Someone who seeks attention

Attention Seeking Behavior in Adults: Causes, Other Symptoms, More

For adults, attention-seeking behavior is a conscious or unconscious attempt to become the center of attention, sometimes to gain validation or admiration.

Attention-seeking behavior can include saying or doing something with the goal of getting the attention of a person or a group of people.

Examples of this behavior include:

fishing for compliments by pointing out achievements and seeking validation
being controversial to provoke a reaction
exaggerating and embellishing stories to gain praise or sympathy
pretending to be unable to do something so someone will teach, help, or watch the attempt to do it

Attention-seeking behavior may be driven by:

jealousy
low self-esteem
loneliness

Sometimes attention-seeking behavior is the result of cluster B personality disorders, such as:

histrionic personality disorder
borderline personality disorder
narcissistic personality disorder

Jealousy

Jealousy may come about when someone feels threatened by another person currently getting all the attention.

This, in turn, can lead to attention-seeking behavior to change the focus.

Self-esteem

Self-esteem is a broad term covering a variety of complex mental states involving how you view yourself.

When some people believe that they’re being overlooked, bringing back the lost attention is may feel like the only way to restore their balance.

The attention that they get from this behavior may help provide them with the feeling of reassurance that they are worthy.

Loneliness

According to the Health Resources and Services Administration, 1 in 5 Americans say they feel lonely or socially isolated.

Loneliness can result in an urge to seek attention, even in people who don’t normally exhibit attention-seeking behavior.

Histrionic personality disorder

According to the National Library of Medicine, histrionic personality disorder is characterized by feeling underappreciated when not the center of attention.

For someone to receive a diagnosis of histrionic personality disorder, they need to meet at least 5 of the following criteria:

uncomfortable when not the center of attention
provocative or seductive behavior
shallow and shifting emotions
using appearance to draw attention
vague or impressionistic speech
exaggerated or dramatic emotions
is suggestible
treating relationships as more intimate than they are

Borderline personality disorder

Borderline personality disorder is a continuing pattern of instability in self-image, interpersonal relationships, emotion, and impulsivity.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, for someone to receive a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, they need to display at least 5 of the following criteria:

frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment
a pattern of intense and unstable interpersonal relationships with extremes between devaluation and idealization

a decidedly or persistently unstable self-image or sense of self
engaging in potentially self-damaging, impulsive behavior
recurring self-harm or suicidal behavior, including threats or gestures
emotionally instability in daily reactions, such as through irritability, anxiety, or intense sadness
chronic feelings of emptiness
inappropriately intense anger that’s often difficult to control
transient, stress-related paranoia or disassociation

Narcissistic personality disorder

Those with narcissistic personality disorder typically have a need for admiration with a lack of empathy.

According to the American Psychiatric Association, for someone to receive a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder, they need to display at least 5 of the following criteria:

a grandiose sense of self-importance
a preoccupation with fantasies of power, unlimited success, brilliance, ideal love, beauty
a belief in their own uniqueness, especially that they should only associate with, and will only be understood by, high-status institutions and high-status people
demand for excessive admiration
a sense of entitlement and unreasonable expectation of favorable treatment or automatic compliance with their expectations
taking advantage of others to achieve their own ends
unwillingness to identify with or recognize the needs and feelings of others
envy of others and belief that others are envious of them
haughty, arrogant attitudes or behaviors

If you notice this behavior is constantly recurring, it’s probably best for the person display the behavior to visit an experienced mental health professional.

If left unchecked, attention-seeking behavior can often become manipulative or otherwise harmful.

Attention-seeking behavior may stem from jealousy, low self-esteem, loneliness, or as a result of a personality disorder.

If you notice this behavior in you or someone else, a mental health professional can provide diagnosis and treatment options.

Attention Seeking Behavior in Adults: Causes, Other Symptoms, More

For adults, attention-seeking behavior is a conscious or unconscious attempt to become the center of attention, sometimes to gain validation or admiration.

Attention-seeking behavior can include saying or doing something with the goal of getting the attention of a person or a group of people.

Examples of this behavior include:

fishing for compliments by pointing out achievements and seeking validation
being controversial to provoke a reaction
exaggerating and embellishing stories to gain praise or sympathy
pretending to be unable to do something so someone will teach, help, or watch the attempt to do it

Attention-seeking behavior may be driven by:

jealousy
low self-esteem
loneliness

Sometimes attention-seeking behavior is the result of cluster B personality disorders, such as:

histrionic personality disorder
borderline personality disorder
narcissistic personality disorder

Jealousy

Jealousy may come about when someone feels threatened by another person currently getting all the attention.

