Integrative psychological & behavioral science
September 1, 2014
Floor Van Alphen
25 citations
Tango dancing offers a unique window into the study of human interaction itself. This theoretical paper argues that viewing tango through the lens of enactivism—focusing on participatory sense-making, mutual incorporation, and consensually coordinated action—can clarify how the dance contributes to cultural psychology. Tango facilitates the study of interaction dynamics, intersubjectivity, and culture as joint activity.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
September 1, 2019
J Shashi Kiran Reddy, Sisir Roy, Edilene De Souza Leite et al.
9 citations
The article argues that scientific studies of the self often examine only partial components of self-experience, such as self-identification, self-location, or the sense of existence, making it difficult to understand the self as a whole. The authors propose two theses: ontologically, the self is a sentient entity that bears the feeling of "what it is like to be"; phenomenologically, we do not directly apprehend the self but experience it through the senses of existence, identification, and location. A complete understanding of the self requires including all these components.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
July 30, 2025
Donato Giuseppe Leo
3 citations
Cultural influences, social expectations, and personal beliefs shape how people perceive altered states of consciousness, often interpreting them as communication with the spiritual world. Spirit possession illustrates how sociocultural factors mold these perceptions. The paper explains spirit possession as a way to "exorcise" individual trauma or address communal fears. It traces the historical view of supernatural causes of illness through rituals to cast out or tame possessing spirits. The authors argue that sociocultural factors have embedded altered states of consciousness in religious and spiritual practices, and that these states can have therapeutic value for mental wellbeing.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
September 1, 2024
Luca Tateo
3 citations
The paper critiques how mainstream psychology selectively adopts only certain concepts from Eastern mindfulness traditions while ignoring their broader philosophical systems. It argues that this partial appropriation limits understanding and proposes instead a fully ecological shift in studying the self, drawing on a Meadian perspective. The author suggests that integrating the complete Eastern worldview, including its metaphysical foundations, could transform psychological approaches to selfhood and mindfulness.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
September 1, 2024
Simone Indius
3 citations
Building on previous work that connects Taoist principles and social psychology, this commentary explores how mindfulness, meditation, and self-transcendence fit into Abraham Maslow's hierarchy of needs. It proposes adding a new layer to the hierarchy: the need for self-transcendence, drawing on Maslow's concept of peak-experiences and William James' notion of mystical experiences. An autoethnographic meditative experience is analyzed as a peak-experience to illustrate how people strive for this state of being.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
April 15, 2026
Seyed Kiarash Sadat Rafiei, Mahsa Asadi Anar
2 citations
Aesthetic anhedonia—a reduced capacity for pleasure and meaning from art—and psychotic hyper-meaning—where neutral events take on excessive significance—are typically studied separately. This paper argues they are opposite dysregulations of a shared process governing how meanings stabilize over time. The authors propose a framework of symbolic closure dynamics: aesthetic anhedonia reflects hypo-closure, a failure to reach or sustain convergence of meaning, while psychotic hyper-meaning reflects hyper-closure, premature or misanchored convergence on insufficient evidence. The framework bridges reward-based models, aberrant salience, predictive processing, and network theories, offering testable predictions about timing, stability, noise sensitivity, and revisability of meaning formation. Aesthetic stimuli are highlighted as sensitive probes of these dynamics.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
March 29, 2026
Wiesław L Galus
2 citations
Thinking includes reasoning, planning, remembering, imagining, and feeling. The paper asks how bodily and neural processes become consciously experienced as a continuous stream of thoughts, and how these processes differ across thinking types. It proposes a set of hypotheses forming the Motivated Emotional Mind (MEM) model, which describes brain structure architecture, neuronal knowledge representations, and dynamic interactions among brain, sensory receptors, and effectors, all integrated by the organism's body. The model also addresses the extent to which AI systems can exhibit phenomenal consciousness and what would be needed for them to achieve it.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
February 14, 2025
Chetan Sinha
2 citations
Consciousness cannot be fully understood without considering social and cultural contexts, including group processes and the socio-legal framework. Law should critically distance itself from purely brain-based or consciousness-focused trajectories and maintain balance by examining precedents. The article explores how consciousness operates within decolonization efforts and whether neuroscience can inform legal reform to achieve justice.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
December 28, 2024
Cristóbal Pacheco, Pablo Fossa
2 citations
Phenomenological Mapping is a novel research method for systematically studying pre-reflective consciousness—experiences occurring before reflective thought and language. Grounded in Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Heidegger, and integrating contemporary work by Zahavi, Gallagher, and Thompson, the method guides researchers through eleven phases from preparation to integration. It employs phenomenological reduction, embodied perception, and being-in-the-world, enriched by intersubjectivity and embodiment concepts. Multisensory data collection techniques—visual diaries, audio recordings, experiential practices—provide a multi-dimensional analysis of subjective experience, bridging empirical and theoretical domains while remaining faithful to philosophical foundations.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
February 3, 2026
Raffaele De Luca Picione, Angelo Maria De Fortuna, Lorenzo Curti et al.
