Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2024
Kelley C O'Donnell, Lauren Okano, Michael Alpert et al.
A conceptual framework for MDMA-Assisted Therapy for PTSD centers on the participant's inner healing intelligence as the primary agent of change, with the therapeutic relationship as the core facilitative condition. This inner-directed, holistic, self-directed, relational, and trauma-informed approach includes a non-pathologizing stance toward embodied experiences, such as intense emotional expression, multiplicity, suicidal ideation, and transpersonal experiences. Therapists bring psychodynamic, somatic, and transpersonal awareness, empathic attunement, relational skillfulness, and cultural humility. MDMA with this psychotherapy outperformed placebo with psychotherapy in Phase 2 and 3 trials, though significant symptom reduction also occurred in the placebo group, supporting the psychotherapy model itself.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2024
Gustav A Von Schulz
Vygotsky developed his Cultural Historical Theory by synthesizing pre-revolutionary Hegelian ideas about consciousness and culture with the Marxist materialist ideology required by the Soviet Union after the Russian Revolution. He aimed to resolve the ideological conflict between idealism and materialism, drawing on Gestalt psychology, Hegel, Marx, and Engels to create a new psychological method. The resulting theory focused on consciousness and mind rather than biology-based stimulus-response psychology. Vygotsky's approach demonstrates how deep ideological differences can be bridged by finding unexpected commonalities between opposing views, as shown in his criticism of pure empiricism.
Frontiers in Psychology
October 18, 2023
Michael Cordova
Silence is not merely the absence of sound but can be a rich, meaningful experience that shapes human consciousness and well-being. The article argues that silence has been undervalued in psychological research, yet it plays a crucial role in self-reflection, emotional regulation, and aesthetic appreciation. Drawing on humanistic and psychoanalytic perspectives, the author suggests that silence can facilitate deeper self-awareness and connection with others, challenging the modern tendency to fill every moment with noise. The piece calls for more empirical and theoretical attention to silence as a positive psychological phenomenon.
Frontiers in Psychology
August 9, 2023
Patric Plesa, Rotem Petranker
The resurgence of psychedelic research aims to treat mental health conditions through psychedelics-assisted psychotherapy, with current theories emphasizing mystical experiences as key drivers of symptom improvement. These experiences enhance feelings of salience, connectedness, and meaning. The authors argue that the excitement around psychedelics partly responds to a modern meaning and alienation crisis, which correlates with rising anxiety and depression. They frame this absence of meaning as neonihilism, a contemporary version of 19th-century nihilism shaped by neoliberal culture. Exploring whether psychedelics combined with group therapy can address modern meaninglessness, they propose concrete next steps for theory and practice, introducing neonihilistic psychedelic group psychotherapy.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2023
Romy Lauche, Dennis Anheyer, Lisa A Uebelacker et al.
Among 7,186 Australian women aged 36-43, 27.5% practiced yoga or meditation. Perceived stress partially explained the link between negative life events and depressive symptoms, but yoga/meditation did not reduce that stress. Instead, yoga/meditation directly weakened the connection between negative life events and depression, acting as a buffer. Social support and optimism also moderated the stress-depression link. The findings suggest yoga/meditation may help protect against depression after negative events, though the mechanism remains unclear.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2022
Nam-Gyoon Kim, Judith A Effken
Perceiving affordances—opportunities for action that the environment offers relative to an individual's body and abilities—keeps people connected to their surroundings and mentally healthy. When this ability is impaired, meaningful relationships with the environment break down, contributing to irrational behavior seen in self disorders like schizophrenia. Two laboratory studies showed that patients with schizophrenia and Alzheimer's disease have a reduced capacity to perceive affordances. This finding serves as contra-positive evidence that supports the affordance concept: if lacking affordance perception leads to mental health problems, then those with such problems should show impaired affordance detection. The results also suggest contra-positive evidence can complement positive evidence for empirically validating concepts like affordance and meaning.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2022
Joan González Guardiola
The authors argue that Husserl's phenomenology contains a notion of a 'minimal self' that is not reducible to a Cartesian subject. They distinguish the philosophy of the subject from the philosophy of the self, showing that Husserl's conception of the self does not align with the Cartesian association Heidegger criticized. By analyzing the 'senses of the self' in Husserl's work, they extract the concept of 'minimal self' relevant to current debates between psychiatry and phenomenology. The authors also demonstrate that moving from the transcendental ego to a theory of the orientation of conscious life requires grounding the concept of ego in the formal mereology of Husserl's third 'Logical Investigation.'