This, in turn, can lead to attention-seeking behavior to change the focus.

Self-esteem

Self-esteem is a broad term covering a variety of complex mental states involving how you view yourself.

When some people believe that they’re being overlooked, bringing back the lost attention is may feel like the only way to restore their balance.

The attention that they get from this behavior may help provide them with the feeling of reassurance that they are worthy.

Loneliness

According to the Health Resources and Services Administration, 1 in 5 Americans say they feel lonely or socially isolated.

Loneliness can result in an urge to seek attention, even in people who don’t normally exhibit attention-seeking behavior.

Histrionic personality disorder

According to the National Library of Medicine, histrionic personality disorder is characterized by feeling underappreciated when not the center of attention.

For someone to receive a diagnosis of histrionic personality disorder, they need to meet at least 5 of the following criteria:

uncomfortable when not the center of attention
provocative or seductive behavior
shallow and shifting emotions
using appearance to draw attention
vague or impressionistic speech
exaggerated or dramatic emotions
is suggestible
treating relationships as more intimate than they are

Borderline personality disorder

Borderline personality disorder is a continuing pattern of instability in self-image, interpersonal relationships, emotion, and impulsivity.

According to the National Institute of Mental Health, for someone to receive a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, they need to display at least 5 of the following criteria:

frantic efforts to avoid real or imagined abandonment
a pattern of intense and unstable interpersonal relationships with extremes between devaluation and idealization
a decidedly or persistently unstable self-image or sense of self
engaging in potentially self-damaging, impulsive behavior
recurring self-harm or suicidal behavior, including threats or gestures
emotionally instability in daily reactions, such as through irritability, anxiety, or intense sadness
chronic feelings of emptiness
inappropriately intense anger that’s often difficult to control
transient, stress-related paranoia or disassociation

Narcissistic personality disorder

Those with narcissistic personality disorder typically have a need for admiration with a lack of empathy.

According to the American Psychiatric Association, for someone to receive a diagnosis of narcissistic personality disorder, they need to display at least 5 of the following criteria:

a grandiose sense of self-importance
a preoccupation with fantasies of power, unlimited success, brilliance, ideal love, beauty
a belief in their own uniqueness, especially that they should only associate with, and will only be understood by, high-status institutions and high-status people
demand for excessive admiration
a sense of entitlement and unreasonable expectation of favorable treatment or automatic compliance with their expectations
taking advantage of others to achieve their own ends
unwillingness to identify with or recognize the needs and feelings of others
envy of others and belief that others are envious of them
haughty, arrogant attitudes or behaviors

If you notice this behavior is constantly recurring, it’s probably best for the person display the behavior to visit an experienced mental health professional.

If left unchecked, attention-seeking behavior can often become manipulative or otherwise harmful.

Attention-seeking behavior may stem from jealousy, low self-esteem, loneliness, or as a result of a personality disorder.

If you notice this behavior in you or someone else, a mental health professional can provide diagnosis and treatment options.

why the thirst for attention is the defining need of our time / Habr

The desire to be involved is inherent in all people. Will understanding this desire help to deal with loneliness, and explain why relentless persecutors, mass murderers and jihadists turn their pain on other people?

There is a popular joke about Jewish mothers. You probably know her. Q: How many Jewish mothers does it take to change a light bulb? Answer: "It's okay, I'll just sit in the dark, don't worry about me." It's funny the first time, because people actually act like that. "Hey, listen to me! they shout. – Ignore me! Ignore me!"

We all need attention as much as food. It is pointless to argue about this and it is easy to understand. But this idea, apparently, is somehow slippery - because we will never get used to it. If we try to constantly remember that people need attention, it will change the way we think about almost everything they do, from the arts to crime, from romance to terrorism. But we must remember this. Facebook alone collects and sells the attention of 1.4 billion people every day. This is one fifth of the world's population. This worries some people, and this is a big change. But we won't know what to do about it until we understand why people need attention.

Attention means that other people are thinking about you - and if there were ever people who did not need it, they are already extinct. "Attention is one of the most valuable resources that social animals have," says Dr. Jeff McDonald, a psychologist at the University of Toronto who studies human connection. “It was literally a matter of life and death. People who did not feel good in the company of others, or did not feel uncomfortable being separated from the rest, did not have the motivation to take the actions necessary to pass genes to the next generations.

In particular, people show a need for the kind of attention that psychologists call involvement. Abraham Maslow placed belonging in his famous hierarchy of needs in 1943. In 1995, Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary concluded in their paper "The Need for Involvement" that research indeed shows that every person has "a strong desire to form and maintain interpersonal attachments." Specifically, they determined that belonging means receiving positive attention from people you know well.

