Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2023
Marco Masi
14 citations
The causal relationship between phenomenal consciousness, mentation, and brain states remains debated. Material monism, which views consciousness and mind as brain epiphenomena, relies on a 'loss-of-function lesion premise': brain lesions and neurochemical changes cause cognitive impairment and altered consciousness, suggesting mind-brain identity. Dualism or idealism, however, regards consciousness and mind as distinct from cerebral activity, pointing to the ineffable nature of subjective experience. This review examines neuroscientific findings that question phenomenal experience as an emergent property of brain activity, arguing that material monism's premise commits a correlation-causation fallacy. Considered integrally, these findings support an ontology where mind and consciousness are primal phenomena.
Frontiers in Psychology
April 15, 2022
Fátima González-Palau, Leonardo Adrián Medrano
14 citations
Work stress harms cognitive and mental health, impairs workplace performance, and increases disease risk, partly through alterations in brain areas like the hippocampus, prefrontal cortex, and amygdala. Mindfulness-based interventions (MBIs) may reduce stress and promote health in workplaces, but their specific neuropsychological benefits in organizational settings remain unclear. This review analyzes stress-related brain impairments and the potential benefits of MBIs from a neuropsychological perspective, emphasizing the role of cognitive functions—such as emotion regulation, problem-solving, and learning—in work achievements. It argues that promoting wellbeing is a shared responsibility between workers and organizations, and that healthy environments enable greater control, productivity, and talent development.
Frontiers in Psychology
June 23, 2021
Alexandre Augusto de Deus Pontual, Luís Fernando Tófoli, Carlos Fernando Collares et al.
14 citations
A new questionnaire, the Setting Questionnaire for the Ayahuasca Experience (SQAE), measures the physical and social context in which ayahuasca is consumed. Developed from a literature review, interviews with 19 users, and a survey of 2,994 participants, the scale's structure was tested using exploratory graph analysis and multidimensional item response theory. Six dimensions emerged—Leadership, Decoration, Infrastructure, Comfort, Instruction, and Social—though the original theoretical model fit the data better than the exploratory model. The instrument shows evidence of validity and can support future research on how setting influences the ayahuasca experience, with potential applications for studying psychedelic use more broadly.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2020
Melina Gastelum
14 citations
Affordances—opportunities for action in the environment—should be understood across three different timescales, unifying enactive and ecological approaches to cognition. At the elementary scale, affordances relate to the constantly changing sensorimotor contingencies of embodied assemblies. At the integrative scale, affordances become solicitations that are actualized and constitute an umwelt, with perception structured by the intrinsic temporality of experience. At the narrative scale, affordances operate over developmental time and explain learning, as proposed in Chemero's dynamicist account. These three scales are always intertwined, as learning and perception are ongoing, inseparable processes. The paper argues that considering affordances as synergies—where abilities and environmental aspects constrain system trajectories—helps explain behavior across macro to micro levels.
Frontiers in Psychology
September 7, 2015
Petr Bob, Olga Louchakova
14 citations
The article reviews evidence that dissociative states and dreaming share common brain processes, suggesting that the neural chaotic activity during dreaming is closely related to dissociative states that can appear in dream imagery. These findings align with clinical observations that dissociated states can be projected into dream scenery during REM sleep. Dreams may reveal specific interactions that unlock unusual creative potential in psychotherapy, art, and scientific discovery.
Frontiers in Psychology
February 14, 2024
Caspar Montgomery, Timo Torsten Schmidt, Ioanna Amaya
13 citations
Flicker light stimulation (FLS), a non-pharmacological method that induces altered states of consciousness (ASCs) and hallucination-like phenomena, can enhance emotional responses to music. In a study with twenty participants, listening to emotionally evocative music while undergoing FLS significantly increased reported music-evoked emotion, particularly emotions related to “Joyful Activation.” The intensity of the FLS experience correlated with higher levels of emotional arousal. These results suggest that FLS may serve as a method for inducing ASCs and that visual stimulation can interact with music-evoked emotion, paralleling effects seen with classic psychedelics like LSD.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2024
Brian M. Galla, Aishwarya Karanam, Avital Pelakh et al.
