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1. 00:01 in previous videos I've dealt with signaling and with signaling theory i would like to extend this a bit by discussing three pathological forms of signaling signaling that aligns very closely with mental illness mental health disorders and mental health issues
2. 00:24 my name is Sam Vaknin the author of malignant self- loveve narcissism revisited a professor of psychology and your main signaling officer [Music] so there are many many many many and I can say another many types of signaling and today we're going to focus on three
3. 00:43 of them all three of them are actually pathological the first one I call exist existence signaling or existential signaling when you signal to people that you exist it's like saying "Hey I'm here pay me attention notice me." That is existence
4. 01:02 signaling and of course what immediately comes to mind is social media existence signaling has to do with the need to be seen the need to be seen is a survival strategy a baby a newborn who is not seen ends up dead so a precondition for survival is being seen being noticed
5. 01:30 when mother pays attention to you your caregivers notice you so from the very get-go from first few days of life newborns babies infants toddlers adolescents and finally adults we constantly signal to the world here we are pay attention to us we have needs we
6. 01:53 want you to help us we want you to interact with us we want to be noticed social media is just a technology platform an extension which allows us to do so more efficaciously it's what I call attention harvesting and again it's a primordial atistic foundational drive
7. 02:16 it's not something superficial we're talking about selfies and so on the selfies are not a superficial phenomenon as far as I'm concerned they are strong indications that people are feeling that they are being unseen that they are invisible that no one is paying
8. 02:35 attention to them with the world population fast approaching 8.3 billion people it's very difficult to stand out it's very difficult to garner attention then it's very difficult to secure your psychological needs by interacting with other people we are gradually atomized
9. 02:52 there's no intimacy relationships have crumbled institutions are gone we spend time in a self-sufficient universe powered by technologies which encourage self-containment and discourage intimacy and interpersonal relationships so existence signaling is a cry for help in
10. 03:14 such a world the second type of signaling is virtue signaling virtue signaling is very famous everyone talks about it social activists um victimhood movements so on woke movements the far right the far left everyone is a virtue signaling virtue signaling simply means that
11. 03:34 you're signaling your virtue your the fact that you're virtuous you're signaling your self-righteousness it's a bit sanctimonious and virtual signaling has multiple goals number one affiliation the need to feel that you belong somewhere that you're
12. 03:53 accepted that you are in the inroup number two victimhood virtue signaling is about competitive victimhood and also about communicating grievances virtue signaling is closely aligned with victimhood and grievance-based communication and virtue signaling is
13. 04:12 highly narcissistic it's a form of self agrandisement and placing yourself at the center of attention think Greta Thurberg the final form is invulnerability signaling invulnerability signaling is very common among young people they signal to each other you can't hurt me i
14. 04:34 don't need love i'm not looking for intimacy you mean nothing to me there there are no emotions involved i didn't catch emotions uh invulnerability signaling has to do with superiority imperviousness immunity impunity and resilience overcoming and so when you couple when you twin
15. 04:58 when you put together existence signaling virtue signaling and invulnerability signaling you get the modern landscape of interpersonal relationships and communication and inevitably because all three are self-centered narcissistic grandiose this leads to breakdowns in the capacity
16. 05:22 to maintain and to embark upon relationships it tears apart not only the social fabric but the interpersonal fabric families couples relationships relationships with children and so on i would like to end this very short video by referring to a recent article
17. 05:43 i'm going to analyze it at length later in in next month but right now I'd like just to refer to it it's an article published in February 2025 and it's titled enticingly I tweet therefore I am a systematic review on social media use and disorders of the social brain the
18. 06:04 authors are Nancy Young and Bernard Krespie was published in BMC Psychiatry volume 25 and I want to read to you the abstract give you a taste of the article and then we'll analyze it uh in a future video the abstract says with rapid technological advances social media has
19. 06:24 become have become by the way an everyday form of human social interactions for the first time in evolutionary history people can now interact in virtual spaces where temporal spatial and embodied cues are decoupled from one another what implications do these recent changes
20. 06:44 have for sociocognitive phenotypes and mental disorders we have conducted say the authors a systematic review on the relationships between social media use and mental disorders involving the social brain the main findings indicate evidence of increased social media usage in
21. 07:04 individuals with psychotic spectrum phenotypes and especially among individuals with disorders characterized by alterations in the basic self most notably narcissism body dysmorphism and eating disorders these findings can be understood in the context of a new
22. 07:23 conceptual model referred to here as delusion amplification by social media whereby this suite of disorders and symptoms centrally involve forms of mentalistic delusions linked with altered perception and perpetuation of distorted manifestations of the self
23. 07:42 that are enabled and exacerbated by social media in particular an underdeveloped and incoherent sense of self in conjunction with real life social isolation that inhibits identifi ident identify information and facilitates v identity information
24. 08:02 probably and facilitates virtual social interactions let me read this again the the article has a few typos and worse in particular an underdeveloped and incoherent sense of self in conjunction with real life social isolation that inhibits identity formation and
25. 08:21 facilitates virtual social interactions may lead to use of social media to generate and maintain a more or less delusional sense of selfidentity the delusions involved may be mental as in narcissism and erottomania or somatic as in body dysmorphic disorder and
26. 08:41 eating disorders encompassing either the entire body or specific body parts in each case the virtual nature of social media facilitates the delusionality because the self is defined and bolstered in this highly mentalistic environment where real life exposure of
27. 08:58 the delusion can be largely avoided current evidence also suggests that increased social media usage via its disembodied and isolative nature may be associated with psychotic spectrum phenotypes especially delusionality by the decoupling of inter and intracorporeal
28. 09:20 cues integral to shared reality testing leading to the blurring of self other boundaries as you see there is very close affinity between this article and what I've been saying for well over 20 years problems problems with reality testing problems with formation of the
29. 09:38 self and formation of identity and so on and this is why I'm going to analyze this article later in a later video thank you for listening