Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2024
Masahiro Fujino, Yuuki Ooishi, Yoshiyuki Ueda et al.
3 citations
Thirty minutes of focused attention or open monitoring meditation reduces the tendency to inhibit distracting face images during a cognitive interference task, as shown by the persistence of the mere exposure effect—where repeated exposure increases preference—only in meditation groups. In a control group, the mere exposure effect disappeared, indicating that distractors were inhibited. A positive correlation between the mere exposure effect and state relaxation, and a negative correlation with state anxiety, were found only in the focused attention meditation group, suggesting different mechanisms for reducing inhibition between the two meditation types.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2024
Charlotte Hohnemann, Florian Engel, Corinna Peifer et al.
3 citations
Over eight weeks, mindfulness and flow experience increased linearly while perceived stress decreased among participants in a mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) program compared to an inactive control group. Emotional exhaustion amplified the beneficial effects: the more emotionally exhausted individuals were, the stronger the positive link between growing mindfulness and increasing flow, and the stronger the negative link between growing mindfulness and decreasing stress. These results suggest that mindfulness training can both reduce stress and enhance the autotelic experience of flow, particularly for chronically depleted people. The quasi-experimental design, self-report measures, and participant dropout limit the conclusions.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2024
Jamie L Tully, Oliver Bridge, Joseph Rennie et al.
3 citations
During the first year of COVID-19 social restrictions (March 2020–February 2021), use of psychoactive substances for cognitive enhancement rose significantly among UK university students and staff compared to the previous year. Modafinil use increased by 42%, nutraceuticals by 30.2%, and microdose LSD by 22.2%. Polydrug use with modafinil and other prescription stimulants also rose. Personality factors—particularly lower agreeableness, male gender identity, and lower conscientiousness—reliably predicted use, while academic self-efficacy and student/staff status did not. The authors suggest increased pressures from lockdown and reduced access to university resources drove the rise.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2022
Asger Kirkeby-Hinrup
3 citations
Misrepresentation, as proposed by some higher-order theories of consciousness, is plausible because conscious states are generated by brain processes that can be corrupted. Drawing on cognitive and behavioral neuroscience, brain state corruption is both possible and relatively frequent, and such corruption may occasionally lead to misrepresentation. The main alternative view, the no-consciousness reply, appears less supported by current knowledge. This meta-level argument rests on a general premise acceptable to most participants in the debate, distinguishing it from other empirically based arguments.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2022
Javier Garcia-Campayo, Rinchen Hijar-Aguinaga, Alberto Barceló-soler et al.
3 citations
People who meditate are more likely to report having had a peak experience—an intense moment of joy, unity, or transcendence—than those who do not meditate. In a survey of 237 Spanish adults, 71.8% of meditators reported at least one peak experience compared to 46.8% of non-meditators. However, among those who had such experiences, the number, intensity, and ability to self-induce them did not differ between the two groups. Meditators also scored higher on measures of non-dual awareness, mindfulness, and absorption, but not on all aspects of dream lucidity. Being a meditator predicted having had a peak experience but not lucid dreaming scores, suggesting meditation may facilitate peak experiences while its effect on lucid dreams remains unclear.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2021
Moo-Rung Loo, Shih-Kuen Cheng
3 citations
People who frequently have lucid dreams—dreams in which they are aware they are dreaming—tend to be more efficient at resolving mental conflicts, but only when their attention has been primed by a warning cue. In a study of 77 participants who rated their dream lucidity over a week and then completed a computerized attention task, a negative correlation emerged between trait lucidity and conflict resolution scores among the 49 participants whose responses were faster after an alerting signal. This suggests that for individuals whose information processing is facilitated by cues, greater lucidity is linked to better conflict resolution.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2025
Thomas Fuchs
2 citations
Concepts, even abstract ones like space, time, and truth, remain rooted in bodily experience and social interaction rather than being free-floating symbols. Concrete concepts emerge from sensorimotor interactions transformed into simulated actions; abstract concepts arise through metaphorical extensions of bodily experience and participatory sense-making in social contexts. Neurobiological evidence shows strong connections between language processing and sensorimotor and social brain systems, tracing language evolution to reuse of motor coordination areas. Phenomenological analysis reveals how bodily intentionality underlies grammatical structures. Container schemas, for example, provide the embodied basis of categorization. Human reason is not disembodied but fundamentally rooted in embodied interaction and intersubjective practice.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2025
Nishit Kumar Sinha
2 citations
Mindfulness is linked to better mental health, and this relationship is partly explained by resilience. A survey of 431 adults in India found that higher mindfulness scores were associated with greater emotional, psychological, and social well-being. Resilience acted as a mediator, meaning that mindfulness may improve mental health by strengthening resilience. The findings suggest that resilience is a key mechanism through which mindfulness supports mental health.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2025
Laura H Malinin
2 citations
Despite long-standing calls for an integrated understanding of creativity, the role of the physical environment remains poorly connected to other factors. Creatively productive people report that they deliberately use and modify their surroundings to enhance creative work, yet no conceptual framework links designed spaces to creative processes. This conceptual analysis applies an embodied creativity lens grounded in ecological psychology and 4E cognitive science to synthesize literature from creativity, environmental design, and related fields. It aims to clarify person-environment relationships during creativity, including how creative space, place, and physical settings can support creative work, addressing a gap that leaves designers relying on anecdotal evidence.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2025
Kequn Chu, Jing Ge, Huan Fan et al.
