Frontiers in Psychology
June 13, 2024
Marieta Pehlivanova, Marina Weiler, Bruce Greyson
2 citations
Belief in psychic phenomena is widespread but controversial. A leading hypothesis is that high belief is explained by differences in cognitive styles, but most research has been conducted with lay individuals. This study measured actively open-minded thinking (AOT) and need for closure (NFC) in four groups: academic psi researchers (N=44), lay psi believers (N=32), academic skeptics (N=35), and lay skeptics (N=33). Group differences appeared in AOT but not NFC. Academic psi researchers scored similarly to both skeptic groups on AOT (4.5 out of a possible range), while lay psi believers scored significantly lower (4.2), indicating less willingness to consider evidence that challenges their beliefs.
Frontiers in Psychology
April 29, 2024
Thurston C. Lacalli
2 citations
Consciousness and individual agency can be decoupled in two hypothetical ways: reflex pathways that incorporate conscious sensations as an intrinsic component (InCs), and consciously conditioned reflexes dependent on synaptic plasticity but not memory (CCRs). Whether these exist is unclear, and InCs are limited to theories where consciousness depends on EM field effects. Consciousness with agency, as humans experience it, requires deliberate choice of alternative actions (DCs) that depend on explicit memory systems. CCRs provide a heuristic model for how conscious inputs could refine routine behaviors while evolution optimizes qualia without agency.
Frontiers in Psychology
June 9, 2023
Neşe Devenot, George Erving
2 citations
Consciousness may be understood as a form of poetry, with the brain's default mode network acting as a kind of 'editor' that selects and organizes experience into coherent narratives. The article argues that both poetic creation and conscious experience involve a dynamic interplay between spontaneous, associative thought and structured, editorial refinement. This perspective bridges neuroscience and poetics, suggesting that the default mode network's role in self-referential thought and narrative construction is analogous to the editorial process in poetry. The authors propose that viewing consciousness through a poetic lens can offer new insights into its nature and function, potentially informing both scientific and artistic understandings of subjective experience.
Frontiers in Psychology
July 29, 2020
Jared R. Lindahl, D. James Cooper, Nathan E. Fisher et al.
2 citations
Buddhist meditation practitioners and teachers report a wider range of difficult or distressing experiences than previously discussed, some of which are considered expected on the contemplative path. Distinguishing these from psychopathology requires expanding assessment frameworks beyond normative fit with religious experience or mental illness to include the need for intervention, whether religious or clinical. Decision-making about intervention often depends on contextual factors, aligning with person-centered mental health care that considers interpersonal and cultural dynamics.
Frontiers in Psychology
May 19, 2016
Katarina L. Shebloski, James M. Broadway
2 citations
A commentary on a study about psilocybin and time perception argues that the original work's conclusions may be overstated. The commentary suggests that the reported effects of psilocybin on time perception could be influenced by other factors, such as changes in attention or working memory, rather than a direct alteration of an internal clock. It calls for more rigorous controls in future research to isolate the specific cognitive mechanisms affected by psychedelics.
Frontiers in Psychology
March 11, 2026
Filippo Dellanoce
1 citation
A novel therapeutic approach called 'amplified psychoanalysis' integrates MDMA-assisted therapy with traditional psychoanalytic treatment for obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). A single-case clinical narrative of a patient named Ygg illustrates how MDMA-induced altered states of consciousness may facilitate access to unconscious material and help overcome therapeutic impasses. The patient experienced more direct access to and processing of previously avoided memories and affects. The combination may be particularly promising for OCD, where traditional approaches often face limitations. Enhanced emotional processing, a strengthened therapeutic alliance, and improved access to traumatic memories are identified as putative processes of change. The approach requires systematic investigation with larger samples and formal outcome measures.
Frontiers in Psychology
February 11, 2026
Bettina Habelt
1 citation
Event-related beta oscillations, which are brain rhythms time-locked to tasks, are an underused but promising biomarker for evaluating treatments like brain stimulation and neurofeedback. Evidence from a rat model of alcohol addiction shows that both psilocybin and targeted electrical stimulation shift dominant beta activity from higher to lower sub-bands during an auditory oddball task, suggesting sub-band-specific analyses may indicate treatment efficacy. Despite this potential, systematic studies of beta sub-bands for diagnosing and treating neurological and psychiatric disorders remain scarce. The author proposes that event-related beta oscillations could help assess neuromodulatory interventions in both preclinical and clinical settings.
