Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2021
Nir Lahav, Zachariah A Neemeh
27 citations
The explanatory gap between functional and phenomenal consciousness—the 'hard problem'—remains unresolved. Dualists posit phenomenal consciousness as a primitive, private, non-reductive element; illusionists claim it is a cognitive illusion. Both views are flawed because they treat consciousness as an absolute, observer-independent property. A relativistic theory of consciousness is proposed: a system has or lacks phenomenal consciousness only relative to an observer. In the cognitive system's own frame of reference, consciousness is observable (first-person perspective); in another frame, it is not (third-person perspective). Neither perspective is privileged. Drawing on relativity physics, a mathematical formalization is developed that bridges the explanatory gap and dissolves the hard problem. Philosophers can contribute by collaborating with neuroscientists to explore the neural basis of phenomenal structures.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2021
Lisa Musculus, Markus R Tünte, Markus Raab et al.
27 citations
Interoception, the sense of the internal state of the body, is a crucial but often overlooked component of the minimal self—the basic sense of being a subject. This perspective extends the embodiment account of interoceptive inference to explain how the minimal self develops in humans. It reviews major theories linking interoception to the minimal self and argues for a bidirectional relationship between motor and interoceptive states that jointly shape this development. The authors present empirical findings on interoception during development and offer testable theoretical predictions, aiming to provide a comprehensive view of the mechanisms underlying the minimal self.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2017
Tuomas K Pernu
27 citations
The mental and physical realms appear distinct, with the mental dependent on yet different from the physical. This review identifies five marks of the mental—intentionality, consciousness, free will, teleology, and normativity—that are commonly associated with mental phenomena and each conflict with a physical view of reality in unique ways. Rather than defining mentality, these features highlight that there is no single mind-body problem but a set of interconnected problems. Each problem is analyzed, and their differences, similarities, and connections are identified, offering a foundation for future theoretical work in psychology and philosophy of mind, which has often suffered from unclarities and conflations.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2021
Felicity Maria Simpson, Gemma Perry, William Forde Thompson
26 citations
A 10-minute online chanting session reduced stress and increased positive affect compared to an online control task, whether done individually or in a group. Participants in group chanting felt more connected to their chanting group than those in the control group, but general feelings of connectedness to all people did not differ across conditions. The findings suggest that online chanting may serve as a useful psychosocial intervention, even when practiced remotely.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2018
Michal Polák, Tomáš Marvan
26 citations
A non-causal account of the relationship between consciousness and its neural correlates is preferable to a causal one, which implicitly involves an undesirable dualism of matter and mind. The identity theory, which holds that states of phenomenal consciousness are identical with their neural correlates, is favored. The paper argues that research into neural correlates of consciousness and the identity theory can enrich each other, but the identity theory requires a suitably defined concept of type, which has been neglected. A tentative hierarchical classification of phenomenal and neurophysiological types is proposed. The identity theory is compared with other mind-body conceptions, and scientists are urged to engage more with metaphysical issues.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2022
David Martínez-pernía, Ignacio Cea, Alejandro Troncoso et al.
25 citations
Empathy for pain involves direct bodily perception and sensation, not just mental states. In an experimental phenomenological study, 28 adults watched videos of extreme-sport accidents and then underwent phenomenological interviews. Four main themes emerged: bodily resonance (kinesthetic and affective sensations coordinated with the athlete's actions), attentional focus (either on one's own discomfort or the athlete's pain), kinesthetic motivation (avoidance or helping impulses), and temporal fluctuations in experience. Two experiential structures were identified: a self-centered empathic experience focused on personal discomfort and self-protection, and an other-centered empathic experience focused on the athlete's suffering with prosocial motivation. The findings support an enactive, embodied view of empathy and extend enactive theory to non-interactive social contexts.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2020
Robin Bekrater-Bodmann, Ruben T Azevedo, Vivien Ainley et al.
