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1. 00:02 In both healthy people and people who are mentally unwell, self states are transient. They’re not permanent. As you may recall, self states are reactive to environmental cues, changing circumstances, new people in our lives. So self states are there to respond um appropriately
2. 00:33 to the changing parameters of one’s ecosystem or habitat. Therefore they are transitory. Self states change all the time like a river in flux. Self states therefore are state dependent. They are not trait dependent. They’re not permanent. They’re not
3. 01:00 hereditary. And today I would like to discuss the difference between these two. State dependent behavior is a set of actions that are affected by one’s emotional state usually but also sometimes by cognitions. So if you say something hurtful to another person while you’re angry,
4. 01:26 you’re displaying state dependent behavior. You’re not angry because this is your trait. You’re not angry because you’re always angry. You’re not angry because you are an angry person. You’re angry because something has happened to unsettle you, to discomfort you, to
5. 01:46 provoke you. You’re angry because the state of things has changed. So your anger is state dependent. But anger and similar reactance or reactivity are only one aspect of state dependency. Many many things are state dependent. For example, there is state dependent
6. 02:08 dependent learning. That is learning that occurs in a particular biological or psychological state. And this kind of learning is recalled or brought to memory much better when the individual is subsequently in the same state. So if you have learned something in a highly
7. 02:31 specific environment with highly specific circumstances embedded in highly specific events in a specific sequence the specificity the specificity of all these is the state. When you find yourself in a similar state or a state that is reminiscent of
8. 02:49 the previous state, your recall, your memory would be much stronger. You’re much more likely to remember the things that you have learned when the first state has taken place. Recall may be diminished when the individual is in a different state. For example, when we train rats
9. 03:10 to navigate a maze while under the influence of a psychoactive drug of some kind, fenobital or whatever, um, they don’t run it as successfully without the drug. It seems that they associate the task, the learned task, they associate the learning with the
10. 03:33 drug. When they’re not given the drug, their recall is compromised. They’re much worse at negotiating the maze. But given the drug and the memories flawed back and they’re able to navigate the maze much better. This is also called dissociated learning. Context
11. 03:57 dependent learning is a learning that has occurred in a particular place, particular circumstance, a state for example while you are intoxicated and is displayed only in that context and not when testing occurs or situation occurs in another context. This is contextual a
12. 04:18 kind of contextual association. a connection learned between items or material that an organism is exposed to and the context and circumstance in which that exposure has occurred. For example, a lecture. You’re listening to this lecture and it may be associated
13. 04:38 with whatever it is that you’re doing right now. You’re lying in bed. You’re ironing. You’re twiddling your thumbs in a classroom. The lecture is you’re exposed to the lecture while embedded in a highly specific situation or context. And that contextual association facilitates
14. 04:58 memory retrieval. So the recall of the lecture would be better when you’re exactly in the same state. In other words, you would tend to record this lecture much better where next time you’re ironing or next time you’re in bed than when you’re not. These are facts.
15. 05:17 State dependency is a crucial facet of conditioning of learning of emotionality or effective effective regulation of um uh certain types of cognition and so on. Memory is highly state dependent. State state dependent memory is a condition in which memory for a past event is
16. 05:41 improved when the person is in the same biological or psychological state as when the memory was initially formed. So I mentioned for example alcohol. Alcohol actually improves one recall of events that have been experienced when one was previously under the influence of alcohol.
17. 06:02 Um, so this is counterintuitive because we tend to believe that alcohol reduces the ability to recall memories. That is not true. If the memories were formed while you were consuming alcohol, you’re likely to remember them to bring them to awareness much more powerfully and
18. 06:22 accurately and intensely when you’re again under the influence of alcohol. I will not go now into questions of encoding and retrieval and sober state compared to alcohol. That’s another time for another lecture. But a distinctive state may arise from a drug mood a
19. 06:42 particular place and we even have mood dependent memory. A memory of an event for an event can be recalled more readily when one is in the same emotional mood. If you if you have formed a memory, if you’ve created a memory when you were sad, you’re likely
20. 07:03 to recall this memory much more authentically and accurately when you’re again sad. Similarly, if some of your memories are associated with a state of contentment or happiness, you would have much better access to them, unfettered access to them when you’re again content
21. 07:23 or happy. The initial the state within which the memory has been initially formed informs the ability or regulates modulates the ability to recall the memory much later in life. And so this is state dependency. Self states are state dependent. When
22. 07:46 you act sometimes as um as an angry person that is state dependent. Similarly in psychological disorders there are self states. So a narcissist could have a borderline self state following motification narcissistic modification or narcissistic injury. A
23. 08:08 borderline could have a narcissistic selfate or even a secondary psychopathic selfate. These self states are temporary. They’re triggered by changes in the environment, in circumstances, in the behaviors and input from other people. They’re context dependent. They
24. 08:28 are not part of the essence of the narcissist or the essence of the borderline. They are there as reactive displays. They are there as strategies of coping with ever transmuting and ever mutating environments, ecosystems, habitats and circumstances.
