Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2017
Rahil Rojiani, Juan F Santoyo, Hadley Rahrig et al.
232 citations
Women who took a 12-week college meditation course showed greater decreases in negative affect and larger increases in mindfulness and self-compassion than men. Women's improvements in negative affect were linked to gains in both mindfulness skills and self-compassion, while men showed non-significant increases in negative affect and their affect changes correlated only with the ability to describe emotions, not with experiential or self-acceptance measures. The findings suggest that women may respond more favorably than men to school-based mindfulness training and that tailoring interventions by gender could improve effectiveness.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2013
Thomas Metzinger
165 citations
Most conscious thought is actually automatic, non-agentive subpersonal processing, with personal-level cognition being the exception. Mind wandering can be understood as a loss of mental autonomy (M-autonomy), which people lack for roughly two thirds of their conscious lives. Empirical evidence from mind wandering and dreaming research shows that phenomenally represented cognitive processing is mostly automatic and lacks mental agency, explicit goal-directedness, or veto control. This raises a new mind-body problem about how subpersonal cognition relates to personal-level thought. The paper proposes two criteria for individuating mind-wandering episodes: the 'self-representational blink' (SRB) and a shift in the phenomenological 'unit of identification' (UI), and outlines research goals linking mind wandering to philosophy of mind.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2020
Sami Abuhamdeh
140 citations
Flow, a concept introduced by Csikszentmihalyi in 1975, has been studied extensively for over forty years, yet understanding has advanced little beyond his original insights. This conceptual analysis argues that progress is hindered by inconsistent ways researchers define and measure flow. Among 42 recent studies, 24 distinct operationalizations were found. Three key inconsistencies are identified: treating flow as continuous versus discrete, as inherently enjoyable or not, and as dependent on or separate from the conditions that elicit it. The author recommends defining flow exclusively as a discrete, highly enjoyable optimal state, distinct from its antecedents, and suggests that lesser engagement be called task involvement instead.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2016
Andrea Jelić, Gaetano Tieri, Federico De Matteis et al.
138 citations
Neuroscientific approaches to architecture have yet to produce a systematic framework for interpreting results and guiding experiments. The enactive perspective is proposed as a guiding approach because it accounts for the active, dynamic connectedness between organism and world, shaped by bodily features. Emphasis is placed on embodiment and motivational factors as constituents of body-architecture interactions. Enactive understanding of the relational coupling between body schema and affordances of spaces highlights two-way bodily communication, explorable in immersive virtual reality. Enactivism also aligns with phenomenological thinking in architectural theory, offering common ground between neuroscience and architecture. A model of the human as embodied, enactive, and situated agent is proposed as a basis for neuroscientific and phenomenological interpretation of architectural experience.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2020
Aviva Berkovich-Ohana, Yair Dor-Ziderman, Fynn-Mathis Trautwein et al.
101 citations
Neurophenomenology integrates first-person (subjective) and third-person (objective) approaches to the mind. This practical guide outlines theoretical principles, the importance of phenomenological training, and the utility of cooperating with meditators as skilled participants. First-person accounts range from thick to thin phenomenology, highlighting a tension in naturalizing phenomenology. A typology of bridges creates mutual constraints between approaches. The paper demonstrates a decade of neurophenomenological studies investigating the sense of self, focusing on its embodied and minimal aspects accessed via dissolution of sense-of-boundaries, revealing the multi-dimensionality and flexibility of embodied selfhood.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2018
Daniel D Hutto, Ian Robertson, Michael D Kirchhoff
89 citations
Basic Emotion Theory (BET) has been central to affective science for decades, guiding research on facial expressions, neuroimaging, and evolutionary psychology. Philosophers have recently called for abandoning BET entirely. This paper defends BET against those criticisms, arguing that the theory should be retained. It also addresses concerns that BET's reliance on affect programs makes it outdated. The authors propose that with minor adjustments, BET can overcome these objections when reinterpreted through a radically enactive account of emotions. Rather than discarding BET, the paper shows how its core ideas can be revised and preserved, concluding that the revised BET remains a valuable framework.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2020
George Deane, Mark Miller, Sam Wilkinson
88 citations
Disruptions in the ordinary sense of self can lead to either devastating depersonalization or sought-after selfless experiences in meditation. Using the active inference framework, the authors propose that selfhood emerges from a temporally deep generative model that tunes agents to counterfactually rich possibilities for action. Depersonalization may result from an inferred loss of allostatic control, contrasting with the euphoric selfless experiences reported by meditation practitioners. This unified account conceptualizes the experiential similarities and differences between these states, with implications for understanding dissociative disorders and the therapeutic potential and dangers of meditation.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2014
Brice Martin, Marc Wittmann, Nicolas Franck et al.