Frontiers in Psychology
November 25, 2025
Lars‐gunnar Lundh, Lo Foster
1 citation
People have a need to feel embodied—to experience having a body as both an object that can be perceived and evaluated and as a subjective, felt body. This felt embodiment is crucial for developing self-identity, interpersonal relations, wellbeing, and flourishing. The paper argues that experiences of feeling embodied serve as important motives: embodiment motivation drives people to feel their body in its vitality, capacities, expressiveness, as part of wholesome environments, and in pleasurable contact with others, while disembodiment motivation drives people to avoid or reduce bodily self-experiences due to pain or discomfort. The paper outlines a new research area on embodiment motivation.
Frontiers in Psychology
October 24, 2025
Elizaveta Solomonova, Jared R. Lindahl, Ian Gold et al.
1 citation
Delusion-like ideation (DLI) occurs in psychopathology and among the general population, and meditation can trigger such experiences. Based on interviews with over 100 Buddhist meditation practitioners and experts, this mixed-methods study establishes a typology of eight types of DLI, reports their relative frequencies, and identifies impacts and treatment outcomes. Four case studies illustrate risk factors, trajectories, outcomes, and appraisals. Responses to DLI depend on type, duration, severity, impact, and appraisals by meditators, teachers, and psychiatrists. Some DLI phenomenology reflects Buddhist meditation cultures; although normalized in certain contexts, meditation experts consider DLI a potential "red flag" requiring monitoring or intervention. Explanatory models include environmental conditions of retreats, attention and sensory attenuation, and DLI as a cultural idiom of distress.
Frontiers in Psychology
October 17, 2025
Michail Elpidoforou, Antonios Boultadakis, John Parissis et al.
1 citation
Dance-based interventions fall into three distinct categories with different goals, facilitators, and target populations. Dance therapy (DT), dance movement psychotherapy (DMP), or dance movement therapy (DMT) is a psychotherapeutic modality delivered by registered dance-movement therapists to address mental health needs. Adapted dance (AD) or inclusive dance (ID) is led by certified dance educators trained in special education, focusing on artistic expression, recreation, and social inclusion for individuals with disabilities. Therapeutic dance (TD) or dance as therapy (DaT) is facilitated by registered healthcare practitioners with dance training to improve or relieve disease symptoms or side effects of medical care in clinical populations. Clear terminology is essential for designing interventions, defining outcomes, and establishing professional standards.
Frontiers in Psychology
July 22, 2025
Pascal Michael, Pauline Fritz, Olivia Gosseries et al.
1 citation
Near-death experiences (NDEs), which involve mystical-type content during life-threatening situations, are not well studied in acute medical care. This article argues for more comprehensive NDE research in emergency and critical care settings, citing reasons such as experiencers' awareness of surroundings and the need for patient support due to NDEs' profound psychological impacts. The authors suggest incorporating identification of NDEs into management plans and propose that exploring NDE incidence and their subsequent impact in acute settings may lead to favorable clinical outcomes.
Frontiers in Psychology
March 12, 2024
Terje Sparby, Dirk Cysarz, David Hornemann V. Laer et al.
1 citation
Attentional control has two basic aspects: directing attention to different objects is experienced as easy and a sign of freedom, while sustaining attention on a chosen object is difficult because mind-wandering is inevitable. This raises the question of whether we are fundamentally unfree. An introspective study with six people performing various attention tasks over a month examined whether it is possible to experience the source of attention—the subject enacting freedom through attention. Common and contrasting experiences are reported, forming a basis for discussing the method of introspection and how to handle conflicting reports.
Frontiers in Psychology
July 7, 2026
Sonu Sharma, Pradeep Kumar, Vishva Chaudhary et al.
This conceptual paper compares Indian philosophical traditions—Advaita Vedanta, Buddhism, and the teachings of J. Krishnamurti—with contemporary psychology, which typically aims to build a cohesive self for wellbeing. These traditions critique the idea of a fixed self-identity. The paper relates these comparisons to contemplative neuroscience, focusing on the default mode network, self-referential processing, and meditation-related changes in self-experience. It proposes a spectrum model: self-referential processing as an ordinary mode, meta-awareness as a trainable capacity, and non-self experience as a transformed outcome. The framework suggests wellbeing may involve flexible regulation of self-identification rather than simple self-enhancement. Implications for research, clinical practice, and cultural interpretation are discussed.