13 citations
A reanalysis of 22 randomized controlled trials (16,558 adolescents) found that universal school-based mindfulness interventions do not reliably improve adolescent mental health. Compared to passive controls, mindfulness training actually reduced trait mindfulness slightly (d = -0.10). Compared to active controls, it improved anxiety/stress (d = 0.17) and wellbeing (d = 0.10), but against all controls combined, no outcomes—including anxiety, depression, attention, or social behavior—showed significant benefit (effect sizes ranged from 0.01 to 0.26). No effects persisted at follow-up. These results question the value of existing school-based mindfulness programs as a universal prevention strategy for adolescents.
Frontiers in Psychology
May 11, 2023
Hannah Thurgur, Meg J. Spriggs, Ashleigh Murphy-Beiner et al.
13 citations
A framework called Access, Reciprocity and Conduct (ARC) is proposed to build an ethical and equitable infrastructure for psychedelic-assisted therapy (PAT). ARC rests on three pillars: ensuring equal access to PAT for those needing mental health treatment, promoting safety for those delivering and receiving therapy, and respecting traditional and spiritual uses of psychedelic medicines. The framework is being developed through a dual-phase co-design approach, first co-creating ethics statements with stakeholders from research, industry, therapy, community, and Indigenous settings, then inviting broader collaborative review. The authors aim to spark dialogue and help organizations and practitioners address complex ethical questions in PAT.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2023
Shaun Gallagher
13 citations
The concept of minimal self-consciousness, a basic form of first-person pre-reflective self-awareness tied to bodily awareness and phenomenal experience, is central to discussions of sense of ownership, agency, Buddhist no-self, the Rubber Hand Illusion, and schizophrenia. However, the concept lacks clear definition. To clarify it, this paper revisits Avicenna's 11th-century Flying Man thought experiment, which isolates self-awareness from sensory input. The paper then reviews contemporary debates on the minimal self, focusing on the roles of bodily and social processes.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2022
Zhuo Job Chen, Richard G Cowden, Heinz Streib
13 citations
People who identify as more spiritual than religious form a notable and growing segment in North America and Europe. Two complementary studies examined how four religious/spiritual self-identity groups—more religious than spiritual, more spiritual than religious, equally religious and spiritual, and neither religious nor spiritual—differ across sociodemographic traits, personality, well-being, generativity, mystical experiences, and religious schemata. Study 1, a cross-sectional analysis of 3,491 German and U.S. adults, and Study 2, a longitudinal analysis of 751 adults assessed about three years later, both found strong evidence that the more spiritual than religious group is particularly associated with mysticism.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2022
Stephan Schleim
13 citations
The hard problem of consciousness—explaining subjective experience through third-person science—has historical roots in Leibniz, du Bois-Reymond, and Wundt's concerns about introspection. Recent research on long-term meditators, who can sustain stable conscious states, offers a promising paradigm for studying consciousness. This perspective article traces the problem historically and examines how neurophenomenology, as advocated by Varela, can guide contemporary meditation research toward addressing the hard problem.
Frontiers in Psychology
April 20, 2021
Ana Guerrero-Gomez, Isabel Nöthen-Garunja, Michael Schredl et al.
13 citations
During the COVID-19 lockdown, 31% of adolescents reported heightened dream recall and 18% noticed more nightmares, with 15% of recorded dreams containing pandemic-related content. Subjective emotional reactions to lockdown correlated more strongly with dreaming than objective distress such as illness or death of a close person from COVID-19. The findings suggest that dreams may reflect waking-life stress and that attention to dreams could be included in preventive programs for adolescents facing pandemic-related stress.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2019
Luca Simione, Enrico Di Pace, Salvatore G Chiarella et al.
13 citations
A distinction between phenomenal and access consciousness has been influential in consciousness studies. Phenomenal consciousness is linked to iconic memory and a fragile short-term memory store with larger capacity than working memory, while access consciousness is linked to limited-capacity working memory. Visual attention was thought to affect only access consciousness, but some evidence suggests earlier attentional effects. An experiment using a change-detection task with delayed cueing and high- and low-priority colored objects found an attentional bias toward high-priority objects at longer cueing delays (600 and 1,200 ms) associated with fragile visual short-term memory, but not at shorter delays (16.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2013
Janina Nielsen, Tillmann H. C. Krüger, Uwe Hartmann et al.