87 citations
Disturbances of the minimal self—the immediate sense of being a subject of experience—may be a core feature of schizophrenia, manifesting as an altered sense of presence or difficulty distinguishing self from non-self. These disturbances are not correlated with common cognitive impairments like working-memory or attention disorders. This paper reviews literature suggesting a link between such self-disturbances and alterations in time processing, including both implicit temporal integration windows and explicit duration perception. The authors argue that understanding the relationship between time and the minimal self, along with embodiment issues, requires further research focused on implicit time processing.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2018
Kenneth Williford, Daniel Bennequin, Karl Friston et al.
85 citations
The Projective Consciousness Model (PCM) combines a projective geometric model of the perspectival structure of conscious experience with a variational free-energy minimization model of active inference, explaining how consciousness serves a cybernetic function: modulating cognitive and affective dynamics to control embodied agents. Projective transformations link geometry and inference, integrating perception, emotion, memory, reasoning, and perspectival imagination to optimize behavior, resilience, and preference satisfaction. The PCM makes empirical predictions, fits a neurocomputational framework, and accounts for pre-reflective self-consciousness, the first-person perspective, the sense of ownership, and social self-consciousness. The authors argue it offers the most complete theory to date of phenomenal selfhood.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2018
Judson A Brewer, Andrea Ruf, Ariel L Beccia et al.
83 citations
Modern food environments interact with human biology to promote reward-related eating through associative learning, specifically operant conditioning. Standard weight-loss diets that rely on dietary restriction have shown little long-term benefit and may be counterproductive because they do not directly target the habit-based reward-related eating cultivated by positive and negative reinforcement. Mindfulness training that targets reward-based learning may help rewire the eating process. Teaching patients to act on intrinsic rewards—such as enjoying healthy eating, not overeating, and self-compassion—rather than extrinsic rewards like weighing oneself, offers a promising new direction for improving individuals' relationship with food.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2018
Marcin Miłkowski, Robert Clowes, Zuzanna Rucińska et al.
82 citations
Several recent 'wide' perspectives on cognition—embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, and distributed—are only partially relevant because cognitive science has already moved beyond them toward integrated mechanistic explanations that include internal submechanisms, interactions with others, groups, cognitive artifacts, and the environment. These wide perspectives function as research heuristics for building such explanations. The argument draws on developments in the study of mindreading and debates on emotions, showing that cognitive neuroscience has undergone a silent mechanistic revolution, turning from binary oppositions toward integration with the broader field.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2020
Todd E Feinberg, Jon Mallatt
80 citations
Consciousness arises from standard (weak) emergence in physical systems, not from a radical or strong form of emergence. The paper traces emergent features through three progressive levels: life, nervous systems, and special neurobiological features, each increasing in complexity and ultimately leading to phenomenal consciousness. The formulation Life + Special neurobiological features → Phenomenal consciousness expresses this relationship. Consciousness fits the criteria of an emergent property with extreme complexity. The authors conclude that consciousness stems from an organism's personal life combined with a complex nervous system that maximizes emergent neurobiological features, and that no scientific explanatory gap exists between brain and consciousness, though an experiential or epistemic gap remains that is ontologically untroubling.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2014
Aviva Berkovich-Ohana, Joseph Glicksohn
72 citations
A theoretical model called the consciousness state space (CSS) proposes that all experiences can be mapped along three dimensions: time, awareness, and emotion. These dimensions each have two layers: a core layer tied to the present moment and minimal selfhood, and an extended layer supporting narrative selfhood, memory, and personal identity. The model suggests that normal waking consciousness involves two simultaneous, typically antagonistic trajectories within core and extended consciousness. Altered self-states, such as flow and meditation, change this dynamic. The CSS framework integrates diverse phenomenological and neuroscientific findings, offering testable predictions for the science of consciousness.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2016
Chiara F Tagliabue, Chiara Mazzi, Chiara Bagattini et al.
