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
July 20, 2018
Marek Havlík, Karolína Mladá, Iveta Fajnerová et al.
3 citations
Personality traits, particularly the dimension of self-transcendence measured by Cloninger's Temperament and Character Inventory, correlate with people's intuitive inclinations toward either dualism or reductive materialism regarding the mind-body problem. In a pilot study using a newly developed questionnaire based on analytic philosophy of the mind, participants categorized as dualists showed significant differences in self-transcendence scores compared to those categorized as reductive materialists. The findings suggest that philosophical positions on the mind-body problem, and possibly responses to thought experiments in philosophy of mind, may be influenced by underlying personality features, a factor that should be considered in future philosophical and empirical research.
Frontiers in Psychology
September 15, 2025
Judith Hooper, Jarrod M. Ellingson, Kent E. Hutchison
2 citations
Aesthetic experiences under psychedelics are vivid and meaningful but poorly measured. A new questionnaire, the Psychedelic Aesthetic Experience Questionnaire (PAEQ), was refined and validated in 365 past-year psilocybin users who completed an online survey. Factor analysis revealed four dimensions: sensory, affective, semantic, and flow. The scale showed high internal consistency (α = 0.90) and strong correlations with existing measures of mystical experience, emotional breakthrough, and psychological insight. PAEQ scores modestly predicted improvements in sleep, pain, substance use, anxiety, depression, and quality of life after psychedelic use. The PAEQ offers a psychometrically sound tool for capturing aesthetic engagement during psychedelic experiences.
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
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
June 13, 2024
Marieta Pehlivanova, Marina Weiler, Bruce Greyson
2 citations
Belief in psychic phenomena is widespread but controversial. A leading hypothesis is that high belief is explained by differences in cognitive styles, but most research has been conducted with lay individuals. This study measured actively open-minded thinking (AOT) and need for closure (NFC) in four groups: academic psi researchers (N=44), lay psi believers (N=32), academic skeptics (N=35), and lay skeptics (N=33). Group differences appeared in AOT but not NFC. Academic psi researchers scored similarly to both skeptic groups on AOT (4.5 out of a possible range), while lay psi believers scored significantly lower (4.2), indicating less willingness to consider evidence that challenges their beliefs.
Frontiers in Psychology
April 29, 2024
Thurston Lacalli
2 citations
Consciousness and individual agency can be decoupled in two hypothetical ways: reflex pathways that incorporate conscious sensations as an intrinsic component (InCs), and consciously conditioned reflexes dependent on synaptic plasticity but not memory (CCRs). Whether these exist is unclear, and InCs are limited to theories where consciousness depends on EM field effects. Consciousness with agency, as humans experience it, requires deliberate choice of alternative actions (DCs) that depend on explicit memory systems. CCRs provide a heuristic model for how conscious inputs could refine routine behaviors while evolution optimizes qualia without agency.
Frontiers in Psychology
March 7, 2024
Fatih Incekara, Jan Dirk Blom
2 citations
Based on a phenomenological analysis of Carl Jung's self-reports in a seven-volume journal and other writings, several types of anomalous perceptual experiences are identified: hypnagogic-hypnopompic experiences, hyperphantasia, hallucinations, personifications, and sensed presence. These experiences were not indicative of a psychotic disorder but stemmed from extremely vivid mental imagery, or hyperphantasia, a condition not conceptualized during Jung's time. Jung may have foreshadowed research on reality equivalence, where inner mental reality substitutes for external perception. Future research should investigate hyperphantasia's role in psychotic experiences, but Jung himself managed to contextualize and find meaning in his experiences, sharing them with others.
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
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
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, 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
June 9, 2023
Neşe Devenot, George Erving
2 citations
Consciousness may be understood as a form of poetry, with the brain's default mode network acting as a kind of 'editor' that selects and organizes experience into coherent narratives. The article argues that both poetic creation and conscious experience involve a dynamic interplay between spontaneous, associative thought and structured, editorial refinement. This perspective bridges neuroscience and poetics, suggesting that the default mode network's role in self-referential thought and narrative construction is analogous to the editorial process in poetry. The authors propose that viewing consciousness through a poetic lens can offer new insights into its nature and function, potentially informing both scientific and artistic understandings of subjective experience.
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
July 29, 2020
Jared R. Lindahl, D. James Cooper, Nathan E. Fisher et al.
2 citations
Buddhist meditation practitioners and teachers report a wider range of difficult or distressing experiences than previously discussed, some of which are considered expected on the contemplative path. Distinguishing these from psychopathology requires expanding assessment frameworks beyond normative fit with religious experience or mental illness to include the need for intervention, whether religious or clinical. Decision-making about intervention often depends on contextual factors, aligning with person-centered mental health care that considers interpersonal and cultural dynamics.
Frontiers in Psychology
September 12, 2019
Leonor Asensio-Aguerri, Luis Beato‐Fernández, María Stavraki et al.
2 citations
Paranoid thinking and positive mental health are two separate dimensions, not opposite ends of a single scale. In 60 patients with DSM-5 diagnoses linked to paranoid thinking, treatments that reduce pathological confidence—such as metacognitive therapy and antipsychotics—can inadvertently induce doubt in all thoughts, not just delusional ones. This generalized doubt partially mediates the relationship between paranoid thinking and well-being, meaning that while these treatments reduce paranoid thoughts, they also lower patients' well-being and quality of life by casting doubt on non-delusional thoughts as well.
Frontiers in Psychology
June 7, 2019
Renato Donfrancesco, Claudio Vezzani, Giuliana Pinto et al.
2 citations
Fantasy in children is a precocious and important skill, and some imaginative events closely resemble hallucinations. A new questionnaire, the Free Fantasy Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (FFQ), was validated with 1,707 participants aged 8–18 years. Among the general population, 10% of adolescents frequently have fantasy with paracosmos, 9.5% sometimes have imaginary relatives, and perception-like experiences involving invisible real personages were found in 64.3% of primary school, 34.5% of lower-secondary, and 27.4% of upper-secondary students. Among ADHD participants, 40% showed perception-like experiences, with 21.66% scoring very high on the Reality/Unreality dimension and having dissociative symptoms, and 3.