1 citation
The Trickster figure, found in myths, folklore, and literature, symbolizes liminality, transgression, and creativity. Operating at the boundaries of order and disorder, sacred and profane, the Trickster embodies ambiguity, deception, and hidden wisdom. Through myths like that of Hermes and tales of fools and jesters, the Trickster acts as an agent of transformation, subversion, and innovation, subverting social categories through play, irony, and hyper-sexualization. The article compares Turner's theory of liminality and Freud's notion of the uncanny to show how the Trickster traverses psychosocial thresholds and boundaries between consciousness and the repressed, generating ambiguity and anxiety.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
July 31, 2025
Rasmus Birk, Sarah Kirkegaard Jensen, Noomi Matthiesen et al.
1 citation
Situated psychology is a new concept that draws on traditions like ecological psychology, situated learning theory, 4E cognition, and critical psychology. It understands situatedness as involving environment, culture, relations, and context, but not merely as a framework for behavior. The article provides a theoretical outline of this perspective.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
December 19, 2024
Majid Beshkar
1 citation
The QBIT theory proposes that consciousness arises from macroscopic coherence emerging in the axon initial segment of neurons, a specialized compartment that integrates synaptic inputs and amplifies sensory signals. This coherence is necessary for conscious perception, as the axon initial segment's unique properties enable spontaneous emergence of this state. The theory links consciousness to a specific intracellular substrate that registers and processes sensory information within the brain.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
December 29, 2025
Adriana Damascena Da Silva Santos, Caio Maximino
Memory is not a static mental storehouse but a dynamic, mediated activity shaped by social and material contexts. This argument emerges from a synthesis of enactivist theories and cultural-historical activity theory, both of which reject internalist models of cognition. The integration centers on the dialectical interplay of internalization and externalization, where psychological functions develop through engagement with tools, signs, and social practices. The concept of functional organs from activity theory parallels enactivist notions of embodied and extended cognition. Levels of processing theory is incorporated to show that cognitive depth arises from meaningful, socially mediated interaction. Labor exemplifies how memory becomes sedimented in material culture through cooperative activity and ecological norm development.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
March 13, 2025
Priscilla Fabrizi, Thomas Ditye
A four-week experiment with twelve novice meditators found that the Gateway Experience—a program combining hypnosis, meditation, and binaural beats—significantly improved psychological well-being compared to a relaxation control condition. Improvements were seen across all six measured aspects: autonomy, environmental mastery, personal growth, positive relations, purpose in life, and self-acceptance. Participants' sense of mysticality did not influence the results. The findings suggest the Gateway Experience can be a powerful short-term tool for enhancing well-being and offer historical insight into the program's effects.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
December 21, 2024
Enno Von Fircks
Mindfulness research should adapt traditional psychological frameworks like Maslow's hierarchy of needs to reflect contemporary cultural and psychological landscapes. Meditation acts as a transformative process that can destroy and rebuild psychological needs, leading to self-actualization and self-transcendence, metaphorically likened to a volcanic eruption. Social, material, and cultural contexts shape mindfulness practices, requiring personalization and recognition of ecological interconnectedness. Future research should preserve mindfulness breakthroughs, explore religious worldviews, and integrate social environments, advocating for a holistic understanding of mindfulness as both process and outcome in human experience.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
May 25, 2026
Shogo Tanaka
Extreme experiences are not merely intense events but disruptions of ordinary selfhood that open up value-laden modes of perception. Drawing on Karl Jaspers' boundary situations and Abraham Maslow's peak and plateau experiences, the paper argues that such experiences have long been addressed within existential and psychological traditions. An embodied perspective clarifies how these transformations are lived: through the dynamics of the lived body and body schema, habitual patterns of perception, action, and agency are temporarily suspended and reorganized. Extreme experiences are embodied threshold phenomena, not marginal anomalies, but moments when the fundamental structure of human existence becomes particularly visible.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
March 25, 2026
Gary D Fisk
Unconscious perception research using masked priming has produced inconsistent results due to oversimplified models of perception and consciousness. While improved methodology can help, it alone cannot resolve the weaknesses of the null awareness paradigm. Perception, cognition, and emotion arise from network functions, implying that perception and consciousness exist on a graded continuum with a dependent relationship for near-threshold stimuli. Advancing the field requires not only better methods but also updated theoretical expectations about experimental outcomes.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
March 17, 2026
Myron Tsikandilakis, Persefoni Bali, Roland Erich Uriko et al.