Frontiers in Psychology
July 3, 2026
Fredric Schiffer
Space and time are irreducible dimensions of nature, and life and experience are proposed as similarly irreducible dimensions, together called lifeexperience. From this dimensional ground emerges the Force of Experience, a candidate fifth fundamental force whose causal reality is evidenced by human civilization. Physics fails to explain consciousness and life by treating them as derivable from lower-level processes rather than as foundational dimensions.
Frontiers in Psychology
June 30, 2026
Yiwen Zhang
Jung's theory of individuation reaches a structural limit that Vijnanvada (Yogacara) Buddhist philosophy can identify and continue. Prior comparative scholarship that mapped Jungian archetypes onto Buddhist categories conceals a more fundamental asymmetry between the two traditions. Both traditions posit a subliminal mind (collective unconscious or alaya-vijnana) in response to the insufficiency of surface consciousness. Jung's integrative methodology misreads the structural self-grasping of manas as content available for integration. The Jungian Self archetype reproduces at a more sophisticated level the same atma-graha structure that manas enacts in lived experience. Vijnanvada's doctrine of 'turning consciousness into wisdom' articulates a transformation of cognitive mode that Jung's framework approaches but does not formulate. Individuation functions as precondition for the subtler work of transforming the structural orientation of cognition itself.
Frontiers in Psychology
June 29, 2026
Bruno Forti
Conscious vision, according to Extended Information Theory, lets us know how objects extend into space, compensating for limitations of neuro-computational systems that handle point-like information. This paper explores links between spatial extension and two other properties of phenomenal experience: subjectivity and qualitative aspect. The author identifies thingness—the materialization of something extending into space—as an underlying property from which subjectivity and quality derive. Subjectivity involves a structure where a third-person world forms within a first-person world, creating egocentric knowledge. Quality conveys how something materializes based on its degree of differentiation from other qualities, transforming unconscious into conscious knowledge. A hypothesis is proposed for how qualities may originate from physical brain processes.
Frontiers in Psychology
June 24, 2026
Xiaodong Luo
Self-consciousness originated in an animal ancestor when repeated exposure to its own mirror image triggered illusory transformations and discontinuous leaps in the brain's conscious reaction, eventually leading to mental self-consciousness. The Mirror-Induced Leap of Consciousness (MLC) model formalizes this eight-stage evolutionary process. Consciousness is defined as the brain's reaction to a percept's attribute, formalized as C = R(a(p)). The principle of percept drift explains how repetitive mirror stimulation drives conscious change, supported by the rubber hand illusion experiment. The framework integrates behavioral experiments, logical reasoning, and mathematical modeling to address the generation, transformation, and definition of consciousness.
Frontiers in Psychology
June 22, 2026
Thurston Lacalli
Conscious vision presents a challenge for theories of consciousness because it involves a 2-dimensional perceptual display. A modular/constitutive model requires that awareness of visual stimuli has position-dependence, meaning the physical location of each module contributing to visual experience has perceptual consequences. Conscious gaze control registers salient visual features in a way that has no preconscious counterpart and helps visual experience acquire meaning. The analysis justifies Merker's ideas on vision and gaze control as core functions of consciousness, where postnatal refinement of visual skills equates to learning agency. It provides a framework for the hard problem and suggests conscious experience for non-visual species may incorporate position-dependent components based on something other than light perception. The adaptive advantage of consciousness depends on both position-dependent contents and valence to assign meaning to experience.
Frontiers in Psychology
June 12, 2026
Annahita Nezami, Elisa Raffaella Ferrè
Earth's gravity acts as a deeply ingrained '1G super-prior' in the brain's predictive architecture, stabilizing how the brain integrates sensory information and organizes large-scale networks. When people enter microgravity, disrupted vestibular signals destabilize this super-prior, causing widespread prediction errors that force recalibration across brain systems. This process extends beyond sensorimotor adaptation to reshape conscious experience—altering self-location, emotional regulation, and perceptual coherence, and potentially triggering transformative phenomena. Drawing computational parallels with psychedelic states, the authors propose that microgravity transiently relaxes high-level priors and enhances global integration, offering a non-pharmacological way to probe the foundations of human awareness.
