Trauma, pain and fear: Using the startle paradigm to explore the relationship between PTSD and chronic pain

The dissertation explores new assessment protocol designed to objectively identify people with significant symptoms of posttraumatic stress, chronic pain, or both. To process information requires that the brain use "resources," which are then temporarily unavailable. Specialized systems, such as the system that responds when we get startled, allow the brain to automatically transfer resources when we are threatened.Among other things, the startle response causes us to blink, rotecting our eyes, and the blink intensity can be used as a measure of mental resource allocation. People with posttraumatic stress or chronic pain are expected to be fearful of reminders of trauma or pain.As such,we expected that words related to individual symptoms would produce different enough reactions that we could identify who had which symptoms based on their startle response.

Participants included 100 people who reported symptoms of posttraumatic stress and chronic pain, symptoms of posttraumatic stress or chronic pain, or no such symptoms. veryone viewed the same set of words in different random orders with the same number and location of startling noises.

Overall, participants with symptoms of posttraumatic stress, with or without chronic pain, responded more to trauma-related words (e.g. crash) than other words, and more than participants without posttraumatic stress symptoms. Those with chronic pain, with or without symptoms of posttraumatic stress, responded more to pain-related words (e.g. burning) than to other words, and more than participants without chronic pain. The data support the idea that there are symptom-specific,over-learned responses associated with each disorder.The results also support using the startle paradigm for identifying symptoms in specialty clinics treating pain and anxiety. Specifically, using startle may provide a much needed,arguably objective method to measure symptoms of posttraumatic stress and chronic pain. The ability to identify differences based on symptoms was good; however, it was not as good as hoped, so there is additional work to do yet. In any case, the current results and subsequent research will eventually allow for more objective measures of symptoms to become standard parts of patient assessment and care.

THE 2011 CAGS/PROQUEST DISTINGUISHED DISSERTATION AWARD WINNER IN THE CATEGORY OF FINE ARTS, HUMANITIES AND SOCIAL SCIENCES

Dr. David Cecchetto, University of Victoria, 2010
Research supervisor: Dr. Stephen Ross, English Department

A practiced-informed critique of technological posthumanism and its ideologies

With the recent emergence of copious scholarship that considers the discursive life of the term "human," posthumanism has become a timely interdisciplinary discourse. This study is a critical analysis of three strains of this discourse’s technologically oriented segment: "scientific," "humanist," and "organismic" posthumanisms.Throughout, analyses are presented in an effort to appreciate the insights available from these three perspectives, and to contextualize them in the larger conversations of technology and culture. Ultimately, though, the analyses also unpack how each perspective continues to hold onto certain elements of the humanist tradition that it is mobilized against; in each case, the study desublimates the presumptions that underwrite a given perspective.

To materially ground the problematic of posthumanism in its full complexity, this dissertation interleaves these theoretical chapters with three others on artworks. Each of the latter draws out the problems discussed in the immediately preceding chapter, demonstrating the material impact of each perspective’s biases. Moreover, these chapters focus on the topos of sound, demonstrating how aurality might offer new insights to an area that has been dominated by visual theorization. The last of these chapters is a discussion of the author’s own collaborative artistic practice that elucidates the variegated causal chains that comprise human-technological coupling, unpacking the ramifications of how we narrate this problematic.

In short, this study offers at least four unique contributions to the existing literature on posthumanism. Firstly, it nominates the term "technological posthumanism" as a means of focusing specifically on the discourse as it relates to technology without neglecting its other disciplinary histories. Secondly, it suggests that deconstruction remains relevant to this discourse, specifically with respect to the performative dimension of language. Thirdly, it offers analyses of artworks that have not heretofore been considered in the light of posthumanism, specifically emphasizing the role of aurality. Finally, the text’s innovative form introduces a reflexive component that exemplifies how the discourse of posthumanism might progress without resorting to the types of unilateral narratives that the dissertation critiques. Collectively, this study offers new purchase on the question of humanity’s relation to technology, a question that is of unprecedented relevance today.