69 citations
Visual conscious experience is graded rather than all-or-none, and its neural signature appears in early local brain activity without requiring later frontal involvement. Using electroencephalography, researchers recorded event-related potentials while participants viewed low-contrast visual stimuli and rated their perceptual clarity on a four-point scale. A left centro-parietal negative deflection (Visual Awareness Negativity, VAN) at 280–320 milliseconds reflected the perceptual content, and a bilateral positive deflection (Late Positivity, LP) at 510–550 milliseconds reflected post-perceptual processes. The amplitude of both deflections increased gradually with reported awareness. Source localization placed the generators of phenomenal content in the left temporal lobe.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2021
Terje Sparby, Matthew D Sacchet
68 citations
Classifying meditation techniques is crucial for research but faces fundamental challenges. This paper describes problems in defining meditation and suggests an integrated model. Drawing on classical, contemporary, and holistic systems, it proposes that all meditation techniques involve a specific set of activities: focusing, releasing, imagining, and moving in relation to an object of meditation or fields of experience. These activities can be combined and unified into observing, producing, and being aware, and all are unified in awareness of awareness. Defining specific techniques involves specifying which activities and objects are involved. This approach can account for the inner workings of existing classification systems, laying a foundation for an overarching system to guide future research and practice.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2020
Zoran Josipovic, Vladimir Miskovic
67 citations
Minimal phenomenal experiences (MPEs) are episodes with greatly reduced phenomenal content and arousal, often considered cases of consciousness-as-such. The authors argue instead that consciousness-as-such is primarily a type of non-conceptual, non-propositional, and nondual awareness—non-representational in nature. This unique kind of awareness cannot be adequately captured by the two-dimensional model of consciousness that combines arousal level with phenomenal content or by mental representations. To understand consciousness-as-such and consciousness more generally, the authors suggest researching it as a distinct kind.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2019
Tainá Carla Freitas De Macêdo, Glescikelly Herminia Ferreira, Katie Moraes De Almondes et al.
65 citations
Lucid dreaming, where dreamers know they are dreaming and can control dream content, may help people with nightmare disorder by allowing them to transform nightmares into normal dreams, improving sleep. A review of the existing literature found that lucid dreaming may reduce nightmare frequency, intensity, and psychological distress, but the available studies are scarce and yield inconsistent results. More research is needed to determine the effectiveness of lucid dreaming as a treatment for nightmares in clinical practice.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2020
Kevin J Ryan, Shaun Gallagher
61 citations
Ecological psychology and enactivism both hold that much of cognition can be explained without invoking internal representations, focusing instead on the dynamic coupling between an agent and the world. Yet the brain clearly plays a role. This paper explores the concept of resonance as a non-representational alternative to the brain's traditional role as a representational organ. It reviews two historical approaches to resonance—representational and non-representational, dynamic—and applies them to a case study of standard tonal jazz performance. The authors propose that a non-representational resonance account, consistent with both ecological psychology and enactivism, offers a viable explanation for jazz performance and suggest future research on the brain as a resonant organ.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2020
Harald Walach
55 citations
Ontology and epistemology are interdependent. The current materialist ontology in science, paired with an empiricist epistemology focused only on outer sense experience, is insufficient to explain consciousness or anomalous cognitions. Historically, medieval science included both inner (first-person) and outer (third-person) experience. The author proposes a complementarist dual aspect model where consciousness and matter are coprimary, not derivative. This entails a broader epistemology: contemplative practice can explore consciousness to understand the deep structure of the world, complementing outward-directed science. Such a contemplative science may aid theoretical intuition and ethics.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2020
