User:CBeaulieu7/sandbox

"Article Evaluation"

This article is relevant to the topic as they mention self awareness within humans and how they go through different stages. This article also mentions self awareness within animals, especially dolphins, chimpanzees, and dogs.

The article seems to be neutral as they do not focus on a particular position. This article is not limited to one aspect of self awareness, but multiple aspects such as animals, humans, disorders, etc.

This article is heavy when it comes to topics such as ASD, dissociative identity disorder, schizophrenia, but the issue of Bipolar is well underrepresented.

By clicking through several links they all seem to be functional, but some sources are scholarly articles in which cannot be read unless the user pays to read them.

Most citations within this article are of reliable sources such as scholarly articles or peer reviewed articles. Only a few citations are from blogs in which are written by bloggers and not scholarly acclaimed writers.

Most sources from this article are of relevant dates; mostly coming from 2000's to present. There are a few citations from the 1990's, and the oldest article is dated from 1967.

In the talk page most people believe that the article should be introduced in a different manner and be reworded. Also, the majority of the talk page criticizes how the article is in a cluster and that the information transmitted is not very clear.

The article is not rated very well as when the user opens this article the top of the article mentions that the article needs a cleanup and more attention given to it from a professional.

= Self-awareness =

Self-awareness is how an individual consciously knows and understands his/her own character, feelings, motives, and desires. There are two broad categories of self-awareness: internal self-awareness and external self-awareness.

Animals
David DeGrazia states that there are three types of self-awareness in animals; the first being, bodily self-awareness. This sense of awareness allows animals to understand that they are different from the rest of the environement; it is also the reason why animals do not eat themselves. Bodily-awareness also includes Proprioception and Sensation. The second type of self-awareness in animals is, social self-awareness. This type of awareness is seen in highly social animals and is the awareness that they have a role within themselves in order to survive. This type of awareness allows animals to interact with each other. The final type of self-awareness is introspective awareness. This awareness is responsible for animals to understand feelings, desires, and beliefs.

Anosognosia
Anosognosia was a term coined by Babinsk i to describe the clinical condition in which an individual suffer from left hemiplegia following a right cerebral hemisphere stroke and were denied that there were any problems with their left arm or leg. This condition is known as anosognosia for hemiplegia (AHP). This condition has evolved throughout the years is now used to describe people who lack subjective experience in both neurological and neuropsychological cases. A wide variety of disorders are associated with anosognosia. For example, patients who are blind from cortical lesions might in fact be unaware that they are blind and state that they do not suffer from any visual disturbances. Individuals with aphasia and other cognitive disorders may also suffer from anosognosia as they unaware of their deficiencies and when they make certain speech errors they may not correct themselves due to their unawareness. Individuals who suffer from Alzheimer's disease lack awareness and their awareness declines and becomes more intense throughout their disease. A key issue with this disorder is that people who do have anosognosia and suffer from certain illnesses may not be aware of them which ultimately leads to putting themselves in dangerous positions and/or environments. To this day there are still no available treatments for AHP, but it has been documented that temporary remission has been used following vestibular stimulation.

Human Development
Bodily self-awareness in human development refers to one’s awareness of their body as a physical object, with physical properties, that can interact with other objects.Tests have shown that at the age of only a few months old, toddlers are already aware of the relationship between the proprioceptive and visual information they receive This is called first-person self-awareness.

At around 18 months old and later, children begin to develop reflective self-awareness, which is the next stage of bodily awareness and involves children recognizing themselves in reflections, mirrors, and pictures. Children who have not obtained this stage of bodily self-awareness yet will tend to view reflections of themselves as other children and respond accordingly, as if they were looking at someone else face to face. In contrast, those who have reached this level of awareness will recognize that they see themselves, for instance seeing dirt on their face in the reflection and then touching their own face to wipe it off.

Slightly after toddlers become reflectively self-aware, they begin to develop the ability to recognize their bodies as physical objects in time and space that interact and impact other objects. For instance, a toddler placed on a blanket, when asked to hand someone the blanket, will recognize that they need to get off it to be able to lift it. This is the final stage of body self-awareness and is called objective self-awareness.

