Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2026
Robert Worden
Consciousness may arise from un-encoded information in an analogue model of 3-D space, specifically a wave excitation in the thalamus that stores information as a Fourier transform, similar to a hologram. Neurons couple to this wave, but the wave itself is the source of consciousness, not neural computation. The theory avoids the decoding problem inherent in neural theories, where encoded information requires external decoding not present in the brain. Although such a wave has not been detected, indirect evidence exists in the mammalian thalamus and insect central body. The theory is an initial conceptual outline, potentially falsifiable, and could explain why consciousness evolved, with many details remaining to be worked out.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2026
Conor H Murray, Kafui Dzirasa, Dana Sawyer et al.
Consciousness remains one of the most enduring questions across human history, with thinkers debating its definition, mechanisms, and purpose. This review examines historical and contemporary perspectives from philosophy, science, medicine, and practice, integrating neuroscientific models, clinical applications, and contemplative methods. The authors identify common themes and persistent gaps in knowledge, highlighting opportunities for future investigation. They advance a working model of consciousness that considers how it is constructed, measured, and modified, and why it may be central to survival and human flourishing.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2026
Giorgio Marchetti
Emotions arise when an object triggers an affective response that shifts attention from the object to the sense of self, activating an area of the organ of attention (aOA) related to the self and adopting a corresponding set-point. Deviations from this set-point generate the conscious experience of emotion, informing the individual about internal equilibrium and the integrity of the sense of self. The AME theory of consciousness proposes that phenomenal consciousness results from modulation of energy levels in the aOA, manifesting through five dimensions: qualitative, quantitative, hedonic, temporal, and spatial. Emotions emerge from interactions among core affect, cognitive appraisal, and physiological-behavioral manifestations, cycling through conscious and unconscious processing. Emotions act as adaptive regulators of behavior and as operations for monitoring, defining, and reconstructing the sense of self.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2026
James Meaden
Burnout among knowledge workers persists despite favorable conditions and limited lasting effects from interventions. Dominant resource models cannot explain why recovery fails with adequate rest, why burnout remains stable despite accumulating resources, or why mindfulness effects fade when practice stops. Building on the environmental model of mindfulness, this paper introduces abstraction habituation: the progressive loss of cognitive flexibility through sustained knowledge work. Neuroplastic adaptation establishes abstraction as the default processing mode, reducing concrete processing capacity that supports psychological recovery. This framework accounts for career-long burnout stability and limited intervention durability, suggesting effective prevention requires redesigning work environments to preserve cognitive flexibility, not solely adding individual coping resources.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2026
Ivan A Khvatov
Self-awareness in animals is not a single capacity that a species either has or lacks, as the classic mirror test implies. Instead, self-representation can be understood as a modular regulatory system through which an organism accounts for its own body, actions, and agency. The authors propose a Modal-Modular Model with three levels of self-representation—implicit bodily, minimal self-related awareness, and reflective self-consciousness—and several candidate modules such as body size, weight, agency, and appearance. The framework shifts research from asking whether an animal 'has' self-awareness to constructing species-specific profiles across sensory channels and ecological contexts.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2026
Tatsuya Daikoku
Creativity in human societies may be sustained not by isolated minds but by embodied, collective intelligence. Using music as a model, this review argues that creativity depends on the dynamic tuning of uncertainty: moderate, time-varying surprise, often accompanied by interoceptive bodily sensations, can promote exploration, while interpersonal synchrony and social evaluation stabilize and transmit what is new. Because creativity is value-neutral, its social consequences depend on ethics, morality, and empathy.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2026
Sarfaraz K Niazi
Empathy can be modulated through pharmacological, neurostimulation, and behavioral approaches, but effects are generally small to moderate and often temporary. Intranasal oxytocin shows modest, context-dependent effects (d = 0.24), while MDMA-assisted therapy yields larger benefits (d ≈ 0.91) in trauma-focused therapy but faces regulatory hurdles. Neurostimulation techniques like transcranial magnetic stimulation (d ≈ 0.18-0.20) offer causal insights but limited lasting behavioral change. Behavioral interventions, especially mindfulness-based programs longer than 24 hours (d = 0.37), show the greatest potential for scalability and sustainability. Empathy remains a promising but clinically constrained therapeutic target, requiring larger trials and standardized outcome measures.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2025
