Communications Psychology
September 29, 2025
John P Veillette, Yimeng Cheng, Aditi Joshi et al.
The nature of self-awareness has been a topic of inquiry for thousands of years, with profound implications for law and ethics, as well as for understanding a host of neurological and psychiatric pathologies. An influential view in philosophy of mind is that the "self" is a construct of consciousness, its basic functions - such as the sense of agency, the capacity by which we attribute sensory...
Journal of Neuroscience
April 30, 2025
John P Veillette, Alfred F Chao, Romain Nith et al.
Every movement requires the nervous system to solve a complex biomechanical control problem, but this process is mostly veiled from one's conscious awareness. Simultaneously, we also have conscious experience of controlling our movements-our sense of agency (SoA). Whether SoA corresponds to those neural representations that implement actual neuromuscular control is an open question with...
Consciousness and Cognition
September 1, 2024
John P Veillette, Letitia Ho, Howard C Nusbaum
Cognitive scientists differentiate the "minimal self" - subjective experiences of agency and ownership in our sensorimotor interactions with the world - from declarative beliefs about the self that are sustained over time. However, it remains an open question how individual sensory experiences of agency are integrated into the belief ofbeing an agent.We administered a sensorimotor task to...
Cognition & Emotion
February 1, 2023
Yena Kim, Howard C Nusbaum, Fan Yang
22 citations
Having good moral character often involves shifting one's focus of attention from the self to others and the world. Across three studies (N = 605 adults), we found converging evidence that self-transcendent experiences, specifically awe and flow, enabled the expression of wisdom, as captured by wise reasoning and epistemic humility measures. Study 1 found that dispositionally awe- and...
The Journal of Positive Psychology
April 10, 2017
Patrick B Williams, Greg Poljacik, A Jean Decety et al.
15 citations
To better understand the cultivation of positive intra- and interpersonal emotions, we examined an argument that some effects of contemplative training result from language processing. We presented participants with loving-kindness language used in kindness-meditation training studies and asked them to rate imagined pain. If loving-kindness language processing is responsible for some effects...
PLoS One
February 18, 2016
Patrick B Williams, Heather H Mangelsdorf, Carly Kontra et al.
In this study we sought to explore how experience with specific mental and somatic practices is associated with wisdom, using self-report measures of experience and wisdom. We administered standard surveys to measure wisdom and experience among four groups of practitioners of mental and somatic practices, namely, meditators, practitioners of the Alexander Technique, practitioners of the...