Frontiers in Psychology
March 15, 2021
Ingmar Gorman, Ingmar Gorman, Ingmar Gorman et al.
Psychedelic Harm Reduction and Integration (PHRI) is a clinical approach for mental health providers working with patients who use or consider using psychedelics in any setting. It combines harm reduction psychotherapy and psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy, applicable in brief or ongoing therapy. PHRI shifts from focusing only on negative outcomes and abstinence-based addiction treatment toward compassionate, destigmatizing acceptance of patients' choices. The approach addresses assessment, preparation, and managing difficult experiences, responding to increased psychedelic research, media attention, and legal changes.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2020
Alexandra Kitson, Alice Chirico, Andrea Gaggioli et al.
Self-transcendence involves reduced self-saliency (ego disillusionment) and increased connection, and interest in the topic has grown over the past decade. Several measures with some psychometric validity and reliability exist, but no prior review has systematically described, contrasted, and evaluated the various methodological approaches—including questionnaires, neurological and physiological measures, and qualitative methods. This review fills that gap by describing existing measurement methods, assessing their strengths and weaknesses, and suggesting future research directions and recommendations for selecting appropriate methods based on research context.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2015
Francisco A Olivares, Esteban Vargas, Claudio Fuentes et al.
Neurophenomenology aims to bridge qualitative and quantitative methods in consciousness research through reciprocal constraints between first-person accounts and neurophysiological data, but has faced methodological difficulties in systematically obtaining and analyzing subjective reports. Recently developed second-person methods—interview techniques that elicit verbal and non-verbal information—offer a way to obtain detailed subjective reports. This paper examines the potential of second-person methodologies for neurophenomenology, describes available interview techniques, analyzes two experimental studies that incorporate them, and identifies the validation problem of comparing results across participants and interviewers. The authors argue that second-person methods are a powerful approach for closing the gap between experiential and neurobiological levels of description.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2014
Paul Lodder, Mark Rotteveel, Michiel van Elk
Within social cognition, some researchers argue that understanding others relies on dynamic, second-person interactions rather than detached observation. This enactivist view splits over whether such intersubjective processes are innate. Nativist enactivists cite neonatal imitation as evidence that infants possess an embodied form of understanding others from birth, while empiricist enactivists claim these processes are learned through social interaction. A critical examination of studies on neonate imitation finds that only tongue protrusion imitation is consistently replicated across studies; evidence for other gestures is mixed. If neonates imitate only one gesture, a simpler explanation for tongue protrusion is possible. Thus, the nativist claim that second-person interactive processes are present at birth appears unsupported. The evidence aligns with the empiricist position, suggesting that such interactive understanding develops over time.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2014
Éric Laurent
Vision is not an isolated, modular process but is instead shaped by non-visual contextual factors—biological, physical, and social systems with which it is coupled. Converging evidence from human perception research indicates that visual activity is enacted through multiscale couplings rather than hard-wired modules. The article introduces the Multiscale Enaction Model (MEM), which links psychological findings with biocomputational data to bridge scales of analysis. MEM accounts for autopoiesis-driven information seeking and the emergence of perception, emphasizing the embodied, flexible teleology of subsystems.
Frontiers in Psychology
July 30, 2026
Lena Erdmann, Barbara Breitenstein, Maria Badanova et al.
In a cross-sectional online study of 324 participants from 23 countries, lower experiential avoidance during a high ventilation breathwork session predicted higher mental well-being afterward. Altered states of consciousness during the session predicted lower experiential avoidance, and more intense altered states combined with fewer challenging experiences predicted better post-session well-being. Experiential avoidance did not predict emotional breakthroughs, nor did it mediate the links between altered states or challenging experiences and well-being. The authors suggest that reduced experiential avoidance and more intense altered states during breathwork enhance mental well-being, with blissful states within altered states potentially fostering openness and engagement.