And this is not hard to understand. If someone thinks positively of you, they are more likely to partner with you. Or even mate if you're lucky. But his opinion matters only if he spends a lot of time with you, because this makes his impression of you more accurate, and only accurate approval is considered safe. "If you think you're being recognized for the wrong reasons, it can make you anxious," McDonald says.

People without a sense of belonging suffer terribly and experience health problems comparable to smoking or obesity. And this is 18% of British adults, of which 4% report feeling lonely all the time, and 14% often. This is the conclusion of last year's study by the British Red Cross. The number of single people in Britain exceeds the entire population of London. Now this problem has become obvious enough for the government to appoint the so-called "Secretary of Solitude" Tracy Crouch.

The word "loneliness" describes the feeling well, but not the cause, which really has little to do with being alone. According to the report, only 22% of people who live alone feel lonely all the time or often - not much more than the national 18%. Among people aged 16 to 24, on the other hand, this proportion is already 32%. And this should not surprise you. “Typically, loneliness depends more on a lack of close ties than a lack of social contact,” Baumeister and Leary wrote. Lonely people, in short, lack positive and precise attention.

So why don't they ask for this attention? Because attention can only be received in the minds of other people, and high-quality attention cannot be obtained by force. “Anthropologically speaking, it’s a gift economy,” says Dr. Emmy Polard of the Mental Health Foundation (MHF), a charity that campaigns against loneliness. “You create a bond of reciprocity, which is where belonging comes from.” This means that you will only get as much high-quality attention as people are willing to give you. And if you ask for more - demand attention to yourself - this is a signal that they do not want to give you much attention. It's unfair and unreliable (people may misjudge you). But the idea that lonely people don't deserve attention is something we instinctively understand, like when we see one restaurant empty and another next door full of people.

Some lonely people themselves come to the conclusion that they are not worthy of attention, and further move away from the world. Others seek a sense of belonging, and not always in the best possible way. If you seek positive attention too openly, you can be branded as a "narcissist." If you look for the attention of your relatives, with all your appearance demonstrating a desire to be ignored, you will fall into a joke about Jewish mothers. There are many ways to ask without asking if you are ready to see them. Why, for example, is it not customary to say that people who harm themselves or suffer from anorexia may want attention? Is this source of pain not worthy of serious consideration?

One way to get attention is to do something that attracts attention: art, politics, crime, perhaps journalism - but this seems to have a different purpose. And the goal matters. Otherwise, you risk earning the contemptuous fame of people "known for their fame."

When Jamie Jewitt joined ITV2's Love Island last July, he was suffering from depression. He was a successful model in New York and then moved back to Essex to live with his parents and did nothing for several years. His family forced him to take part in the show when he was 27, hoping that the event would bring him out of his daze.

Modeling, as Jewitt explains while sipping coffee, is nowhere without Instagram. "You won't get a job," he says, "if you don't have followers. " In practice, it's quite easy for a model to do this: feed the public's appetite with carefully choreographed photographs. Over time, Jewit gained 13,000 followers. He enjoyed their compliments and exchanged messages with some of them. It was like friendship. “You convince yourself that this is all for real,” he says, “but it’s so hard to tell the difference.” He found himself torn between bursts of activity and guilty silence. “I felt like a hypocrite, a traitor. Mostly because of this, I became unhappy. You feel isolated and you don't know why."

Upon arrival at Love Island, all participants must return their smartphones. Inside there are no TVs, tablets, no contact with the outside world. “You have to talk to people,” Jewitt says. “Get to know them, make friends.” What viewers of the show don't see are the many hours of active communication. “On our dates with Camilla, we only talked about books,” recalls Jewitt, “and none of this got on the air! People don't want to listen to this nonsense, do they?"

It's funny that Jewit needed a TV show to get his real life back. “After a couple of days, I could wake up in the morning and feel unreal relief,” he says. - That was incredible. Start from a clean slate. It's sad to think that I could have done this at any point in my life without coming to the show." Today, she and Camilla are still together, and the participants of the show remain close friends.

Jewit now has 801,000 followers on Instagram and mostly promotes something useful. And these posts are not very popular. “When I write about something important to me, I lose about a thousand followers,” he says. So far, he's lost about 20,000 of his max total during his time on the show, and he's learned to take a strange satisfaction in the process. “I don’t need anything else,” he says, “because I want my followers to know who I am and love me for who I am. I try to show a more real version of myself."

