Integrative psychological & behavioral science
September 1, 2014
Floor Van Alphen
25 citations
Tango dancing offers a unique window into the study of human interaction itself. This theoretical paper argues that viewing tango through the lens of enactivism—focusing on participatory sense-making, mutual incorporation, and consensually coordinated action—can clarify how the dance contributes to cultural psychology. Tango facilitates the study of interaction dynamics, intersubjectivity, and culture as joint activity.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
September 1, 2019
J Shashi Kiran Reddy, Sisir Roy, Edilene De Souza Leite et al.
9 citations
The article argues that scientific studies of the self often examine only partial components of self-experience, such as self-identification, self-location, or the sense of existence, making it difficult to understand the self as a whole. The authors propose two theses: ontologically, the self is a sentient entity that bears the feeling of "what it is like to be"; phenomenologically, we do not directly apprehend the self but experience it through the senses of existence, identification, and location. A complete understanding of the self requires including all these components.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
July 30, 2025
Donato Giuseppe Leo
3 citations
Cultural influences, social expectations, and personal beliefs shape how people perceive altered states of consciousness, often interpreting them as communication with the spiritual world. Spirit possession illustrates how sociocultural factors mold these perceptions. The paper explains spirit possession as a way to "exorcise" individual trauma or address communal fears. It traces the historical view of supernatural causes of illness through rituals to cast out or tame possessing spirits. The authors argue that sociocultural factors have embedded altered states of consciousness in religious and spiritual practices, and that these states can have therapeutic value for mental wellbeing.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
September 1, 2024
Simone Indius
3 citations
Building on previous work that connects Taoist principles and social psychology, this commentary explores how mindfulness, meditation, and self-transcendence fit into Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It proposes adding a new layer to the hierarchy: the need for self-transcendence, drawing on Maslow's concept of peak-experiences and William James' notion of mystical experiences. An autoethnographic meditative experience is analyzed as a peak-experience to illustrate how people strive for this state of being.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
September 1, 2024
Luca Tateo
3 citations
The paper critiques how mainstream psychology selectively adopts only certain concepts from Eastern mindfulness traditions while ignoring their broader philosophical systems. It argues that this partial appropriation limits understanding and proposes instead a fully ecological shift in studying the self, drawing on a Meadian perspective. The author suggests that integrating the complete Eastern worldview, including its metaphysical foundations, could transform psychological approaches to selfhood and mindfulness.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
April 15, 2026
Seyed Kiarash Sadat Rafiei, Mahsa Asadi Anar
2 citations
Aesthetic anhedonia—a reduced capacity for pleasure and meaning from art—and psychotic hyper-meaning—where neutral events take on excessive significance—are typically studied separately. This paper argues they are opposite dysregulations of a shared process governing how meanings stabilize over time. The authors propose a framework of symbolic closure dynamics: aesthetic anhedonia reflects hypo-closure, a failure to reach or sustain convergence of meaning, while psychotic hyper-meaning reflects hyper-closure, premature or misanchored convergence on insufficient evidence. The framework bridges reward-based models, aberrant salience, predictive processing, and network theories, offering testable predictions about timing, stability, noise sensitivity, and revisability of meaning formation. Aesthetic stimuli are highlighted as sensitive probes of these dynamics.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
March 29, 2026
Wiesław L Galus
2 citations
Thinking includes reasoning, planning, remembering, imagining, and feeling. The paper asks how bodily and neural processes become consciously experienced as a continuous stream of thoughts, and how these processes differ across thinking types. It proposes a set of hypotheses forming the Motivated Emotional Mind (MEM) model, which describes brain structure architecture, neuronal knowledge representations, and dynamic interactions among brain, sensory receptors, and effectors, all integrated by the organism's body. The model also addresses the extent to which AI systems can exhibit phenomenal consciousness and what would be needed for them to achieve it.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
February 14, 2025
Chetan Sinha
2 citations
Consciousness cannot be fully understood without considering social and cultural contexts, including group processes and the socio-legal framework. Law should critically distance itself from purely brain-based or consciousness-focused trajectories and maintain balance by examining precedents. The article explores how consciousness operates within decolonization efforts and whether neuroscience can inform legal reform to achieve justice.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
December 28, 2024
Cristóbal Pacheco, Pablo Fossa
2 citations
Phenomenological Mapping is a novel research method for systematically studying pre-reflective consciousness—experiences occurring before reflective thought and language. Grounded in Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger, and integrating contemporary work by Zahavi, Gallagher, and Thompson, the method guides researchers through eleven phases from preparation to integration. It employs phenomenological reduction, embodied perception, and being-in-the-world, enriched by intersubjectivity and embodiment concepts. Multisensory data collection techniques—visual diaries, audio recordings, experiential practices—provide a multi-dimensional analysis of subjective experience, bridging empirical and theoretical domains while remaining faithful to philosophical foundations.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
February 3, 2026
Raffaele De Luca Picione, Angelo Maria De Fortuna, Lorenzo Curti et al.