25 citations
The perception of being located inside one's own body (bodily self-location) can be altered by manipulating external sensory information, such as viewing the body from a third-person perspective and receiving synchronous touches. This study tested whether interoception—the processing of internal bodily signals—affects this malleability. Participants experienced stronger out-of-body sensations when viewing their body from a third-person perspective with synchronous visuotactile stimulation. Higher meta-cognitive interoceptive awareness (how well one monitors internal signals) was specifically linked to less malleability of bodily self-location. The results suggest that stable self-location depends on an interaction between external sensory input and higher-order interoceptive abilities, with implications for understanding disorders involving disturbed body perception.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2020
Daniel Erlacher, Tadas Stumbrys
24 citations
A combination of the wake-up-back-to-bed (WBTB) sleep protocol and the mnemonic technique MILD can effectively induce lucid dreams in people who are not selected for lucid dreaming ability. In a sleep laboratory experiment, participants were awakened after 6 hours, kept awake for 30 or 60 minutes to practice MILD or a control task, then returned to bed. Across three MILD conditions, 36% to 54% reported lucid dreams, and 14% to 27% produced PSG-verified eye signals. In contrast, only 9% reported lucid dreams after reading, and none occurred after playing a video game. The findings suggest that WBTB plus MILD is an effective induction method for laboratory research.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2025
Paul Alan Arkin Alvarado-García, Marilú Roxana Soto-Vásquez, Francisco Mercedes Infantes Gomez et al.
23 citations
A 12-session mindfulness meditation program significantly reduced stress, anxiety, and depression and improved sleep quality, social support, and life satisfaction among university students. In a quasi-experimental study with 128 participants divided into an experimental and a waiting-list control group, all measured variables showed statistically significant improvements after the intervention. Effect sizes ranged from small for depression (η² = 0.091) to large for social support (η² = 0.704). The program appears effective for enhancing psychological well-being in educational settings.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2024
Jungjoo Lee, Junhyoung Kim, Marcia G Ory
23 citations
A 10-week pilot clinical trial of Immersive Virtual Reality Meditation (IVRM) added to usual care for 26 adults with depression and anxiety found that improvements in emotional regulation, measured by Coherence Achievement Score from electrocardiogram, were associated with reductions in both depressive and anxiety symptoms. The single-arm study delivered the intervention three times weekly at a community hospital behavioral health unit. Results suggest that IVRM may enhance emotional regulatory function and help alleviate depression and anxiety, supporting the potential of technology-based complementary approaches.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2023
Alan Jurgens
23 citations
Disability may be better understood through an ecological functional model that focuses on how individual functionality intersects with contributions to group and collective functioning, offering an alternative to both social-relational and medical models. Enactivist relational models of disability, while challenging the orthodox medical model, remain problematically committed to an individualist methodology, facing both theoretical and practical issues in intervention strategies. For a genuinely relational approach, enactivists should adopt a neurodiversity paradigm and the ecological functional model proposed by Robert Chapman.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2022
Laura Moral-Bofill, Andrés López de la Llave, Mᵃ Carmen Pérez-llantada et al.
23 citations
An electronic intervention program designed to develop psychological self-regulation skills helped performing musicians in Spain improve their flow state and sense of control while reducing musical performance anxiety and self-consciousness. The program used a quasi-experimental design with a control group, involving 62 musicians from various music colleges. After the intervention, the experimental group showed significant improvements in flow state and sense of control, and decreases in music performance anxiety and self-consciousness, while the control group did not. The changes demonstrated an inverse relationship between flow and anxiety, with worry and lack of control likely playing key roles in performance situations. Results are under discussion.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2020
Kenneth G Drinkwater, Andrew Denovan, Neil Dagnall
23 citations
Among people who have experienced lucid dreaming, those who also report nightmares and sleep paralysis tend to score higher on measures of paranormal experience and belief, but the correlations are weak. A tendency toward reality-testing deficits—especially auditory and visual hallucinations—shows the strongest links with these sleep-related dissociative experiences. Paranormal experience alone does not predict lucid dreaming, nightmares, or sleep paralysis once hallucination-proneness is accounted for, but it becomes a significant predictor when hallucinations are controlled. The findings suggest that internally generated cognitive processes, such as hallucinatory tendencies, play a key role in conscious control during lucid dreaming and related dissociative sleep states.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2023
Amirhossein Hashemi, Ali Akbar Oroojan, Maryam Rassouli et al.