The charm of social networks is that, unlike real life, there is time for lies. The potential for positive influence is huge, but it comes at the cost of precision. "When you're presenting an edited version of yourself to the world, any approval you receive doesn't apply entirely to you," McDonald says. As Jewitt discovered, this eats away at your sense of belonging.

We don't yet know if social media makes people lonely. Even so, it must be remembered that they are also suitable for maintaining an existing friendship. But in a survey last month, the FPH found that 30% of young Scots say social media makes them feel isolated. A 2015 report by the Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) shows a sharp drop since 2012 in developed countries in the number of children who say they “make new friends easily at school.” The people who use the Internet the most often talk about feeling lonely - but we do not know what is the cause and what is the effect. We also don't know what percentage of their time they spend on social media.

Even if off-line time is good for you, it can also be stressful, causing people to decide to hide behind their screens. “I always tell my students,” McDonald says, “it's a pity we don't have a 'backspace' button in real life. But she is not. Once said, you can't take back. We don't have that kind of control." In other words, until recently, most people were too socially awkward to seem like anyone else.

For some people, especially those who have had difficulty growing up, this stress can be overwhelming. The ingrained belief that they are unworthy of good things creates loneliness and a thirst for attention, which they try to satisfy. In especially desperate cases, they even try to get other people to notice them, believing that hatred is better than indifference. These people are unhappy and can be dangerous. They go to crime for attention.

There are two types of stubborn pursuers (stalkers) in a broad sense. “One of them is looking for an intimate relationship,” says Dr. Brian Spitzberg, a leading stalking expert at San Diego State University. “They are trying to bring back the person who rejected them. ” Such people have often been in a relationship with their victim, and cannot accept their ending. “They are convinced that this person is exactly what they need. They feel hurt and rejected, but it's all because they crave the attention they think they deserve."

Another type he calls "public person harassers". They usually don't know their prey personally, but they pester them in order to achieve some goal. “They need something to happen—something they think public figures don’t do,” Spitzberg says. “Some of them need someone powerful to pay attention to them.”

Stalkers often suffer from loneliness. However, the pursuit of attention is not often considered their main motive. The stalker's desires seem obvious: to become a part of the victim's life. Their behavior is irrational; it only pushes their victim away from them, but the stalker continues to insist that the woman (and in three-quarters of the cases the victim is a woman) change her mind, or continue her attempts to take revenge. And it certainly becomes a pretty big part of the victim's life.

In addition to a firm rejection, most experts recommend ignoring the stalker. They act on what Spitzberg describes as “all attention is attention.” Given this, the behavior of stalkers already seems half-rational for a person desperately looking for a sense of belonging. Of course, most stalkers are mentally healthy - at least according to the conclusion of a psychiatrist. According to Spitzberg, no more than 30-50% of cases of stalking that ended in criminal cases could be diagnosed with some kind of clinical diagnosis. And among stalkers who crave intimate relationships, this percentage is even smaller. “Most of the cases of stalking, where people sought intimate relationships, are not alien to almost none of us,” says Spitzberg, “if we meet the wrong person in the wrong circumstances.”

Unfortunately, some people feel that they are not just ignored by their former partner, but ostracized by the whole world. For them, life with little or no attention is pure torture. A recent study of work environments in Canada found that people perceive ostracism worse than negative attention or aggressive behavior. The work of Professor Kip Williams of Purdue University in Indianapolis shows how ostracism hurts and can lead to antisocial behavior. Another study by Mark Leary shows that this is a key factor leading to school shootings.

Like stalking, such a crime seems completely irrational. It is usually enough to characterize the killer as angry or insane. But they are always alone. Mass murderers love to leave notes explaining their feelings. Cho Seung-hee (2007 Virginia Tech mass shooting) has claimed to have experienced violent behavior that surprised people who knew him. Elliot Roger (Isla Vista, 2014) wrote: "I felt depressed because I wanted sex, but I felt I was not worthy of it." There is often a grotesque sense of belonging between them. Lee Wester Flanagan (Monita, 2015) was a fan of Cho. Matti Juhani Sari (Kauhajoki, 2008) and Pekka-Erik Auvinen (Jokela Lyceum, 2007) exchanged videos on YouTube. Auvinen quoted the manifesto of "martyrs Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold" (Columbine School, 1999), which also inspired Todd Cameron-Smith (Alberta, 1999), Adam Peter Lanza (Sandy Hook School, 2012) and everyone else. Naturally, if they had not killed anyone, we would have paid less attention to their feelings.