Frontiers in Psychology
June 10, 2026
Guy W. Fincham, Edward Caddye, Amy A. Kartar et al.
A single session of high ventilation breathwork produced larger altered states of consciousness—including mystical experience, emotional breakthrough, and feelings of oneness—than body scan meditation in 24 healthy adults. One week later, breathwork was associated with greater psychological insight and self-reported behavioral change. Both groups showed improvements in stress, anxiety, depression, and well-being over time. These preliminary findings suggest breathwork can induce psychedelic-like effects and support further confirmatory research.
Frontiers in Psychology
June 4, 2026
David O. Avruch
Ketamine-assisted psychotherapy (KAP) is increasingly used in mainstream mental healthcare, but its application in couple therapy is underexplored. Interviews with nine psychotherapists from four couple therapy modalities revealed diverse strategies for using ketamine to facilitate attachment processes. Respondents reported that ketamine helps couples reduce fearfulness, deepen emotional expression, communicate frankly, enhance trust, gain perspective on relational dysfunction, and address trauma. Different therapeutic modalities conceptualize ketamine's role uniquely. The study, limited by its small sample, contributes to the emerging field of psychedelic-assisted couple therapy.
Frontiers in Psychology
June 2, 2026
Marina Weiler, Marieta Pehlivanova, Philip J. Cozzolino
Out-of-body experiences (OBEs) sometimes involve reports of veridical perception—accurate information obtained from a vantage point outside the body without conventional sensory input. While case collections and early laboratory studies suggest this possibility, replication under standard protocols has been challenging. This review argues that typical target-identification paradigms, conducted in sterile settings with inexperienced participants, misalign with the dynamics of the OBE state. Five key determinants constrain laboratory outcomes: the participant's mental/emotional state, the participant-researcher relationship, researcher intention, variability in participant skill, and the intrinsic purpose of the experience. Reframing methodology around these determinants and complementing lab tasks with rigorously vetted spontaneous cases can increase ecological validity while preserving falsifiability, offering a pathway toward more effective investigation of veridical perception in OBEs and implications for models of consciousness.
Frontiers in Psychology
May 29, 2026
Gianluca Castelnuovo
Clinical psychology and psychotherapy face a paradigm shift toward more individualized, mechanism-oriented, and transdiagnostic approaches. Recent umbrella reviews show that both psychotherapies and pharmacotherapies for adult mental disorders have only minor effect sizes when only the best studies are considered, with small differences between them and few extra benefits from combining them. New challenges include integrating psychedelic-assisted therapy, using neuroimaging to define psychopathology based on shared neurobiological mechanisms rather than traditional diagnostic categories, expanding digital and mHealth interventions, and applying the biopsychosocial model more effectively in clinical practice. The field must move from disorder-specific protocols to dimensional, person-centered care that combines neuroscience with psychosocial formulation.
Frontiers in Psychology
May 28, 2026
Lidia Venero-Hidalgo, Francisca Carvajal, Fernando Rodrı́guez de Fonseca et al.
Cannabis use during adolescence and young adulthood is linked to memory problems, especially in episodic and working memory, but effects on executive functions are less consistent and depend on age, how much cannabis is used, and the type of cognitive test. Studies from the Americas, many of which followed participants over time, more often found negative associations between cannabis use and cognitive performance. European studies showed mixed results, possibly due to differences in cannabis products, patterns of co-use, and measurement methods. Evidence from Asia was limited. Overall, cognitive differences are more reliably seen in adolescents than in young adults, shaped by developmental, methodological, and contextual factors.
Frontiers in Psychology
May 20, 2026
Keisuke Suzuki
Altered states of consciousness—such as hallucinations, psychedelic experiences, and ego dissolution—differ qualitatively, but no unified computational framework describes what varies and along which dimensions. This paper proposes the C × G × D framework, drawing on three functional roles in deep neural networks: a Classifier (C) that extracts features from sensory input, a Generator (G) that synthesises internal representations, and a Discriminator (D) that judges whether a representation originates externally or internally. Phenomenological differences across altered states are redescribed as variations in objective functions, constraints, and thresholds of these components.