Health
In health and medicine, body-awareness is a construct that refers to a person’s overall ability to direct their focus on various internal sensations accurately. Both proprioception and interoception allow individuals to be consciously aware of various sensations. Proprioception allows individuals and patients to focus on sensations in their muscles and joints, posture, and balance, while interoception is used to determine sensations of the internal organs, such as fluctuating heartbeat, respiration, lung pain, or satiety. Over-acute body-awareness, under-acute body-awareness, and distorted body-awareness are symptoms present in a variety of health disorders and conditions, such as obesity, anorexia nervosa, and chronic joint pain. For example, a distorted perception of satiety present in a patient suffering from anorexia nervosa.

Infancy and early childhood
It is to be kept in mind that as an infant comes into this world, they have no concept of what is around them, nor for the significance of others around them. It is throughout the first year that they gradually begin to acknowledge that their body is actually separate from that of their mother, and that they are an "active, causal agent in space". By the end of the first year, they additionally realize that their movement, as well, is separate from movement of the mother. That is a huge advance, yet they are still quite limited and cannot yet know what they look like, "in the sense that the infant cannot recognize its own face". By the time an average toddler reaches 18-24 months, they will discover themselves and recognize their own reflection in the mirror. They begin to acknowledge the fact that the image in front of them, who happens to be them, moves; indicating that they appreciate and can consider the relationship between cause and effect that is happening. By the age of 24 months the toddler will observe and relate their own actions to those actions of other people and the surrounding environment. Once an infant has gotten a lot of experience, and time, in front of a mirror, it is only then that they are able to recognize themselves in the reflection, and understand that it is them. For example, in a study, an experimenter took a red marker and put a fairly large red dot (so it is visible by the infant) on the infant's nose, and placed him/her in from of a mirror. Prior to 15 months of age, the infant will not react to this, but after 15 months of age, they will either touch their nose, wondering what it is they have on their face, or point to it. This indicates the appearance that he/she recognizes that the image they see in the reflection of the mirror is themselves. There is somewhat of the same thing called the mirror-self recognition task, and it has been used as a research tool for a numerous amount of years, and has given, and lead to, key foundations of the infant's sense/awareness of self. For example, "for Piaget, the objectification of the bodily self occurs as the infant becomes able to represent the body's spatial and causal relationship with the external world (Piaget, 1954). Facial recognition places a big pivotal point in their development of self-awareness. By 18 months, the infant can communicate his/her name to others, and upon being shown a picture they are in, they can identify themselves. By 2 years old, they also usually acquire gender category and age categories, saying things such as "I am a girl, not a boy" and "I am a baby or child, not a grownup". Evidently, it is not at the level of an adult or an adolescent, but as an infant moves to middle childhood and onwards to adolescence, they develop a higher level of self-awareness and self-description.

As infants develop their senses, using multiple senses of in order to recognize what is around them, infants can become affected by something known as "facial multi stimulation". In one experiment by Filippetti, Farroni, and Johnson, an infant of around 5 months in age is given what is known as an “enfacement illusion”. “Infants watched a side-by-side video display of a peer’s face being systematically stroked on the cheek with a paintbrush. During the video presentation, the infant’s own cheek was stroked in synchrony with one video and in asynchrony with the other”. Infants were proven to recognize and project an image of a peer with that of their own, showing beginning signs of facial recognition cues onto one’s self, with the assistance of an illusion.

Piaget
Around school age a child's awareness of personal memory transitions into a sense of one's own self. At this stage, a child begins to develop interests along with likes and dislikes. This transition enables the awareness of an individual's past, present, and future to grow as conscious experiences are remembered more often. Aa a preschooler, they begin to give much more specific details about things, instead of generalizing. For example, the infant will talk about the Los Angeles Lakers basketball team, and the New York Rangers hockey team, instead of the infant just stating that he likes sports. Furthermore, they will start to express certain preferences (e.g., Tod likes mac and cheese) and will start to identify certain possessions of theirs (e.g., Lara has a bird as a pet at home). At this age, the infant is in the stage Piaget names the pre operational stage of development. The infant is very inaccurate at judging themselves because they do not have much to go about. For example, an infant at this stage will not associate that they are strong with their ability to cross the jungle gym at their school, nor will they associate the fact that they can solve a math problem with their ability to count.