2 citations
Among 65 women with restrictive eating patterns, both stable (trait) and daily (state) mindfulness were linked to less restrictive eating, and this effect was explained by improvements in body image. Daily increases in mindfulness predicted better body image, which in turn predicted less restrictive eating that same day, indicating that body image fully mediates the state-mindfulness-to-eating pathway. Trait and state mindfulness and body image were positively related to each other and inversely related to restrictive eating. The findings suggest that mindfulness-based interventions may reduce maladaptive eating by first improving body image.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2025
Pascal Michael, David Luke, Oliver Robinson
2 citations
A thematic and content analysis comparing naturalistic DMT experiences with near-death experiences (NDEs) found that DMT shares a basic phenomenological structure with NDEs, including canonical themes such as translocation, bright lights, sense of dying, the void, disembodiment, tunnel-like structures, light beings, deceased family, life review-like experiences, and hyper-empathic experiences. 95% of DMT participants reported at least one such theme. However, five classical NDE features were entirely absent from DMT, and DMT exhibited a broader array of features not present in NDEs. The two experiences diverge at a more nuanced qualitative level, with DMT being more prodigious, kaleidoscopic, and stereotypical. A minority of NDEs share significant content with DMT. The authors suggest DMT could be considered an 'NDE-mimetic' and discuss potential clinical applications.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2025
Johannes T Reckweg, Natasha L Mason, Eef L Theunissen et al.
2 citations
A three-item Peak Experience Scale (PES) was developed to quickly gauge the intensity of the psychoactive experience with the psychedelic 5-MeO-DMT and to guide dosing. Data came from three studies involving 84 healthy volunteers and patients with treatment-resistant depression who inhaled a 5-MeO-DMT formulation at doses of 0 (placebo), 2, 6, 12, or 18 mg, or an incremental individualized dosing regimen. PES ratings increased significantly with dose, peaking after the individualized regimen. The scale showed strong internal consistency and high correlation with other psychedelic assessment tools like the Mystical Experience Questionnaire and Ego Dissolution Inventory, but not with the Challenging Experience Questionnaire. The PES is an effective, simple tool for rapidly assessing psychedelic experience strength and may help guide dosing of rapid-acting psychedelics.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2025
Qi Mao, Wolfgang Mastnak, Ruiyuan Guan
2 citations
Analysis of Tujia dances from China suggests nine distinct therapeutic principles and benefits, including improvements to cardiovascular and musculoskeletal health, neuroplasticity, self-expression, and positive attitude changes. The term 'ethno-dance therapy' relates to dance traditions of ethnic groups in China, and narrative ethnological research has detailed dances of the 55 officially recognized ethnic groups such as the Uyghur, Miao, and Wa. Based on field studies and multidisciplinary knowledge, the authors hypothesize that Tujia dances may enhance culturally sensitive public health systems and improve dance therapy across medical areas like psychiatry, oncology, and neurology. Further research is needed on underlying mechanisms and cross-cultural transferability.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2025
Sandra Goizueta, Anny Maza, Ana Sierra et al.
2 citations
Patients with disorders of consciousness, such as those in a minimally conscious state or with unresponsive wakefulness syndrome, often face misdiagnosis because standard assessments rely on motor responses that can be absent due to cognitive-motor dissociation. This study tested whether heart rate variability (HRV) responses to personalized videos of acquaintances differ from responses to videos of strangers. In 17 healthy subjects, HRV measures significantly differed between personalized and non-personalized stimuli, but 11 patients with disorders of consciousness showed no such differences. Significant differences in HRV measures also emerged between the two groups. These findings suggest impaired emotional processing in patients with disorders of consciousness, and that integrating HRV measures may improve diagnosis.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2025
Daniela Ramirez-Duran, Margaret L Kern, Helen Stokes
2 citations
Regular Ashtanga yoga practitioners define yoga as a practice for health and wellbeing, a method for personal inquiry and growth, a way of living, and a spiritual quest. Yoga philosophy is seen as ancient teachings that provide a foundation for practice and life. Yoga practice is a formal daily ritual that is adaptable and permeates daily existence. Three common threads emerged: yoga as an embodied integrated practice, an embodied path for self-knowledge, and a path for spiritual development. These findings challenge the prevailing image of yoga as mainly a physical and stress-reduction activity.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2024
Caroline Stankozi
2 citations
Imagination can be explained as driven by affordance competition, integrating ecological psychology and enactivism. Affordances are directly perceptible on the ecological view and co-created on the enactive view, and these views are compatible. Empirical evidence supports the historicity of affordance competition, interpreted non-representationally. A stand-off between competing affordances can be resolved by imagination, driven by affordance competition. Sensorimotor traces of previous interactions, such as strengthened synapses, can be repurposed as representations, grounding representational explanations in an ecologized enactive framework.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2024
Mette Kristine Hansen
2 citations
We can sometimes perceptually experience what objects afford—what they offer us—when we encounter natural or artificial objects that belong to high-level kinds, such as lemons. This view explains how we visually experience objects as belonging to categories like 'lemon' and has advantages over alternative accounts. A problem for other views is that when two objects look identical but belong to different high-level kinds (e.g., a real lemon and a lemon-shaped soap bar), it is counterintuitive to say the experience is a perceptual mistake. The argument here is that perceiving affordances resolves this puzzle more compellingly than other theories.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2024
Evgeny V Loginov
2 citations
G. E. Moore's 1939 proof of an external world is defended against David Chalmers's criticisms, including Chalmers's 2022 claim that Moore's original argument was wrong and his 2018 Moorean argument against illusionism about consciousness. The paper argues that Chalmers's Moorean argument fails to refute illusionism, and that Moore's original argument withstands Chalmers-style objections.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2024
Eric Terrien, Benoît Huet, Paul Iachkine et al.