There was a time when there were almost no massacres. The weapon was. There were bombs, knives and vans. There were also cruel, sick people. In today's world, on average, there is less violence than there used to be. However, the massacres are on the rise. A study by the Harvard School of Public Health found that in the United States, massacres with at least four victims over the period from 1982 to 2011 occurred on average every 200 days. Then, in the period from 2011 to 2014 - every 64 days on average. Eighteen of the top thirty murders in the US since 1949 have occurred in the last 10 years, including the worst five.

How else to call these crimes, except as crimes of neglect? They were filmed on cameras, then on phones. Watched live around the world. They are stored on Wikipedia and YouTube for posterity. Where could one find a copy of the killer's manifesto at 1990, except on video? The truth is, if you want the world to notice you badly enough, you can get it tomorrow. It's easy. And before the advent of the Internet, it was more difficult.

Jihadists also like to leave their speeches, but they claim higher motives. Their massacres, they say, are part of a plan to achieve paradise and the triumph of their beliefs. But few of them had a life as godly as the goals for which they died. Shezad Tanveer, one of the men who set off the London Underground bombs in 2005, was secretly dating a girl. Amedee Coulibaly, who attacked a kosher shop in Paris, kept pedophile material on his computer. According to Demos think tank interviews with 62 former jihadists in 2010, they "had a more simplistic, shallow understanding of Islam than non-violent radicals. " Does it seem likely that they resorted to violence because of their adherence to the sacred books? Or is it more likely that their violence, with which the world is obsessed, was fueled by a thirst for attention, which they passed off as bigotry?

It is hard to imagine how neglect crimes can disappear, but recognizing their nature can help. Perhaps then we will stop rewarding the behavior of criminals with the amount of attention they crave. There are other simple solutions to the attention crisis. Various socialization activities can improve access to quality attention by helping people get to know each other better. As a result, we can come to the fact that people will be required to meet the minimum weekly norms for offline communication. If we become more open about our attention seeking, perhaps we will finally get the attention we seek.

Warning. Attention disorders

Attention - concentration of perceptual, cognitive and motor activity in a certain direction. There are the following main characteristics of attention: volume, distribution, switchability, stability and concentration (Rubinshtein, 1946). The amount of attention is the amount of information that is held in the field of clear consciousness. It is believed that it is equal to the amount of short-term memory. The amount of attention can be significantly increased by using different methods of organizing incoming information. Concentration or selectivity of attention characterizes the degree of concentration on any activity. With excessive preoccupation with something, important stimuli, both external and internal, may not be noticed. Normally, this feature of attention is called absent-mindedness. Attention switchability consists in the ability to quickly change the direction of activity without getting stuck on the previous one. Distribution of attention is the ability to simultaneously distribute activity in two or more directions. Cicero seemed to be able to simultaneously talk with the interlocutor, write something and think about something else.

The ability to distribute attention in different directions is a very valuable quality in performing complex work. For example, a psychiatrist, when talking with a patient, must perceive and analyze the verbal information received from him, catch non-verbal signals, think over tactics for continuing the conversation, sort information from the patient by symptoms, syndromes, disease forms, assess the state of various mental processes and conditions, and, in addition make appropriate entries.

A seemingly simple conversation with a patient is a very difficult activity, this skill is developed over the years, if not decades. Stability of attention is the ability to do one thing for a long time. IP Pavlov, for example, said that for three decades he was constantly focused on thinking over the laws of higher nervous activity. Finally, another important aspect of attention is observation - the ability to notice important details of what is happening, but hidden behind secondary circumstances.

There are two types of attention: involuntary and voluntary. Involuntary attention is its focus, not associated with volitional effort. Attention in this case can be directed to external objects or events of internal life that are new, unusual, attract interest or contain danger signals. At the same time, the attention of extroverts is more attracted to events in the outside world, introverts - what is happening in the inner plane of life. Arbitrary attention is associated with volitional effort.

At the same time, the individual, as it were, forces himself to do what is necessary, even if it is uninteresting for him. A prominent scientist, for example, is forced to work as a taxi driver due to special circumstances. Creative natures, however, are able to find something interesting and new in the most prosaic, it would seem, classes. The mechanisms of arbitrary collection are social in origin and are mediated by internal speech processes. Focusing on something is accompanied by physiological changes in the body. For example, this change in pupil size is the Piltz reflex.

The topic of organic brain damage may indicate which nerve structures are responsible for attention processes. Thus, with frontal injuries, active, voluntary attention suffers first of all, due to which patients are very distractible. In case of damage to the deep structures of the brain (upper trunk, walls of the third ventricle, limbic system), both voluntary and involuntary attention may fall out.