Frontiers in Psychology
July 29, 2026
Alison King, Darryl Gray
Consciousness research often conflates distinct processes like consciousness, awareness, and metacognition, making it hard to determine which capacities are preserved or disrupted in altered states. This paper proposes an organizational framework distinguishing three partially separable conditions: biological regulation (adaptive control without stable experience), integrated experiential awareness (coordinated sensory and affective experience), and recursive self-modeling (representing one's own internal states). The central hypothesis is that these conditions show ordered vulnerability across perturbation and recovery: recursive self-modeling is more vulnerable than integrated experiential awareness under sleep onset, anesthesia, dissociation, or neurological disruption, and re-emerges later during recovery. These conditions are treated as graded transition zones within a multidimensional landscape, offering testable predictions without requiring sharp boundaries.
Frontiers in Psychology
July 28, 2026
Hercules Morais, Débora Regina de Aguiar, Matheus Hissa Lourenço Ferreira et al.
A pilot proof-of-concept study examined the neurophysiological effects of mindfulness-based artistic–contemplative sound pills—structured auditory interventions combining poetic narratives, soundscapes, and mindfulness instructions—in 12 adults using EEG. Exploratory analyses indicated a statistically significant reduction in high-frequency beta activity (20–30 Hz) during the intervention compared to pre-intervention baseline, with a return toward baseline afterward. No significant global changes appeared in other frequency bands (alpha, theta, delta, mu, low-frequency beta, or combined theta+alpha). Subgroup analyses by artistic modality (visual arts, dance, music, theater) suggested descriptive, modality-specific patterns, but these are hypothesis-generating only due to very small subgroup sizes (n=2–4) and no control condition. The authors conclude the results provide preliminary evidence that such interventions can modulate neural oscillatory dynamics, particularly in high-frequency beta, and require confirmation in larger controlled studies.
Frontiers in Psychology
July 23, 2026
Shoichi Shiota, Takahiro Ohitokata, Hiroshi Harada
A pilot study of 401 Japanese elementary school children who participated in a 15-minute weekly "Asa (morning) yoga" program over six months found that self-esteem and gratitude scores were significantly higher after the program than before. The program included physical postures, breathing techniques, attention-focused meditation, and loving-kindness meditation. The authors suggest that school-based yoga may be associated with positive changes in socio-emotional outcomes, but caution that the absence of a control group prevents causal interpretation.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2026
Merwyn Yu Xian Lee, Megan Wan Ting Tay, Meng Leong Chia et al.
A brief 10-minute guided mindfulness meditation session reduced anxiety and improved accuracy on a simple motor task in healthy young adults who had never meditated before. In a randomized controlled trial, 24 participants either meditated or rested before tracing circles with their dominant hand. The meditation group showed a 4.2% increase in tracing accuracy with their trained hand, while no improvement occurred for the untrained hand or a novel inverted-screen task. Heart rates and self-reported anxiety decreased during meditation, but cognitive functions like attention and inhibitory control did not differ between groups. The authors suggest brief meditation may aid simple motor learning by lowering anxiety, but longer or regular practice might be needed for complex tasks.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2026
Niklas Bergmann, Ingmar Conell, Inge Hahne et al.
Cognitive fusion—overidentifying with thoughts—undermines psychological flexibility and contributes to poor emotion regulation. This set of three studies tested the Cognitive Fusion Questionnaire (CFQ) in diverse groups. In Study 1, 779 regular meditators completed the English CFQ, which showed excellent internal consistency (α = 0.94) and a strong negative correlation with mindfulness (r = -0.67). In Study 2, 123 patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders completed a German version (CFQ-D), which demonstrated high reliability (α = 0.92) and a moderate negative correlation with mindfulness (r = -0.30). In Study 3, a randomized controlled trial with 38 participants, those receiving mindfulness-based group therapy showed reduced cognitive fusion over time. The CFQ is a reliable, valid measure across clinical and non-clinical samples.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2026
Human-Friedrich Unterrainer
Altered states of consciousness, ranging from psychotic disintegration to mystical union, often involve oceanic affectivity—experiences of ego dissolution, boundlessness, and affective merging. Such states can be induced by psychedelics, trauma, meditation, or compulsive addictive cycles. While oceanic states may temporarily relieve psychic pain, they can reinforce a regressive return to early undifferentiated states, bypassing affect and symbolic integration. From a neuropsychodynamic perspective, addiction functions as a failed form of transcendence, an attempt to escape internal fragmentation. Neuroscientifically, these states involve alterations in the default mode network, limbic dysregulation, reduced top-down control, and increased neural entropy, potentially loosening rigid ego structures and facilitating unconscious material. The paper integrates psychodynamic theory with neuroscientific findings to conceptualize addiction as a neuropsychodynamic attempt to restore internal cohesion, offering therapeutic implications.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2026