Adolescence
In adolescent development, the definition self-awareness also has a more complex emotional context due to the maturity of adolescents compared to those in the early childhood phase, and these elements can include but are not limited to self-image, self-concept, and self–consciousness along many other traits that can relate to Rochat's final level of self awareness, however it is still a distinct concept within it's own previous definition. Social interactions mainly separate the element of self-awareness in adolescent rather than in childhood, as well as further developed emotional recognition skills in adolescents. Sandu, Pânișoară, and Pânișoară demonstrate these in their work with teenagers and demonstrates that there is a mature sense of self-awareness with students who were aged 17, which in term provides a clear structure with how elements like self-concept, self-image, and self-consciousness relate to self-awareness.

Mental health
As children reach their adolescent stages of life, the acute sense of emotion has widened into a meta cognitive state in which mental health issues can become more prevalent due to their heightened emotional and social development. There are elements of contextual behavioral science such as Self-as-Content, Self-as-Process and Self-as-Context, involved with adolescent self-awareness that can associate with mental health. Moran, Almada, and McHugh presented the idea that these domains of self are associated with adolescent mental health in various capacities. Anger management is also a domain of mental health that is associated with the concept of self-awareness in teens. Self-awareness training has been linked to lowering anger management issues and reducing aggressive tendencies in adolescents “Persons having sufficient self-awareness promote relaxation and awareness about themselves and when going angry, at the first step they become aware of anger in their inside and accept it, then try to handle it”.

Self-Incompatibility Mechanism Providing Evidence for Self-Awareness In plants
Self-awareness is fringe topic in the field of self-awareness, and is researched predominantly by botanists. The claim that plants are capable of perceiving self lies in the evidence found that plants will not reproduce with themselves due to a gene selecting mechanism. In addition, vining plants have been shown to avoid coiling around themself, which is due to receptors in the plants tendrils that has a similar set of receptors that can identify self. Unique to plants, awareness of self means that the plant can recognise self, whereas all other known conceptions of self-awareness is the ability to recognise what is not self.

Recognition and Rejection of Self in Plant Reproduction
Research by June B. Nasrallah discovered that that the plant's pollination mechanism also serves as a mechanism against self-reproduction, which lays out the foundation of scientific evidence that plants could be considered as self-aware organisms. The SI (Self-incompatibility) mechanism in plants is unique in the sense that awareness of self derives from the capacity to recognise self, rather than non-self. The SI mechanism function depends primarily on the interaction between genes S-locus receptor protein kinase (SRK) and S-locus cysteine-rich protein gene (SCR). In cases of self-pollination, SRK and SCR bind to activate SKR, Inhibiting pollen from fertilizing. In cases of cross-pollination, SRK and SCR do not bind and therefor SRK is not activated, causing the pollen to fertilise. In simple terms, the receptors either accept or reject the genes present in the pollen, and when the genes are from the same plant, the SI mechanism described above creates a reaction to prevent the pollen from fertilising.

Self-discrimination in the tendrils of the vine Cayratia japonica is mediated by physiological connection.
The research by Yuya Fukano and Akira Yamawo provides a link between self-discrimination in vining plants and amongst other classifications where the mechanism discovery has already been established. It also contributes to the general foundation of evidence of self-discrimination mechanisms in plants. The article makes the claim that the biological self-discrimination mechanism that is present in both flowering plants and ascidians, are also present in vining plants. They tested this hypothesis by doing touch tests with self neighbouring and non-self neighbouring pairs of plants. the test was performed by placing the sets of plants close enough for their tendrils to interact with one-another. Evidence of self-discrimination in above-ground plants is demonstrated in the results of the touch testing, which showed that in cases of connected self plants, severed self plants and non-self plants, the rate of tendril activity and likeliness to coil was higher among separated plants then those attached via rhizomes.