize or disagree with someone but he has a message that you agree with or if you totally agree with the message but the person the messenger the person who who gave up the gave out the message is you admire that person or you believe that person this creates a dissonance and you try to somehow reconcile the two you would modify your attitudes in order not to feel bad about the persuasive communication or the persuasive communicator congruity theory differs from balance theory in that it takes into account gradations of evaluations of elements and therefore it makes more precise predictions regarding the magnitude of change required to restore congruity among elements but I will not go I will not go too deeply into any of them I just want to give you a taste refill of the theories in the field self-affirmation theory is a major theory it was proposed by psychologist Claude Steele and it's a concept that people are motivated to maintain views of themselves as good objects people want to see themselves as moral competent stable safe beloved able to control important outcomes and so forth people really want to attribute to themselves good qualities this is doubly true with the narcissist because the narcissist needs to lie to himself about his good qualities he needs to negate a bad object and when I say he is a she yes half of all narcissists are women they need to negate a bad object the bad object is a set of voices a set of interjects inside the narcissist that keeps informing the narcissist that he is inadequate and delinquent and stupid and ugly and a loser and a failure and unworthy and unlovable and so the bad object is intolerable is horrible and the narcissist needs to negate this bad object by lying to himself that is the opposite of all these things that is all knowing that is all that is godlike that is brilliant that is perfect etc etc so in the narcissist's case the need to self affirm the need for self affirmation is compulsive and counterfactual not grounded in reality in healthy people when some aspect of this positive self view of this good object is challenged people experience psychological discomfort they may attempt to reduce this discomfort by directly resolving the inconsistency between the new information and the self or by affirming some other aspect of the self or by doing both these are healthy coping mechanisms the narcissist reacts with rage he's trying to intimidate the source into changing their mind is he devalues the source of information and denies and ignores the information he refrains and falsifies and and and confabulates and so his reactions are highly dysfunctional and also harmful to himself and to the environment um self affirmations theory is largely used as an alternative to cognitive dissonance theory to explain this phenomenon i think self affirmation theory is much better at describing narcissism than cognitive dissonance theory there is a self consistency perspective it's a variation of cognitive dissonance theory in the self consistency perspective theory if you wish cognitive dissonance is considered particularly likely to occur when an inconsistency involves some aspect of the self so the self consensus consistency perspective is a bridge between cognitive dissonance theory and self affirmation theory it says that yeah cognitive dissonance happens but usually when the self image is threatened or self perception is good moral upright successful is threatened when there's a threat to one's positive self image then there's dissonance and that of course sits well with both cognitive dissonance theory and self affirmation theory this perspective though differs from self affirmation theory in that dissonance can be reduced only by resolving the specific inconsistency that gave rise to the discomfort it does not allow for the possibility that dissonance can be reduced by affirming some other aspect of the self and this perspective of theory was suggested by uh psychologist leot aronson aronson ar-o-n s-o-n aronson and all the other uh psychologists i mentioned are american apropos american the new look theory it's a version of cognitive dissonance theory and it postulates that cognitive dissonance is a result of behavior that causes aversive consequences the dissonance occurs when a person assumes responsibility for these bad consequences and then he experiences physiological arousal for example anxiety that they perceive to be negative people people who experience this perceive the feeling to be negative and as a result of the consequences so the new look theory is about actions and consequences causes and effects when you behave in a way that yields harmful outcomes to you and to others this creates a dissonance if you assume responsibility for your actions you have to assume responsibility for the consequences of your actions this creates in you enormous anxiety bad feeling self-loathing sometimes a regret remorse all these are perceived as negative effects they're not pleasant and so this leads to attempts to reduce the dissonance self-perception theory is the hypothesis that people often have only limited access to their attitudes beliefs traits or psychological states limited insight in such cases people must attempt to infer the nature of these internal cues in a manner similar to the inference processes they use when making judgments about other people in other words the self-perception theory says you're always an observer the same way you observe other people and try to somehow gauge or infer the state of mind you see the way other people behave and you derive from these conclusions about their state of mind you're doing the same with yourself you observe yourself in action you analyze your choices decisions behaviors and so on and based on that you derive a theory a hypothesis about your state of mind you see yourself crying and you you're telling you tell yourself well i must be sad because i'm crying that's a self-perception theory so for example a person may infer what their attitude is by considering past behaviors related to the attitude object so if you love someone or have loved someone in the past and then you behave in a certain way you would say well i'm behaving this way because i love them approach behaviors imply a positive attitude avoidance behaviors imply a negative attitude self-perception theory has been offered as an alternative explanation for some phenomena traditionally interpreted in terms of cognitive dissonance theory and it was used to explain the success of certain sales behaviors and marketing