Amira Arora
Consciousness is not a product of the brain but the foundational reality from which mind and matter arise, according to this theoretical paper. Integrating non-dual spiritual traditions such as Advaita Vedanta and Tibetan Buddhism with contemplative science and transpersonal theory, the work argues that a consciousness-centered metaphysics offers a more coherent model for explaining subjectivity, intentionality, and qualia. It critiques materialist reductionism and the limitations of third-person methodologies, emphasizing first-person and participatory ways of knowing. The paper explores the epistemological, ethical, cultural, and ecological implications of adopting a transpersonal cosmology that bridges science and spirituality without collapsing their distinctions, inviting a pluralistic, integrative paradigm for understanding reality.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2025
Andreas Huber, Anette Kjellgren, Torsten Passie
Dream-like and psychedelic experiences often seem internally illogical, but this may reflect a distinct, premodern mode of cognition called 'mythic' cognition rather than a cognitive deficit. Thirty-one participants underwent four 90-minute flotation REST sessions to induce altered, dream-like states. After each session, they completed the Phenomenology of Consciousness Inventory and additional questions targeting mythic cognition features. Participants showed significant phenomenological shifts toward experiences characteristic of mythic cognition, with altered states exhibiting ontological parallels to mythic conceptions of space, time, and substance. The findings suggest that the perceived illogicality in altered states arises from a distinct cognitive framework, not from deficits.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2025
Ding-Zhong Huang, Rohani Ismail, Kar Kheng Yeoh et al.
Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) among college students improved positive mental health with a large, sustained effect (d = 0.71) at post-intervention and 6-month follow-up, but did not significantly reduce psychological distress compared to a waitlist control. Cross-sectional analyses showed mindfulness was positively linked to well-being and negatively linked to distress, with sleep quality acting as a potential mediator, especially for positive mental health. The study used a sequential design: a cross-sectional survey of 406 students and a randomized controlled trial of 120 students assigned to an 8-week MBSR program or waitlist.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2025
Guy Cheron, Ana Maria Cebolla
The brain evolved primarily to generate movement and can be studied as a complex oscillator using electroencephalography (EEG). This perspective reviews findings from animal and human research showing that analyzing brain oscillatory dynamics and neural entrainment reveals links to mental states, motor performance, and consciousness. By examining three established EEG markers—the P300 evoked potential, the readiness potential, and the somatosensory N30 wave—the authors propose new neurophysiological mechanisms for future study. Insights from oculomotor research, particularly the neural integrator concept and its extension to working memory and dynamic attractor models, may clarify how movement generation and consciousness interact functionally.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2025
Yaming Shang, Da Dong, Qingming Liu et al.
A critical examination of Kristopher Nielsen's 3E framework—embodied, embedded, and enactive—shows how second-generation cognitive science offers a more comprehensive and ecologically valid perspective on mental disorders by emphasizing the dynamic interplay among brain, body, and environment. The framework challenges traditional conceptual models and addresses their limitations. The article proposes future research directions that underscore pluralism in explaining mental disorders and explore integrating extended cognition. These theoretical developments refine classification and explanatory methodologies, inform evidence-based treatment strategies, and aim to advance psychopathology toward a more integrated, inclusive, and practice-oriented field.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2025
Sabina Wantoch
Anomalous experiences, often labeled as hallucinations or psychosis, are typically framed by psychiatry as pathologies of the mind. This framing can obstruct intersubjective processes for those who undergo such experiences, creating a relational dynamic that excludes individuals from shared interpersonal reality. The psychiatric conceptualization may paradoxically contribute to the very experiences it seeks to eliminate. Phenomenological psychopathology often takes this pathological framing as a given, but the author argues it should instead start from direct experience itself, without pathological assumptions. This points toward a critical phenomenology that examines how conceptual frameworks shape experience.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2025
Emma R Huels, Lily Carter, Gang Xu et al.