Mental disorders almost always include attention disorders, the latter being quite diverse and, in turn, may lead to secondary deviations of memory, thinking and other mental processes. The isolation of attention deficit disorder as an independent syndrome therefore seems to have no serious grounds, just as there are none in singling out memory deficit syndromes, thinking deficits, etc. We indicate here the main symptoms of impaired attention. Note that they are often combined with each other.

1. Aprosexia (translated as “lack of attention”). The term was originally introduced to refer to attention disorders in children suffering from chronic diseases of the nasal mucosa (Juye, 1887). Aprosexia is the inability to concentrate on what is happening both outside the patient and with him. In other words, this is a loss of both voluntary and involuntary attention, attention paralysis. Nothing attracts the patient's attention, does not arouse his interest, alertness, fear. He cannot force himself to focus on anything, direct or control his thoughts, memories, ideas. Moreover, the patient does not try to somehow activate his attention. Aprosexia is associated with abulia and apathy, occurring in the structure of mental disorders of various origins. Some authors believe that aprosexia characterizes disorders of only voluntary attention (Bleicher, 1995).

2. Hyperprosexia characterizes the loss of the ability to active attention and the predominance of passive, involuntary attention. Manifested by an inability to focus on anything and excessive distractibility. In such an extreme version, a violation of attention is designated by the term hypermetamorphosis, i.e., hypervariability of attention. The term was introduced to denote the extreme distractibility of patients, which can give rise to states close to confusion (Neumann, 1859; Wernicke, 1881). H.Neumann described hypermetamorphosis as an independent disease, but S.Wernicke showed that this disturbance of attention is nothing more than a psychopathological symptom.

Hypermetamorphosis is observed in acute psychotic states of exogenous-organic type, schizophrenia, mania, amental stupefaction. As for hyperprosexia, this violation is manifested by a decrease in the ability to concentrate attention in any one direction satisfactorily: patients cannot bring their thoughts to their logical conclusion, listen carefully to the interlocutor, complete the work begun to the end, limit themselves to the framework of a specific topic of conversation. Patients are constantly distracted by something: extraneous thoughts and memories, the conversation of other people, changes in the current situation. If it is required to focus attention on something happening outside the patient, to track some external events, then patients cannot do this either, again being distracted by something secondary. For example, the patient wants to notice the appearance of a person early, but, being distracted by something else, misses the moment when the person is in the field of perception. The more the patient strains his active attention, the sooner it is turned off. In children, who generally tend to have a predominance of passive attention over active, hyperprosexia is especially common.

For a long time, for example, they can do something that absorbs their attention, something that interests them, but they do not cope well with tasks or activities that require active effort: for example, it is difficult for them to listen to the end of the teacher's explanations, to read and think about the meaning of what they read , write without errors or count, that is, in general, do something boring for them, although important.

