Abstract Background Esketamine is a NMDA receptor antagonist that has been approved as treatment for treatment-resistant depression (TRD). Unlike serotoninergic therapies requiring weeks for effect, intranasal esketamine modulates glutamate neurotransmission, often yielding symptom relief within hours and significant response rates within one month [1]. This rapid action is particularly...
Background: Comorbidity of bipolar disorder and aspects of neurodevelopmental disorders present unique challenges and opportunities in understanding the formation and maintenance of selfhood and worldview in psychopathology. Traditional cognitive models often overlook the narrative and phenomenological dimensions of patient experience, particularly how autobiographical narration and emotionally...
Background/Objectives: Emotion dysregulation is central to many psychiatric disorders. Laboratory-based tasks designed to assess emotion processing and regulation often rely on standardized affective stimuli whose ecological validity remains unclear. We contextualize this study in our broader research program of neurophenomenological reflection of standard paradigms in experimental cognitive...
Ruminations are persistent, repetitive, and often distressing thoughts centered on negative events, mood states, and psychiatric symptoms. Recognized as a maladaptive cognitive process, ruminating contributes to the onset and persistence of psychiatric disorders and is strongly linked to negative emotional states, self-criticism, and suicidality. Despite its clinical significance, a...
There are profound methodological challenges facing microdosing research. One way we can address some of these methodological issues is by understanding how psilocybin microdosing fits in the broader existential context of people’s lives. We recruited participants who underwent psilocybin microdosing on their own and consented to being monitored for harm mitigation purposes. We combined...
Working memory is typically measured with specifically designed psychological tasks. When evaluating the validity of working memory tasks, we commonly focus on the reliability of the outcome measurements. Only rarely do we focus on how participants experience these tasks. Accounting for lived experience of working memory task may help us better understand variability in working memory...
Psychiatric comorbidities have proven a consistent challenge. Recent approaches emphasize the need to move away from categorical descriptions of symptom clusters towards a dimensional view of mental disorders. From the perspective of phenomenological psychopathology, this shift is not enough, as a more detailed understanding of patients' lived experience is necessary as well. One...
The study of individual experience during the performance of a psychological task using a phenomenological approach is a relatively new area of research. The aim of this paper was to combine first- and third-person approaches to investigate whether the strategies individuals use during a working memory task are associated with specific task conditions, whether the strategies combine to form...
Many methodologies for systematic study of lived experience have been proposed. Methods are typically calibrated in terms of the depth and complexity of data collection and whether they consider reports on pre-reflective experience admissible. Even though it has been shown that lived experience occurs at different timescales (elementary, integrative, narrative), contemporary methods tend to...
Polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS) is an endocrine and metabolic disorder affecting women of reproductive age. Research has shown that epigenetic alterations such as DNA methylation may play a role in the development and progression of abnormal ovarian function and metabolic disorders in PCOS. Studies have identified specific genes (related with insulin signaling and steroid hormone metabolism)...
In cognitive science, it is unclear what precisely presence (both in the sense of objecthood and immersion) refers to in lived experience. The present study addresses the research question of what the relationship between presence is and lived space. A hundred and seventeen phenomenological interviews were conducted with 14 participants. We sampled their experience in a transdiagnostic manner....
Synaesthesia is a condition defined by additional perceptual experiences, which are automatically and consistently triggered by specific inducing stimuli. The associative nature of synaesthesia has motivated attempts to induce synaesthesia by means of associative learning. Two recent studies of this kind highlighted the potential for perceptual plasticity even in adulthood, by demonstrating...
In experimental cognitive psychology, objects of inquiry have typically been operationalized with psychological tasks. If we are interested in measuring the target phenomena, we must inquire into the validity of the task; that is, to what extent does the task elicit the phenomenon in question. If we subscribe to the second view, evaluating the validity and the interpretation of the gathered...
Grapheme-colour synaesthesia (GCS) is defined by additional perceptual experiences, which are automatically and consistently triggered by specific inducing stimuli. The associative nature of GCS has motivated attempts to induce synaesthesia by means of associative learning. Two recent studies have shown that extensive associative training can generate not only behavioural (consistency and...
We propose a method of consensually validating phenomenal data. We believe such a method is necessary due to underreporting of explicit validation procedures in empirical phenomenological literature. We argue that descriptive science, exemplified by phenomenology and natural history, rely on nominalization for construction of intersubjectively accessible knowledge. We compare the epistemologies...