Shamanic journeying, an ancient spiritual practice, produces dynamic changes in heart function measurable through heart rate variability (HRV). In a single subject, drumming initiation decreased heart rate and increased HRV measures, while shapeshifting increased heart rate and certain HRV indicators. Qigong meditation also increased HRV measures, with greater changes in some metrics than drumming initiation. These findings suggest shamanic journeying involves widespread cardiac and physiological changes that can be tracked visually and via ultra-short-term HRV.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2025
Lotte Bock, Miriam Hägerbäumer, Erik Riedel et al.
A randomized controlled trial compared a targeted web-based mindfulness intervention focused on self-compassion and gratitude with a comprehensive mindfulness program among 167 university students in distance learning contexts. After exclusions, 98 participants completed daily digital exercises over 28 days. Both groups showed significant short-term improvements in mindfulness and perceived stress. However, only the targeted intervention group sustained reductions in perceived stress at a three-month follow-up. The targeted program was designed using Cognitive Load Theory and Spaced Repetition Theory to reduce extraneous processing and support memory consolidation. Simplified, theory-informed mindfulness interventions may improve psychological resilience in cognitively burdened learners.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2025
Nevia Dolcini
Hallucinations are studied differently in philosophy and empirical science, creating a conceptual misalignment. Philosophers treat them as experiences indistinguishable from veridical perception to test theories of perception and consciousness, while scientists study diverse, clinically embedded phenomena that often differ phenomenologically from ordinary perception. This paper clarifies key distinctions—indistinguishability, insight, sense of reality, agency, ownership—and sketches points of contact with scientific constructs. It examines bottom-up, top-down, and predictive processing models, highlighting their explanations and limitations. It re-situates hallucinations within philosophical debates on perception, mental imagery, and phenomenology, showing how empirical findings complicate current accounts. The analysis supports pluralist, integrative approaches, recasting hallucinations as a family of related phenomena.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2025
Stephan Schleim
Yoga, as defined by the classical Yoga Sutras (at least 1,600 years old), combines ethical rules, postures, breathing exercises, and meditative techniques. This perspective examines whether Western psychology and science are compatible with yoga psychology. It focuses on epistemology—what sources are accepted for valid knowledge in the yoga system—and ontology in the broader context of Indian philosophy. The discussion highlights assumptions from Indian schools of thought that seem difficult to reconcile with Western science. Reinterpreting classical Indian philosophical terms to achieve compatibility with science would likely undermine the authenticity and inner core of those systems.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2025
Mina Nakano
A six-session online mindfulness program designed for Japanese workers, emphasizing decentering and informal practices that fit into daily routines, improved self-compassion, communication skills, decentering, and wellbeing. Among 80 participants who completed the program, significant gains were observed, while a control group of 134 workers showed no notable changes. The program consisted of 90-minute bi-weekly sessions over three months, incorporating brief meditation and workplace-based exercises. The findings suggest that short, structured mindfulness interventions can yield substantial psychological benefits for busy professionals.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2025
Paul F Cook, Laurra M Aagaard, Lisa Krug Avery et al.
