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Neuropsychoanalytic theoretical and clinical work (Bazan 2013) gestures at the differences between how primary and secondary process thinkers experience their bodies in space. Not much is known about this,
however, though it seems that primary process thinkers may have more fluid body schemas than secondary process thinkers. That is, they may be more prone to subjective distortions of space. We first present a detailed analysis that demonstrates the individual differences between primary and secondary processing as measured by the GeoCat (Vanheule et al. 2011) on a novel task of implicit embodied distancing of self-to-objects (Embodied Distancing Task; Finn et al. 2013). These findings were examined from two perspectives: psychoanalytic theory on psychopathology and embodiment (Horowitz, Duff, and Stratton 1964; Muller and Tillman 2007) and existential-phenomenological perspectives on the self (Heidegger 1927; Merleau-Ponty 1945).
We sought to explore the notion that predominantly primary process thinkers experience their bodies, and thus the space around them, differently from how predominantly secondary process thinkers do. We examined the responses of participants on the Embodied Distance Task, a novel task of experiential distance distortions in peripersonal space.
The 81 participants were 65.4% female, with an average age of 19.41 (SD = 4.57). Each participant was seated in front of a touchscreen monitor. The seat was adjusted in such a way that when relaxed in a seated posture, participants could touch the far edge of the screen without changing the position of their torso. This precluded the need for participants to move anything other than their dominant arm when responding to the task.
Stimuli were of three categories: simple geometric shapes, beverages, and household objects. The geometric shapes were designed in Adobe Photoshop CS5. The images of beverages and similarly sized household objects were found in various public domain image archives.
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