22 citations
A systematic review of near-death experiences (NDEs) across religious and cultural backgrounds analyzed 54 studies from 1980 to 2022, covering 465 individuals. The experiences fell into four main categories: emotional, cognitive, spiritual/religious, and supernatural, with 19 subcategories. The most common were supernatural experiences, particularly out-of-body experiences. The core patterns reported—such as leaving the body, passing through a tunnel, and heightened senses—were similar across individuals, though explanations and interpretations varied by culture and religion. The review suggests that understanding these common elements can help clinicians provide meaningful responses to patients who report NDEs.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2022
Inês Hipólito, Thomas Van Es
22 citations
Social cognition should not be understood as attributing mental states to others via representational models. Holding both enactivism and Theory of Mind creates contradictions because Theory of Mind assumes social cognition reduces to mental representation and relies on an innate, contentful 'toolkit' for theorizing—both rejected by enactivism. The paper advances an enactivist-dynamic alternative: social cognition is dynamic, real-time, fluid, contextual social action. Using dynamical systems theory, it explains how socio-cognitive novelty arises in development, and active inference is used to show social understanding as generalized synchronization, avoiding representational assumptions.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2023
Karin Cinalioglu, Paola Lavín, Magnus Bein et al.
21 citations
A randomized controlled trial will test whether virtual-reality-guided meditation is feasible and acceptable for reducing stress, anxiety, and depression in older adults. Thirty community-dwelling adults aged 60 years or older with moderate stress will be randomly assigned to either an eight-session VR meditation program or a waitlist control group. Sessions last 15 minutes and occur twice weekly for four weeks, offered at home or in a hospital. Outcomes include perceived stress, anxiety, depression, sleep quality, quality of life, and mindfulness skills, measured before and after the intervention. Qualitative interviews will capture participants' experiences. The trial is registered at ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT05315609).
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2021
Aden-Paul Flotman
21 citations
During the COVID-19 pandemic, self-transcendence helped seven South African middle managers find meaning and maintain wellbeing at work. Through unstructured narratives, the study found that self-transcendence acts as a coping mechanism in adversity, enabling managers to renegotiate meaning in three ways: shifting from blame to a work orientation, from reflection to reflexivity, and from self-consciousness to other-consciousness. Self-transcendence also allowed exploration of anxiety's adaptive benefits. The findings extend existential positive psychology and suggest organizations invest in reflexive practices to promote deep learning and connectivity.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2024
Sarah E B Francis, Frances Shawyer, Bruno A Cayoun et al.
20 citations
Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) and mindfulness-integrated cognitive behavior therapy (MiCBT) differ in their origins, structure, and evidence. MBCT was developed to prevent depressive relapse and has strong support from systematic reviews and meta-analyses, earning endorsement in clinical guidelines, but its single-disorder focus may limit its use in diverse health settings. MiCBT was designed for transdiagnostic applications, incorporating exposure procedures and compassion training to reduce avoidance, and shows promising early evidence, though it lacks inclusion in clinical guidelines. More high-quality randomized controlled trials and systematic reviews are needed for MiCBT, while MBCT requires greater attention to dissemination and implementation research.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2022
Charlotte Grégoire, Nolwenn Marie, Corine Sombrun et al.