25. 08:48 This is state dependent self states. Self states of course are associated with specific traits but they’re not trait dependent. To explain the difference we need to understand what is a trait. A trait is an enduring personality characteristic that describes or determines an
26. 09:11 individual behavior across a range of situations independent of situations or states. If you have a trait, you’re likely to have this trait in every environment with every set of circumstances with a variety of people regardless of your effects, emotions or
27. 09:33 moods at the moment. This is what leads us to believe that traits are hereditary. They are determined by genetics. There is, for example, a narcissism trait. Every human being has a narcissism trait and a narcissism trait is expressable, manifests in all
28. 09:57 circumstances. Now, people with a low level of narcissism trait as measured by the narcissistic personality inventory are likely to react in one way. Of course, people who are very high on on the trait to the point of malignancy when they become when they acquire
29. 10:13 narcissistic personality disorder would react completely differently. In genetics, a trait is an attribute resulting from a hereditary predisposition. So we all know uh physiological we all we’re all acquainted with physiological traits such as hair color or facial
30. 10:34 features but psychological traits are similarly determined. All traits are organized. They they don’t appear individually. They are within clusters and these clusters interact with each other in a hyper structure. Trait organization is the way in which an individual’s personality
31. 10:56 characteristics are related and comprise a unique integrated whole whose appearance we call personality. There is a whole theory about traits or actually multiple theories about traits and these are theories or approaches that explain personality in terms of
32. 11:18 internal characteristics that are presumed to determine behavior. We have for example all ports personality trait theory, cartels personality trait theory, five factor personality model and so on and so forth. These theories are reductionist in the sense that many
33. 11:35 of them ignore the environment, ignore personal history and upbringing, ignore contextual triggers, which is a mistake in my view. Let’s for example try to understand a trait in terms of something you’re all acquainted with, anxiety. There is a trait of anxiety.
34. 11:57 It’s the proness to experience anxiety. how prone you are, how likely you are to experience anxiety. People with high trait anxiety tend to view the world as more dangerous and hostile or threatening. People with low trait anxiety re view the world more neutrally or even
35. 12:18 as non-hostile as a beneficial place as a non-threatening place. And so people with a high trait anxiety respond with state anxiety to situations that would not elicit this response in people with low trait anxiety. If you want to learn more about this, you should study the
36. 12:38 work of Charles Spielberger or Spielberger in 1972, 1983 and so on. So
37. 12:46 the trait is like a predisposition is like a template and it is the environment the changing states both external environment and internal environment in the external environment things change people come and go the physical environment changes temperature
38. 13:04 goes up and down I mean million things happen in the external environment but also the internal environment your moods change you’ve had a thought there’s a new cognition Your emotions are in flux. All these create an environmental contextual set of cues. Environmental
39. 13:22 contextual queuing and these trigger the trait and we say that the trait then becomes state dependent. The expression of the trait is state dependent. The trait is there always there. It’s genetically and hereditarily determined but its expression and manifestation are
40. 13:46 triggered by changes in the external and internal environment. There are many other traits that you’re aware of. I would mention just one which is goes hand in hand usually with pathological nar with narcissism I’m sorry with trait narcissism um and that is selffocus. There are
41. 14:07 other traits that go with trait narcissism and in a confluence these traits may amount to a pathology. So for example if you have trait narcissism trait dissociity trait anastia obsessivecompulsive um kind of disorder trait of antagonism trait negative affectivity. If you put
42. 14:28 all these basket basket of traits together what you get is the equivalent of pathological narcissism. Similarly, trait selffocus. Self focus is a direction of conscious attention onto oneself. You’re focused on your thoughts, your needs, your desires, your
43. 14:47 emotions. Trait selffocus refers to a chronic habit or pattern of self-consciousness. The state selffocus refers to objective self-awareness, self-awareness within the environment. The excess of trait selffocus is associated with the development or the
44. 15:09 heightened vulnerability to several mental health disorders such as alcohol use disorder, depression, anxiety disorders. So self-focused attention is a key clinical feature in all these. So self focus could be trade dependent could be state dependent.
45. 15:31 I believe the correct way to look at it is that the environment changes in the in the environment trigger the traits and a combination of traits constitutes a self state. And if you want to learn more about my approach, visit the IPAM IPAM playlist
46. 15:55 where I expound on my intracychic activation morning. Have a state free and tradefree day.