13 citations
People with synaesthesia who experience sensory crossovers during sex—such as seeing colors or feeling textures from arousal—report deeper states of sexual trance but lower sexual satisfaction than those without synaesthesia. Among 19 synaesthetes and 36 controls, synaesthetes scored higher on measures of oceanic boundlessness and visionary restructuralization, indicating more intense altered states during intercourse. They also showed better overall sexual function, particularly in sexual appetite, yet felt less satisfied. Qualitative interviews revealed that the idiosyncratic perceptions can create a sense of isolation. The findings suggest that sexual synaesthesia amplifies trance-like immersion without improving satisfaction.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2023
Keke Shi, Guoyan Feng, Qiyong Huang et al.
12 citations
Among more than 3,000 Chinese college students, higher mindfulness was linked to fewer negative emotions, less rumination, and greater resilience. Rumination and resilience each partially explained how mindfulness relates to negative emotions, and they also worked together as a chain: mindfulness was associated with lower rumination and higher resilience, which in turn were associated with fewer negative emotions. The findings suggest that mindfulness may reduce negative emotions both directly and indirectly by decreasing rumination and strengthening resilience.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2022
Kenneth Graham Drinkwater, Neil Dagnall, Stephen J Walsh et al.
12 citations
People who claim to have paranormal abilities—such as psychic powers or mediumship—describe their experiences as deeply tied to their personal history, beliefs, and sense of self. In interviews with 12 participants, four main themes emerged: formative influences like gifted family members or unusual childhood events; subjective experiences of transcendence or extra-sensory perception; embodied processes, especially a sense of control; and perceptions of reality involving self-awareness and surreal experiences. Participants used autobiographical evidence to validate their abilities and often dismissed conventional explanations. The findings suggest that belief in paranormal ability is inseparable from how individuals interpret and make sense of their own experiences.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2020
Tal Dotan Ben-Soussan, Fabio Marson, Claudia Piervincenzi et al.
12 citations
Silence-related experiences during meditation are linked to changes in brain structure and reduced attentional effort. In a study of Quadrato Motor Training (QMT), participants who reported increased silence-related experiences after six weeks of practice also showed decreased attentional effort and increased fractional anisotropy in the left uncinate fasciculus, a white-matter tract. The findings suggest that silence in meditation involves specific neuroanatomical changes and may reduce the cognitive effort required to maintain attention.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2020
Jonathan Mckinney
12 citations
The enactive and ecological approaches to embodied cognitive science, despite sharing roots in psychology and phenomenology, have historically held conflicting views. Early enactivists valued ecological psychology but insisted on keeping the approaches distinct, critiquing that ecological psychology undermined agent autonomy. Conversely, ecological psychologists focused on the organism-environment system, sometimes dismissing enactivism. Both schools now use dynamic systems theory, leading some scholars to propose an ecological-enactive synthesis. This paper argues that such a synthesis risks losing valuable aspects of each approach, analogous to hasty comparisons in early East-West comparative philosophy. Instead, the relationship is best understood as one of complementarity, a concept explored through Japanese Philosophy to illuminate both agent-environment and ecological-enactive complementarities.
Frontiers in Psychology
May 4, 2022
Zuzanna Rucińska, Thomas Fondelli
11 citations
Metaphors are effective therapeutic tools because they connect to action words, allowing a client's embodiment and agency to be explored within dialog. Drawing on embodied, enactive, and ecological ideas, the authors propose a dialogical-enactive account in which metaphors are used to enact change in systemic collaborative therapy. Rather than requiring explicit performances, metaphoric engagement stays within linguistic dialog as an act of participatory sense-making. Two examples with adolescents illustrate how enacting metaphors in shared communication helps clients connect to action and explore their own agency. Talking is seen as a form of doing, unfolding through embodied interaction.