3. Hypoprosexia is a term that defines various variants of the weakening of attention. They are:

the narrowing of the attention span is manifested by a decrease in the ability to keep in the field of clear consciousness a sufficient number of impressions and ideas, so that the patient continually loses sight of something important. It often comes to the point that even when performing a relatively simple task, he forgets certain requirements. When cleaning the house, the patient cannot, for example, fully imagine what she has to do, and therefore is not able to arrange her actions in order: "I clutch at one thing, then another, but in the end nothing happens." As soon as the patient is distracted in the conversation by some details, he forgets the main idea that he had previously developed. Going to another room for the right item, he forgets on the way what exactly he went for. When counting, especially in his mind, he forgets either the number that he must, for example, subtract, or the number from which he must subtract. When planning to go somewhere, he will certainly forget to take something with him, remembering this somewhere on the road. If the patient is driving, he will forget to turn on the turn signal if he needs to change lanes or turn to the side. Even when dressing, the patient may forget to put on something: either a hat, a tie, or something else. The patient says that halfway to the place of work she suddenly remembered that she forgot to put on a skirt, etc.;
stiffness or torpidity of attention reveals itself as an inability to quickly and frequently switch attention from one thing or one topic of conversation to another. To change the occupation, the patient needs a lot of time to "work in". It is no less difficult for him to stop; for some time, as if by inertia, he continues his former occupation. Having joined the topic of conversation, the patient cannot quickly transfer his thoughts to another topic and for some time continues to "stomp" on the first one. Or, having started a conversation with someone, he seems to get stuck in it, sticks to the interlocutor, being unable to interrupt the dialogue at the right moment. Such "stickiness" is denoted by the term akairiya (translated means "lack of measure"). Patients with akairiya can ask the same question several times, return to what has already been said, not noticing that the interlocutor is already giving signs that the question has been settled. Akairiya is a sign of general mental rigidity. It was first described in postencephalitic conditions, then in Huntington's chorea, parkinsonism, epilepsy, epileptoid psychopathy. It also occurs in the structure of the extrapyramidal syndrome with the phenomena of parkinsonism. A synonym for acairii is Turzo's symptom;
a decrease in the ability to distribute attention (there is no term) is characterized by the fact that the patient, if he could do two or more things at the same time, loses this valuable quality of attention. Many patients may not have had this ability initially. If a patient is asked, for example, to sequentially subtract from 200 to 13 and at the same time to call aloud alternately the second, then the third result, he will hardly cope with such a difficult task. Insufficient distribution of attention is often found in quite healthy people. Students, for example, often note that at a lecture they cannot simultaneously listen to and write down the presentation of the lecturer; they either listen or mechanically write down the text in order to read it carefully at their leisure;
a decrease in observation is associated with the dominance of perceptual and cognitive stereotypes, a tendency to perceive and think as if according to a template. The patient does not notice, for example, the differences between two different situations, although, of course, they also have much in common. So, he does not distinguish between an official conversation and a simple, ordinary one, which is why he sometimes falls into inadmissible familiarity. He does not distinguish shades of thought or tonality in which the attitude towards him is expressed by some person. It is difficult for him to notice how his state of health is changing, and only a detailed questioning of the doctor can reveal the symptoms. Such patients, even if they change greatly in character, are not able to say anything concrete about it. The patient cannot notice that by his behavior he is alarming, disturbing those around him. It also happens that he does not seem to see the common or even the main thing that unites objects and situations, they seem to him completely different. The decrease in observation may be due to various reasons: the preoccupation of attention with something else, affective disorders, impoverishment of the imagination and the inability to abandon the usual forms of response, impaired thinking and intellect;
fluctuation of attention is manifested by significant fluctuations in the ability to concentrate. The patient, listening, for example, to the instructions of a doctor, perceives something quite clearly, but not something, as he imperceptibly turns off from the situation, so that a little later and again for a short time he will turn back into it. If you ask him to tell what he learned for himself, then it turns out that he remembered some things well, while others passed by his ears and did not imprint in his memory. When performing a task for sequential counting, it is found that the patient makes mistakes not only at the beginning (this usually indicates torpid attention) or the end of the count (this is mostly due to exhaustion of attention), but also throughout the count (unless, of course, there are signs of a developing acalculia, elementary inability to count and possible other reasons). When reading something, the patient in places reads it well, and in places he continues to read as if mechanically, without delving into the meaning of what he read. He may feel that there is some incoherence of impressions from what he has read and is forced to re-read the text again. Attention fluctuations can probably be made dependent on spontaneous fluctuations in mental activity, on lack of persistence or interest, and on autism, in which patients often "travel" from reality to the imaginary world and back.

4. Paraprosexia is represented by various qualitative disorders of attention, mainly by different deviations in the direction of the latter. It often turns out that the control of the focus of attention is significantly reduced, and sometimes almost absent. The following symptoms may be manifestations of paraprosexia:

somatization of attention or its hypochondriacal orientation, usually coexisting with anxiety and fears about one's well-being. Patients report that it is difficult for them to distract themselves from thoughts about their health and switch their attention to something else. Patients constantly and involuntarily listen to what is happening in their body, while capturing the most insignificant bodily sensations that they simply did not notice before. Hypochondriacal absorption of attention apparently entails a significant decrease in the threshold for the perception of somatic sensations. By the way, anyone who tries to actively study their bodily sensations can easily be convinced of this. If in relatively mild cases of hypochondria, patients can still be forced to redistribute their attention in favor of external impressions or to do business, then in a severe hypochondriacal state, their attention is literally riveted to the events of somatic life;
pathological reflection, or painful introversion, is manifested by a steady focus of attention on the events of the inner mental life. Usually this is accompanied by anxiety about the mental changes associated with the disease. This symptom is most clearly presented when signs of a violation of self-perception appear, especially in cases where the ability to realize emotions, thoughts, acts of intention, etc., is lost. Attention can also be associated with symptoms of alienation, feelings of a split personality. As a rule, the attention of patients is absorbed by hallucinations, delusional ideas, obsessions, and other mental disorders.
egotism, or the riveting of the patient's attention to the problems of his interpersonal relationships (Snezhnevsky). Patients constantly analyze what and how they said to someone, what was the reaction of the interlocutor or a group of people to his appearance and statements, how appropriate his remarks were, whether he provoked anyone to harshness, discontent, indignation or envy, etc. Usually this symptom is characteristic of suspicious patients or patients with shallow depression, who become too impressionable and suspicious, it is also observed with violations of self-perception, when the patient begins to think that he behaves unnaturally, speaks as if not from his own Self, loses the ability to clearly express thoughts or when he perceives his expressive acts as false, unnatural;
depressive focus of attention is manifested by the patient's excessive concern for self-esteem problems. The patient feels all the time that he is behaving and has behaved incorrectly, unworthily, disgustingly, that he is a bad, unsuitable and incapable person. In addition, the attention of patients is involuntarily directed to the darkest and most bleak aspects of life. In general, patients think little about their future, it seems to them that they simply do not have this future;
the anxious focus of attention differs from the depressive one in the first place in that patients are completely at the mercy of gloomy forebodings about both the near and the distant future. These forebodings, as it were, crowd out thoughts about both their past and the present. The future seems sometimes catastrophic not only for the patient himself (he will soon die or perish, fall ill with some terrible disease, he may be buried alive, etc.), but also for his relatives. Anxious forebodings sometimes acquire a global, paraphrenic character, manifesting in such cases as the expectation of almost universal cataclysms;
a turn of attention to the past is often found in pre- and senile age, and indicates, according to I. S. Sumbaev, mental decrepitude, energy decline. This may precede the development of a mental disorder (abiotrophic processes, that is, the extinction of the vitality of the nervous and other body systems, causing the appearance of such diseases as late schizophrenia, senile dementia, Pick's disease, Alzheimer's, Wilson's, Parkinson's, Huntington's chorea). The extreme version of the disorder seems to be ecmnesia, or living in the past, when memories of the distant past are mistaken for current events. A patient with Alzheimer's disease, for example, believes that the USSR still exists, that the president is either L.I. Brezhnev, or M.S. Gorbachev, criticizes them, because at one time he strongly disliked them;
deviant attention (Shachov, 1962) is considered by some authors as a fundamental cognitive impairment characteristic of patients with schizophrenia. The disorder consists in the fact that attention is, as it were, scattered over trifles, and therefore the patient seems to lose the ability to notice the main thing, to adequately respond to the essence of the matter. In a conversation with a doctor, the patient carelessly, inappropriately answers questions or does not answer some of them at all. He does not show interest or concern about issues that raise the topic of his entire future life, fate. At the same time, he seems to be completely absorbed in some perfect trifles. For example, he moves dust particles around the table, carefully examines some kind of stain on his trousers, examines cracks on the wall, pulls threads out of clothes and begins to twist them, then straighten them, twists a button from side to side, picks under his fingernail, etc. A kind of paradoxical situation is revealed, which was first noted by V.A. Gilyarovsky (1954): simultaneously with the weakening of active attention, the passive attention of patients can remain at a sufficiently high level, so that, seemingly not listening to the doctor, the patient nevertheless remembers and, perhaps, fully understands what he said to him. This disorder is rooted, apparently, in the autism of patients, their indifference to the real aspects of life. One could perhaps even argue that both the thinking of such patients, as well as their behavior, will be permeated with autism;
selective attention (the term, it seems, is not very successful, because attention itself is selection, the selection of mental material) is characterized by the fact that it is riveted, mainly to stimuli that cause fear and anxiety. In Russian, this is formulated as alertness, suspicion, an excessively high level of vigilance. Apparently, this disturbance of attention is primarily characteristic of patients with delusional mood and developing persecutory delusions.

Attention disorders, as noted in the text, occur in various diseases and are included in a variety of symptom complexes. Especially often it is necessary to observe a decrease in memory in asthenic conditions (exhaustion, other manifestations of hypoprosexia). With organic lesions of the brain, torpidity is often observed, as well as exhaustion of attention, narrowing of its volume, and in severe lesions, disorders reach the degree of attention paralysis. Almost all disorders of attention are detected in schizophrenia, from exhaustion to aprosexia and hypermetamorphosis. The differential diagnostic value of many attention disorders is relatively small, with the exception, perhaps, of the phenomena of paraprosexia and deviant attention. We note one more circumstance. The term "paraprosexia" is sometimes used to refer to such a violation of attention, in which the patient, tensely waiting for the appearance of an object, does not notice in time its appearance in the field of view. It may be so: the patient is feverishly looking for some object, does not see it, although it is very close and it seems difficult not to notice it. So, the patient is looking for his glasses, and they rest on his nose. This disturbance resembles negative optical hallucinations, although the latter can hardly be associated with a pathology of attention. In the author's previous book (2002), paraprosexia is presented in the sense just mentioned. This may be true, but it is doubtful nonetheless.

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