2 citations
Elite windsurfers experience continuous performance optimization through a pre-reflective self-consciousness that includes multidimensional attentional foci and normative self-assessment. Using the course-of-experience framework, the analysis of two riders' activities reveals meaningful accompaniments to ongoing optimization, a micro-scale phenomenological description of continuous improvement, and the multidimensionality of attention and self-assessment norms. These findings demonstrate how the framework can capture the experience of being absorbed in performance optimization.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2023
Lawrence Fischman
2 citations
Self-touch, particularly the form observed in infant engagement with transitional objects, provides a pre-reflective sense of mine-ness that grounds experience during states of self-loss. These transitional states include absorption in art, empathic immersion, drug-induced ego dissolution, and depersonalization. Drawing on examples from Rodin, Dante, and the Beatles, along with neurophysiological research, predictive processing models, and phenomenological perspectives on touch, the author argues that self-touch serves as a template for experiencing oneself as both subject and object, thereby maintaining a sense of reality and grounding in experiences where the self is diminished or dissolved.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2021
Brigitte Holzinger, Franziska Nierwetberg, Gerhard Klösch
2 citations
A woman with severe PTSD and recurrent nightmares completed six weeks of lucid dreaming training, which enabled her to alter her dream plots and improve several psychological measures. Her dream reports and assessment results are presented. The authors argue that sleep and nightmares should receive more attention in psychiatric treatment, not only for PTSD patients, and support their case with literature on non-medication treatments for sleep problems.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2025
Jian Sun
1 citation
A two-tier model of abduction resolves a tension in Peirce's philosophy: perception is involuntary yet resembles reasoning. The model distinguishes abductive insight (spontaneous hypothesis generation) from abductive reasoning (conscious conceptual endorsement). Integrated with Predictive Processing, perceptual gestalt formation is abductive insight, while perceptual judgment is abductive reasoning. The framework extends to emotion: Barrett's theory of constructed emotion instantiates the same architecture, where core affect is abductive insight into interoceptive signals and emotional categorization is abductive reasoning. This synthesis reveals how conceptual operations shape affective experience and suggests emotion regulation interventions targeting either core affect or emotional categorization.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2025
Serena Paese, Andrea Schiavio
1 citation
A four-week mindfulness course that includes body-centered meditation, meditation on thoughts, and affect-centered meditation can enhance wellbeing, boost emotional balance, and reduce the occurrence of music performance anxiety. Qualitative data from 12 musicians who participated in two short mindfulness courses and provided diary entries and open-ended responses support these benefits. The findings suggest that these meditation types positively impact musicians' wellbeing and performance skills, though further research is warranted to explore additional methods.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2025
Egbert Haverkamp, Erik Olsman, Branislava Ćurčić-blake et al.
1 citation
Prayer, one of the most widespread religious practices, may work psychologically like human attachment bonds, which are strongly linked to mental health. This systematic review of 44 studies examined brain activity during Christian prayer and during activation of the attachment system in adults. Evidence showed convergence between prayer and neural areas involved in social cognition, specifically the default mode network and theory of mind regions. No significant differences emerged between prayer and attachment in brain regions linked to emotion regulation, but findings diverged for the aversion module, particularly in the insula. The shared cognitive and affective dimensions suggest prayer could be integrated into psychotherapy, though more research is needed.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2025
Bruno Forti
1 citation
A new theory of consciousness, the Extended Information Theory (EIT), proposes that the simplest forms of experience are not sensations but perceptions where qualitative aspects have relational significance. Phenomenal analysis of early visual experience reveals a nested Hierarchy of Spatial Belongings, indicating that conscious contents extend into the space they belong to. This extension allows immediate knowledge of structural aspects of the physical world. Functionally, consciousness handles extended information, unlike non-conscious systems that process point-like information, potentially overcoming computational limitations. The theory differs from classical integration-based theories by emphasizing the integration of information about stimulus structure.