Edward Baggs, Vicente Raja, Michael L Anderson
52 citations
Within ecological and enactive cognitive science, skill learning is often viewed narrowly as bodily change over time or broadly as change in the animal–environment system. The authors argue for the broader view, rejecting the narrow one. They claim the proper unit of analysis is activity, not the body, and that learning involves establishing and adaptively organizing enabling constraints on that activity. Using examples of maintaining upright posture and walking, they show how environmental structures (e.g., furniture for support) play a constitutive role that changes over development. This extended approach unifies ecological and enactive theories and may ground a radically embodied account of higher cognition.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2014
Stephen J Cowley
51 citations
Language is symbiotic: its dynamics between agent and environment arise as linguistic embodiment is managed under verbal constraints, granting humans a unique form of phenomenal experience through co-action. Evidence from 750 ms of mother-daughter talk shows how parties attune using a dynamic field to co-embody speech with experience of wordings, which emerge in making and tracking phonetic gestures that mesh artifice, cultural products, and impersonal experience. Rather than processing verbal content in brains, linguistic symbiosis grants access to diachronic resources, redefining language as "activity in which wordings play a part."
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2021
Larissa Bartlett, Marie-Jeanne Buscot, Aidan Bindoff et al.
50 citations
In a large sample of adults from 130 countries, higher mindfulness was linked to lower perceived stress and slightly higher work engagement. Each standard deviation increase in mindfulness corresponded to a 0.52 standard deviation decrease in stress and a 0.06 standard deviation increase in engagement. After a six-week mindfulness MOOC, participants reported substantially higher mindfulness, reduced stress, and a small improvement in work engagement. The findings suggest mindfulness is a modifiable personal resource that may protect against stress and support engagement, and that online courses can deliver these benefits affordably to many people.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2014
Marek Mcgann
49 citations
Embodied cognitive science often describes the mind as “world-involving,” yet the nature of the environment remains poorly specified. This paper argues that enactivists should ally with a dynamic form of ecological psychology, which offers the most explicit theory of the psychological environment. It explores the intersubjective, cultural character of human psychology and the challenges this poses for both enactivist and ecological approaches. The theory of behavior settings (Barker, 1968; Schoggen, 1989) is presented as a framework to address these challenges, yielding an outline of a radical embodied account of intersubjectivity and social activity.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2015
Tal D Ben-Soussan, Aviva Berkovich-Ohana, Claudia Piervincenzi et al.
48 citations
Four weeks of daily Quadrato Motor Training (QMT), a whole-body movement contemplative practice, increased cognitive flexibility and ideational fluency more than verbal or simple motor training alone. In a pilot longitudinal MRI study, gray matter volume and fractional anisotropy changes in several brain regions, including the cerebellum, correlated positively with cognitive flexibility scores. These preliminary results support a connection between motor practice and creativity, consistent with models integrating cognitive flexibility, embodiment, and the motor system.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2019
Todd E Feinberg, Jon Mallatt
47 citations
Consciousness cannot be explained solely by physics, chemistry, and biology, creating an "explanatory gap" between the physical brain and subjective experience. This paper deduces the living and neural features behind primary consciousness within a naturalistic biological framework, identifying vertebrates, arthropods, and cephalopod molluscs as taxa possessing these features. It reconstructs when consciousness first evolved and considers its adaptive value. The authors theorize that consciousness arises from all complex system features of life plus even more complex features of elaborate brains. They argue the explanatory gap persists because it stems from both life and diverse brains, requiring a complex, multifactorial account including consciousness's diversity, personal nature from embodied life, and unique neural features.