20 citations
A protocol describes a planned trial comparing three group interventions—hypnosis, mindful self-compassion meditation, and self-induced cognitive trance (SICT)—against a no-intervention control for improving quality of life in cancer patients who have completed active treatment within the past year. The study targets cancer-related fatigue, emotional distress, sleep difficulties, pain, and cognitive problems. Each participant chooses their preferred arm. Data from questionnaires, neurobiological measures, and medical records are collected at baseline, immediately after the intervention, and at 3- and 12-month follow-ups. The trial aims to enroll 160 patients and will assess short- and long-term effectiveness.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2022
Luis Felipe Llanos, Lorena Martínez Verduzco
20 citations
Transcendence can be understood as either a personal pursuit (individual transcendence) or a community-oriented one (collective transcendence). A survey of 402 business students in Mexico, analyzed with a structural equation model, showed that these two orientations are clearly different. Young participants preferred seeking personal meaning over collective meaning, suggesting that collective transcendence may be a prerequisite for personal transcendence. The findings can inform job profile design for staff development and serve as a positive model for life education and society.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2020
David Travieso, Lorena Lobo, Carlos De Paz et al.
20 citations
Enactivism and ecological psychology share more common ground than is often recognized, as illustrated by the example of dynamic touch—a form of touch involving muscles and tendons that allows perception of hand-held objects wielded but not seen. Dynamic touch necessarily implies active exploration because perceivers perform wielding movements with effort. The example has been formalized at the level of laws governing the organism-environment system, providing empirically supported instantiations of sensorimotor contingencies (in enactivist terms) and intentional exploration and information detection (in ecological terms). It also exemplifies the enactivist concepts of bringing-forth the world and sense-making. The article also clarifies key ecological concepts of invariance and affordance, highlighting the crucial difference between perceiving and actualizing affordances for dialogue between the approaches.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2023
Josh Kaplan, Vanessa C Somohano, Belle Zaccari et al.
19 citations
Mind-body interventions (MBIs) for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) show promise but have inconsistent evidence. A review of 26 randomized controlled trials found low-strength evidence for mindfulness-based and meditation- or mantra-based interventions due to contradictory results and high risk of bias. Movement-based interventions (e.g., yoga, tai chi) had moderate-strength evidence, with individual studies consistently favoring the intervention across a relatively large number of studies and participants. Only two of the 26 studies used objective outcome measures. The review highlights the need for better comparator conditions, standardized measurement, and objective outcomes in future research.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2023
Pascal Michael, David Luke, Oliver Robinson
19 citations
A person who had a near-death experience (NDE) while in a coma from bacterial meningoencephalitis later took 5MeO-DMT, an endogenous psychedelic. A thematic analysis of the NDE account and an interview about the drug experience found high comparability, including ego dissolution and transcendence of time and space. However, the NDE uniquely included a life review, encounters with the deceased, and a threshold experience. Despite similarities, the participant felt the two experiences were not similar enough to attribute the NDE to endogenous psychedelics. The authors speculate that the brain inflammation may have triggered neural activity similar to that of psychedelics, but note this hypothesis is speculative.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2022
Ido Hartogsohn
19 citations
The concept of cyberdelics, linking digital technologies with psychedelic drugs, re-emerges alongside renewed interest in virtual reality and psychedelics. Advocates envision transformative technologies fostering awe and transcendence rather than consumerism, but cultural and economic conditions may suppress this potential. Drawing on psychedelic humanities, which emphasize how cultural context (set and setting) shapes drug effects, the paper examines how these principles apply to cyberdelic media, its prospects, and its challenges.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2021
Laura Tolbaños-roche, Praseeda Menon
19 citations
Yoga practitioners show better self-awareness and self-regulation than non-practitioners, as measured by interoceptive awareness and decentering abilities, according to a test of the S-ART neurobiological model of well-being. Among 362 Indian and Spanish yoga practitioners and non-practitioners, those who practiced yoga scored higher on these abilities. Perseverance in yoga practice predicted self-awareness and self-regulation in the combined sample, but cultural differences emerged: for Indian practitioners with over a year of practice, yoga practice and perseverance predicted interoceptive awareness and decentering, whereas for Spanish participants, physical exercise and frequency of practice were better predictors. The findings provide preliminary support for the S-ART model's application to yoga's self-regulatory mechanisms.