Frontiers in Psychology
April 29, 2022
Amalia Casas-Mas, Juan Ignacio Pozo, Ignacio Montero
11 citations
Two flamenco guitar apprentices with contrasting learning profiles—reproductive and transformative—were studied to examine how bodily practices and verbal discourse reflect embodied cognition in an oral tradition. The analysis, using the SAPIL system, revealed that flamenco learners show a fusion of verbal, body language, and musical discourse, unlike musically literate cultures. Music is embedded in their family and social life, transcending musical activity itself. The transformative apprentice differed from the reproductive one in active learning processes. Flamenco learning relies on listening and temporary external representations rather than notation, with the body central to holistic rhythm processing through singing, playing, and dancing. The embodied mind is a product of the learning culture, reflected through body and gesture.
Frontiers in Psychology
August 27, 2021
Leor Roseman, Nadeem Karkabi
11 citations
Ayahuasca rituals involving both Israelis and Palestinians can produce feelings of unity, but these feelings may mask a political status quo that marginalizes Palestinians. Interviews and observations of 31 participants revealed that the ritual structure avoided recognizing Palestinian national identity or acknowledging Israeli injustice. However, ayahuasca occasionally triggered revelatory events where individuals confronted the oppressive reality between the groups. These events evoked pain, anger, and guilt, leading to resistance against the hegemonic ritual structure and a desire to deliver an emancipatory message, often through song. This fidelity to the revealed truth sometimes expanded ayahuasca practices to other Palestinians and politicized the practice, illustrating the egalitarian revolutionary potential of psychedelics as analyzed through Badiou's theory.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2020
Manuel De Pinedo García
11 citations
Recognizing that living, cognitive agents require normative language to be understood properly—rather than purely factual or descriptive terms—frees us from having to choose sides in ontological debates about whether such agents are eliminable, reducible, or emergent. Treating life only as something to be predicted and controlled strips it of dignity, and a purely factualist view risks making ethical judgments dependent on discovering alleged biological or mental facts, a form of representationalism that undermines democratic ideals by granting technocratic experts authority over values. The argument draws on early analytic philosophy, neglected in post-cognitivist discussions, to show that normative vocabulary is essential for making sense of life and agency.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2018
Michał Bola, Paweł Orłowski, Karolina Baranowska et al.
11 citations
Brain signal diversity is a marker of consciousness, being lower in unconscious states and higher during psychedelic states. This study tested whether increasing the information rate of speech would increase signal diversity, reflecting richer experience. Nineteen participants listened to an audiobook at five speeds (65–135% of original) and to backward (unintelligible) speech, plus a resting-state condition. EEG Lempel-Ziv diversity was measured. The main hypothesis was not supported: Bayes Factor showed evidence for no effect of speech speed on diversity. Resting-state diversity was greater than during any speech condition. Diversity also gradually declined over the experiment, possibly due to decreasing vigilance, suggesting that unconstrained rest allows more varied experiences like mind wandering.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2017
Johannes Wagemann
11 citations
Thinking and perceiving have alternated between convergence and divergence throughout the history of science and philosophy; today they appear more separated than ever, contributing to scientific crises. Drawing on the consciousness phenomenology of Rudolf Steiner and Herbert Witzenmann, this article shows how methodical first-person observation can integrate thinking and perceiving. Through skilled introspective or meditative self-observation, individuals can observe their own mental micro-actions of separating and integrating, which jointly constitute thinking and perceiving. This approach combines conceptual and perceptual dimensions, aligning with the methodological core of modern natural science, and may enable further development of human consciousness and its scientific study.
Frontiers in Psychology
November 15, 2024
Natalia Angarita‐Osorio, Rosa M. Escorihuela, Toñi Cañete
10 citations
A scoping review of 49 studies found that mindfulness is negatively correlated with neuroticism, a personality trait linked to mental and physical health problems. The review identified four common themes across studies: mental health, cognitive outcomes, physiological symptoms, and mindfulness-based interventions. The results suggest that mindfulness may help reduce neuroticism and its negative effects on well-being, though limitations in the existing research were noted. Future work should address these limitations to better understand the relationship.