Nursing students who received a single 1-2 hour session of Regenerating Images in Memory (RIM) therapy reported large improvements on 4 of 5 symptom questionnaires (Cohen's d = 1.93-2.75). Participants experienced levels of altered consciousness similar to those in psychedelic drug studies, especially an ineffability linked to symptom improvement. EEG readings showed a shift from frontal to temporal lobe activity during the middle stage of RIM, followed by co-activation of both areas in the final stage—a pattern also seen in psychedelic research. This uncontrolled, exploratory study with 30 nursing students during the late COVID-19 pandemic suggests RIM's proposed mechanism aligns with Two Minds Theory, though no conclusions about treatment efficacy can be drawn.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2024
Chuan-Chung Hsieh, Shun Li
A bibliometric analysis of 1,950 articles from the journal Mindfulness (2012–2022) reveals significant growth in annual publication volume, with research progression divided into three phases. The United States leads in publication output, researcher involvement, and institutional contributions. Keyword co-occurrence and reference co-citation analyses identify five main research clusters: mindfulness, meditation, depression, stress, and self-compassion. Mindfulness research in Taiwan's educational sector remains underdeveloped, highlighting a need for increased support in diverse thematic areas.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2024
Gustav A Von Schulz
Vygotsky developed his Cultural Historical Theory by synthesizing pre-revolutionary Hegelian ideas about consciousness and culture with the Marxist materialist ideology required by the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution. He aimed to resolve the ideological conflict between idealism and materialism, drawing on Gestalt psychology, Hegel, Marx, and Engels to create a new psychological method. The resulting theory focused on consciousness and mind rather than biology-based stimulus-response psychology. Vygotsky's approach demonstrates how deep ideological differences can be bridged by finding unexpected commonalities between opposing views, as shown in his criticism of pure empiricism.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2024
Kelley C O'Donnell, Lauren Okano, Michael Alpert et al.
A conceptual framework for MDMA-Assisted Therapy for PTSD centers on the participant's inner healing intelligence as the primary agent of change, with the therapeutic relationship as the core facilitative condition. This inner-directed, holistic, self-directed, relational, and trauma-informed approach includes a non-pathologizing stance toward embodied experiences, such as intense emotional expression, multiplicity, suicidal ideation, and transpersonal experiences. Therapists bring psychodynamic, somatic, and transpersonal awareness, empathic attunement, relational skillfulness, and cultural humility. MDMA with this psychotherapy outperformed placebo with psychotherapy in Phase 2 and 3 trials, though significant symptom reduction also occurred in the placebo group, supporting the psychotherapy model itself.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2023
Romy Lauche, Dennis Anheyer, Lisa A Uebelacker et al.
Among 7,186 Australian women aged 36-43, 27.5% practiced yoga or meditation. Perceived stress partially explained the link between negative life events and depressive symptoms, but yoga/meditation did not reduce that stress. Instead, yoga/meditation directly weakened the connection between negative life events and depression, acting as a buffer. Social support and optimism also moderated the stress-depression link. The findings suggest yoga/meditation may help protect against depression after negative events, though the mechanism remains unclear.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2022
Joan González Guardiola
The authors argue that Husserl's phenomenology contains a notion of a 'minimal self' that is not reducible to a Cartesian subject. They distinguish the philosophy of the subject from the philosophy of the self, showing that Husserl's conception of the self does not align with the Cartesian association Heidegger criticized. By analyzing the 'senses of the self' in Husserl's work, they extract the concept of 'minimal self' relevant to current debates between psychiatry and phenomenology. The authors also demonstrate that moving from the transcendental ego to a theory of the orientation of conscious life requires grounding the concept of ego in the formal mereology of Husserl's third 'Logical Investigation.'
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2022
Nam-Gyoon Kim, Judith A Effken
Perceiving affordances—opportunities for action that the environment offers relative to an individual's body and abilities—keeps people connected to their surroundings and mentally healthy. When this ability is impaired, meaningful relationships with the environment break down, contributing to irrational behavior seen in self disorders like schizophrenia. Two laboratory studies showed that patients with schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease have a reduced capacity to perceive affordances. This finding serves as contra-positive evidence that supports the affordance concept: if lacking affordance perception leads to mental health problems, then those with such problems should show impaired affordance detection. The results also suggest contra-positive evidence can complement positive evidence for empirically validating concepts like affordance and meaning.