1 citation
The Trickster figure, found in myths, folklore, and literature, symbolizes liminality, transgression, and creativity. Operating at the boundaries of order and disorder, sacred and profane, the Trickster embodies ambiguity, deception, and hidden wisdom. Through myths like that of Hermes and tales of fools and jesters, the Trickster acts as an agent of transformation, subversion, and innovation, subverting social categories through play, irony, and hyper-sexualization. The article compares Turner's theory of liminality and Freud's notion of the uncanny to show how the Trickster traverses psychosocial thresholds and boundaries between consciousness and the repressed, generating ambiguity and anxiety.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
July 31, 2025
Rasmus Birk, Sarah Kirkegaard Jensen, Noomi Matthiesen et al.
1 citation
Situated psychology is a new concept that draws on traditions like ecological psychology, situated learning theory, 4E cognition, and critical psychology. It understands situatedness as involving environment, culture, relations, and context, but not merely as a framework for behavior. The article provides a theoretical outline of this perspective.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
December 19, 2024
Majid Beshkar
1 citation
The QBIT theory proposes that consciousness arises from macroscopic coherence emerging in the axon initial segment of neurons, a specialized compartment that integrates synaptic inputs and amplifies sensory signals. This coherence is necessary for conscious perception, as the axon initial segment's unique properties enable spontaneous emergence of this state. The theory links consciousness to a specific intracellular substrate that registers and processes sensory information within the brain.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
December 29, 2025
Adriana Damascena Da Silva Santos, Caio Maximino
Memory is not a static mental storehouse but a dynamic, mediated activity shaped by social and material contexts. This argument emerges from a synthesis of enactivist theories and cultural-historical activity theory, both of which reject internalist models of cognition. The integration centers on the dialectical interplay of internalization and externalization, where psychological functions develop through engagement with tools, signs, and social practices. The concept of functional organs from activity theory parallels enactivist notions of embodied and extended cognition. Levels of processing theory is incorporated to show that cognitive depth arises from meaningful, socially mediated interaction. Labor exemplifies how memory becomes sedimented in material culture through cooperative activity and ecological norm development.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
March 13, 2025
Priscilla Fabrizi, Thomas Ditye
A four-week experiment with twelve novice meditators found that the Gateway Experience—a program combining hypnosis, meditation, and binaural beats—significantly improved psychological well-being compared to a relaxation control condition. Improvements were seen across all six measured aspects: autonomy, environmental mastery, personal growth, positive relations, purpose in life, and self-acceptance. Participants' sense of mysticality did not influence the results. The findings suggest the Gateway Experience can be a powerful short-term tool for enhancing well-being and offer historical insight into the program's effects.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
December 21, 2024
Enno Von Fircks
Mindfulness research should adapt traditional psychological frameworks like Maslow's hierarchy of needs to reflect contemporary cultural and psychological landscapes. Meditation acts as a transformative process that can destroy and rebuild psychological needs, leading to self-actualization and self-transcendence, metaphorically likened to a volcanic eruption. Social, material, and cultural contexts shape mindfulness practices, requiring personalization and recognition of ecological interconnectedness. Future research should preserve mindfulness breakthroughs, explore religious worldviews, and integrate social environments, advocating for a holistic understanding of mindfulness as both process and outcome in human experience.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
September 1, 2023
Lucia-Elisabeta Faiciuc
Interactionist theories can be closely connected to a nonlinear dynamic approach of psychological and social processes. The mathematical theory of dynamic systems (DST) offers a systematic conceptual and methodological framework for understanding interaction. From a DST perspective, interaction is conceived as an interdependent continuous evolution over time of two or more dynamic variables, which are paradoxically both separated as independent sources of variation and indistinguishable as a new emergent source of variation. This contrasts with the popular view of interaction as a sequence of action and reaction. The key notion of coupling, rarely used in interactionist work, is central to this dynamic systems view. Future studies should specify the link between the dynamic approach of interaction and action theories.