behaviors by the way anyhow it was proposed by the psychologist daryl bem and you can read about it online now all these all these sit within a much bigger theory known as cognitive behavior theory cognitive behavior theory is actually again a family of theories they derive from general behavioral theory and they consider cognitive or thinking processes thought processes as significant mediators of behavioral change cognitive behavior theories say if you change your cognitions it would automatically change your behaviors and this is of course a foundation of cognitive behavior therapy a central feature in the theoretical formulations of a process is that people respond primarily to cognitive representations of their environments rather than to the environments themselves this is very crucial because this explains a lot when it comes to pathological narcissism a pathological narcissism is emphasizing the representation of the environment including people in the environment external object at the expense of the environment itself so whereas healthy people compare the representation of the environment to the environment in order to make sure that they match the narcissist ignores the environment altogether and focuses only on the representation of the environment now of course this theory led to the emergence of therapeutic procedures that incorporate cognitive behavior techniques to affect self-image and through self-image behaviors and i will not go into it right now but an interesting theory is the shakhtar singer theory shakhtar singer theory was proposed by stanley shakhtar and gerome singer it's a theory that says that experiencing and identifying emotional states are functions of both physiological arousal and cognitive interpretations of the physiological arousal this is known as attribution of emotion cognitive arousal theory of emotion the shakhtar theory two-factor theory of emotion etc etc this is very important it means that emotions are triggered by cognitions or even that emotions are cognitions but emotions are compounded cognitions whereas cognitions usually are epistemological they relate to thinking that they comprise thinking and knowledge this is classical cognition emotions are comprised of classical cognition plus a physiologically aroused state so emotion is like cognition plus body or signals from the body whereas classical cognition in the sense that we are discussing in this video is only the thinking knowledge identity memory interpretation of perception part the James Lange theory is a theory proposed by William James and Carl Georg Lange Danish physiologists Lange and James collaborated and they came up with a theory that different feelings different feeling states stem from the feedback that the body gives especially the guts by the way in their work for some reason voluntary musculature so the body gives a lot of signals to the brain and the brain interprets these signals in terms of feelings or emotions and the theory hypothesizes that there are as many physiological responses as there are different intra-psychic feelings or emotions and then each of these responses precedes rather than follows the feeling so here we introduce the element of the body the body intrudes interacts with cognition to generate emotions never mind if you adopt the James Lange approach or Schachter approach or whatever both the predominant schools today believe that emotional that's physiological leads to emotions or emotional arousal via cognition condition is a kind of mediator or at the very least combines with physiological arousal as an interpreter interprets physiological arousal and gives rise to emotions and there is some theory there's a theory called cognitive appraisal theory it's a theory that says that cognitive evaluation is involved in the generation of each and every emotion evaluation includes a primary appraisal and a secondary appraisal i'm not going to it right now and so this concept is elaborated in the cognitive motivational relational theory which recognizes that cognition is one of three simultaneously operating processes that contribute to the generation of emotion i will deal with this in a separate video it has to do with core relational things the whole thing was proposed originally by Richard Lazarus and and merits a separate video but again we come to the point that cognition is perceived as a mediator now here is exactly the explanation why narcissists have no access to their positive emotions because of their cognitive distortions you cannot access your emotions if your cognition is deformed disrupted dysfunctional in somehow distorted even biased so the narcissist cognition when it comes to specific issues is distorted cannot be relied upon and definitely is not in touch with reality but is in touch with an internal fantastic space which incorporates the false self so it's all false it's all make belief it's a movie it's a theater production it's not real and because the cognition in this sense is so defunct and deficient it is it does not allow the narcissists direct contact between his body and his emotions and so it distorts the cognition distorts physiological arousal signals in a way that doesn't give rise to positive emotions but give rise only to negative emotions the narcissist metastatic cancerous cognition will interpret all signs of sexual arousal as negative emotions will never interpret signs of physiological arousal as positive emotions now what the narcissist calls love is not love it's not an emotion and it's definitely not positive it is arousal owing to the fantasy it's arousal induced by the fantasy it is a thrill it's an adventure so it's nothing to do with a positive emotion the narcissist cognition filters out positive emotions prevents a narcissist from experiencing positive emotions so the the source problem why the narcissist doesn't have empathy why he doesn't have positive emotions is actually his cognition his cognition which gives rise to cognitive distortions like grandiosity which colludes and collaborates with substitute realities such as the fantasy and the false self and which metastasizes cancerously and prevents the narcissist from acting self-efficaciously efficiently in the world and from experiencing positive emotions narcissistic pathological narcissism therefore is a cognitive sickness problem cognitive disorder problem with cognition and this is true also for trauma victims of a variety of stripes and colors including borderline personality disorder and victims or survivors of complex trauma and PTSD