Jingxin Deng, Fang Xu
An 8-week Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) program improved sleep quality, reduced academic stress, and increased mindfulness in Chinese school adolescents. Forty-six students were randomly assigned to either the MBSR group (22 participants) or a no-intervention control group (24 participants). After the program, the MBSR group showed significant reductions in sleep quality and academic stress scores and a significant increase in mindfulness scores, while the control group showed no significant changes. The findings suggest MBSR may be a beneficial intervention for adolescents in school settings.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2026
Isabella Langwei, Bin Li
Whether a group has collectively experienced an optimal state—like flow or effervescence—has been judged by individual reports, leaving unclear how the group itself could recognize such an experience. An analysis of bisosilin, the evaluative term Bunun singers use to decide whether their ritual polyphonic chant pasibutbut is complete, shows that recognition depends not on anyone's internal feeling but on achieving a specific relational configuration of sonic alignment, bodily coordination, and shared intentional orientation. The study argues that collective optimal experience is not generated first and then recognized; generation and recognition are structurally inseparable. Two models are proposed: a three-layer body grammar specifying necessary conditions, and a process-uncertainty-alignment model describing a nonlinear transition called critical convergence at which the experience is established as a structural event, not an internal state.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2026
Sharon Vaisvaser
Aesthetic experiences are rooted in the body and can evoke deep emotions, supporting development, mental health, and well-being. This conceptual review integrates neuroaesthetics and psychodynamic approaches to show how aesthetic experiences arise from a dynamic interplay between anticipation and surprise, generating prediction errors that drive exploration, curiosity, and meaning-making. These processes engage neural systems for sensorimotor processing, emotion-valuation, and meaning-knowledge integration. In psychotherapy, aesthetic moments emerge through embodied interactions and creative arts, enabling pre-symbolic impressions to be transformed into symbolic, thinkable experience. Therapist and patient co-create a shared field that expands peripersonal space, deepens connection, and helps integrate unrepresented aspects of self, supporting emotional regulation, mentalization, neural plasticity, and corrective learning.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2026
Sushil Prasad Mahato, M Anjaladevi, Abinash Roy et al.
A small pilot study compared heartfulness meditation, bell meditation, and a control condition in nine healthy male university students over 21 days. Heartfulness meditation was associated with observed increases in gamma and low-beta brain activity, while bell meditation showed a small increase in low-beta activity with minimal gamma change. Heart rate decreased across all groups. Heart-rate variability measures showed declines in low-frequency percentage for both meditation groups but an increase in the control group, and HRV amplitude decreased in all groups. These preliminary observations suggest potential trends toward neural-autonomic regulation, with heartfulness emphasizing attentional engagement and bell emphasizing relaxation, but the very small sample size and brief duration limit confidence.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2026
Chen-Gia Tsai
Music evokes emotion by making the brain infer a 'virtual body' whose internal states are implied by musical patterns. The framework treats rhythm, dynamics, and timbre as pseudo-interoceptive cues that the brain integrates with real physiological signals and context. Within a hierarchical generative model, top-down predictions combine with actual arousal to produce a conscious blend of genuine bodily sensation and simulated affective qualia. Analyses of works by Mozart, Schubert, Berlioz, Beethoven, and Verdi show how composers manipulate these cues to drive precision-weighted prediction error, sustaining attention and immersion. Music-induced emotion is redefined as a controlled hallucination of bodily change, with implications for aesthetic empathy and therapy.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2026
Benjamin Kozuch, Peter Kok
A framework is proposed for identifying the neural correlates of a low-level component of visual consciousness called base experience, defined as the spatial arrangement of colors across the visual field. A content-matching method compares the content of base experience with that represented by candidate neural systems, using matches and mismatches as evidence for or against a neural system being the neural basis of base experience. A formal system specifies the content of both experience and neural activity in a common quantitative format for precise comparison. Three matching strategies—region-matching, grain-matching, and representational-matching—are outlined for testing hypotheses about the neural basis of conscious visual content. Applying this method can help adjudicate between competing theories of consciousness.