The authors argue that subliminal processing—unconscious responses to imperceptible stimuli—cannot be the sole basis for evolutionary skill acquisition, conscious problem-solving, or social engagement. They contend that a purely subliminal unconscious would pose an evolutionary disadvantage, whereas unconscious processes that interact with conscious awareness are necessary for ecological adaptation. The paper discusses how unconscious-and-conscious communication supports implicit and explicit learning, physiological responses, and adaptive evaluation. It concludes by noting the lack of an experimental paradigm to properly investigate subliminality and the interactions between consciousness and the unconscious mind.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
March 7, 2026
Tri Yatno
At Sojiwan Temple, a ninth-century Buddhist monument in Central Java, community-led full-moon meditations serve as a form of ritual resilience that reasserts spiritual authority against secular and touristic pressures. Based on ethnographic fieldwork, in-depth interviews with 12 participants including monks, lay practitioners, and cultural officials, and observation of four full-moon meditation cycles between May and August 2025, the study finds that state-driven heritage narratives prioritize visual preservation and economic value, often marginalizing local spiritual agency. In response, the meditations function as counter-hegemonic practices that reaffirm sacred continuity and foster collective identity. The work integrates Durkheim’s and Eliade’s notions of sacrality with Casanova’s secularization theory to argue that rituals are adaptive responses to cultural erosion.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
February 15, 2026
Vladimir Glebkin
Free will can coexist with action predictability, according to a series of studies with native Russian and English speakers. The research challenges neurodeterminism, the view that neural processes fully determine actions and undermine free will. Participants consistently judged actions as free when they were consciously performed, regardless of whether those actions were predictable. Bodily movements outside conscious control were not considered free. The findings suggest that conscious awareness, not unpredictability, is the necessary condition for attributing free will.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
December 1, 2025
Cristóbal Pacheco, Pablo Fossa
The article introduces 'protoexistence,' a pre-reflective, affective layer of experience that resists narrative integration and challenges conventional ideas of time and self. Drawing on Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and other phenomenologists, it argues that certain dimensions of lived experience emerge through rupture, silence, bodily intensity, and incoherence rather than articulated meaning. The work critiques qualitative research for prioritizing coherence and excluding affective gaps and somatic dislocations. It also proposes extending Phenomenological Mapping to trace these unstable phenomena through methods like mapping corporeal disruptions and preserving temporal incoherence, expanding the epistemological horizons of phenomenological inquiry.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
February 15, 2025
Can Büyükbay
The article introduces 'Homo Putans,' or the 'supposing human,' as a philosophical framework for understanding human existence. Supposing is distinguished from mere thinking or imagination by involving hesitation, doubt, and creative engagement with possibilities. It is characterized by confronting ambiguity and constructing meaning amid uncertainty, examined as both a cognitive and philosophical act that bridges uncertainty and understanding. Drawing on Hans Vaihinger's Philosophy of As If and phenomenological insights from Husserl and Brentano, the study situates supposing as significant in human cognition and meaning-making. It also considers conceptual alignments with cognitive science to explore how supposing shapes perception and decision-making, framing it as constructing potential realities and engaging with the unknown.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
December 1, 2024
Majid Beshkar
The QBIT theory aims to scientifically explain consciousness by proposing that qualia—the subjective experiences of perception—are real physical systems. Each quale is composed of qubits bound together by quantum entanglement, forming a unified whole that is more than the sum of its parts. These systems are highly organized and coherent, with organization and coherence being manifestations of information. The theory suggests that qualia are maximally entangled and coherent, containing high amounts of information and extremely low entropy or uncertainty.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
December 1, 2024
Majid Beshkar
The QBIT theory proposes that consciousness arises when the brain becomes more than certain about the cause of a sensory representation. This occurs when the conditional entropy of a prior belief given the sensory representation drops below zero, a condition that requires the brain to use entangled quantum information. At its most fundamental level, consciousness is described as a special kind of entangled information.
Integrative psychological & behavioral science
March 1, 2024
Jinsong Meng
The explanatory gap between consciousness and matter is partly due to a methodological trap in scientific research and incomplete logic. A new logical tool, the non-identity law derived from physics, is applied to analyze visual dynamics during naturalistic observation of a night-shot still life. The visual system has a postponed, recurrent out-of-body projection pathway from the brain back to the observed object, in addition to the known feedforward signaling pathway. This out-of-body projection, together with neural correlates of consciousness, bridges the gap between consciousness and matter. The finding suggests human consciousness involves subjectively imaging and projecting images outward, obeying certain rules rather than being unruly.