Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2022
Inês Hipólito, Thomas Van Es
22 citations
Social cognition should not be understood as attributing mental states to others via representational models. Holding both enactivism and Theory of Mind creates contradictions because Theory of Mind assumes social cognition reduces to mental representation and relies on an innate, contentful 'toolkit' for theorizing—both rejected by enactivism. The paper advances an enactivist-dynamic alternative: social cognition is dynamic, real-time, fluid, contextual social action. Using dynamical systems theory, it explains how socio-cognitive novelty arises in development, and active inference is used to show social understanding as generalized synchronization, avoiding representational assumptions.
Frontiers in Psychology
February 22, 2019
Caroline di Bernardi Luft, Никита Дрозд, Michael J. Banissy et al.
22 citations
In an artist who experiences vivid visual imagery during meditation, occipital gamma power (30-70 Hz) increased during the deepest meditation stages and was higher during visions than during non-vision periods. Alpha-frequency brain stimulation made her images sharper, shorter, and more frequent, but the sharpened images were too detailed for her art. Gamma and sham stimulation had no effect on imagery content. These findings suggest occipital gamma may be a neural marker of spontaneous visual imagery in experienced meditators.
Frontiers in Psychology
October 12, 2023
Jakub Greń, Filip Tylš, Michał Lasocik et al.
21 citations
Mental health professionals increasingly encounter clients who have had psychedelic experiences, yet graduate training in psychiatry, psychology, and counseling does not prepare them for this work. To address this gap, an international bottom-up project used literature reviews and roundtable discussions to develop comprehensive guidelines for psychedelic integration. The guidelines cover theoretical and practical aspects, including psychedelic effects, a definition of integration, theoretical considerations, a model for organizing integration practice, an overview of current models, and specific interventions from various psychotherapeutic approaches. These guidelines are intended as a resource for any mental health specialist supporting individuals with psychedelic experiences.
Frontiers in Psychology
February 8, 2023
Jonathan Nash, Andrew B. Newberg
21 citations
A classification system for meditation methods, first proposed in 2013, is expanded into a Three Tier Classification System that accounts for the full range of meditation practices. The system uses functional essentialism and the affect-and-cognition paradigm to separate methods into three orthogonal categories. Recent neuroscience research is presented as validating the original thesis. The paper also introduces a criterion-based protocol for formulating such classification systems and demonstrates how this model can be used to compare and evaluate other taxonomy proposals published over the past 15 years.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2023
Karin Cinalioglu, Paola Lavín, Magnus Bein et al.
21 citations
A randomized controlled trial will test whether virtual-reality-guided meditation is feasible and acceptable for reducing stress, anxiety, and depression in older adults. Thirty community-dwelling adults aged 60 years or older with moderate stress will be randomly assigned to either an eight-session VR meditation program or a waitlist control group. Sessions last 15 minutes and occur twice weekly for four weeks, offered at home or in a hospital. Outcomes include perceived stress, anxiety, depression, sleep quality, quality of life, and mindfulness skills, measured before and after the intervention. Qualitative interviews will capture participants' experiences. The trial is registered at ClinicalTrials.gov (NCT05315609).
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2021
Aden-Paul Flotman
21 citations
During the COVID-19 pandemic, self-transcendence helped seven South African middle managers find meaning and maintain wellbeing at work. Through unstructured narratives, the study found that self-transcendence acts as a coping mechanism in adversity, enabling managers to renegotiate meaning in three ways: shifting from blame to a work orientation, from reflection to reflexivity, and from self-consciousness to other-consciousness. Self-transcendence also allowed exploration of anxiety's adaptive benefits. The findings extend existential positive psychology and suggest organizations invest in reflexive practices to promote deep learning and connectivity.
Frontiers in Psychology
June 3, 2024
Darius Parvizi-Wayne, Lars Sandved-Smith, Riddhi J. Pitliya et al.
20 citations
Flow is a state of optimal performance experienced across domains like art, athletics, gaming, and writing. Its puzzling features include a reported loss of self-awareness despite skilled agency, and effortlessness despite task complexity. Using the active inference framework—where action and perception minimize variational free energy—the authors propose that flow arises from high precision weighting on expected sensory consequences of action and beliefs about sequential action. This draws the embodied system to exploit pragmatic affordances while restricting counterfactual planning, leading to inhibition of the sense of self as a temporally extended object and higher-order self-conceptualization. However, self-awareness is not entirely lost; it remains pre-reflective and bodily.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2024
Sarah E B Francis, Frances Shawyer, Bruno Cayoun et al.
20 citations
Mindfulness-based cognitive therapy (MBCT) and mindfulness-integrated cognitive behavior therapy (MiCBT) differ in their origins, structure, and evidence. MBCT was developed to prevent depressive relapse and has strong support from systematic reviews and meta-analyses, earning endorsement in clinical guidelines, but its single-disorder focus may limit its use in diverse health settings. MiCBT was designed for transdiagnostic applications, incorporating exposure procedures and compassion training to reduce avoidance, and shows promising early evidence, though it lacks inclusion in clinical guidelines. More high-quality randomized controlled trials and systematic reviews are needed for MiCBT, while MBCT requires greater attention to dissemination and implementation research.
Frontiers in Psychology
September 7, 2022
Katherine V. Sparks, Christopher Ring
20 citations
A 6-week rowing-specific mindfulness intervention, combining generic and rowing-specific practices, increased flow, mindfulness, and rowing performance in rowers, while decreasing conscious motor processing from pre-test to post-test. However, the intervention did not change mindfulness or reinvestment more than the control condition. Participants evaluated the intervention positively. These results provide preliminary evidence that sport-specific mindfulness training can benefit athletes.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2022
Charlotte Grégoire, Nolwenn Marie, Corine Sombrun et al.
20 citations
A protocol describes a planned trial comparing three group interventions—hypnosis, mindful self-compassion meditation, and self-induced cognitive trance (SICT)—against a no-intervention control for improving quality of life in cancer patients who have completed active treatment within the past year. The study targets cancer-related fatigue, emotional distress, sleep difficulties, pain, and cognitive problems. Each participant chooses their preferred arm. Data from questionnaires, neurobiological measures, and medical records are collected at baseline, immediately after the intervention, and at 3- and 12-month follow-ups. The trial aims to enroll 160 patients and will assess short- and long-term effectiveness.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2022
Luis Felipe Llanos, Lorena Martínez Verduzco
20 citations
Transcendence can be understood as either a personal pursuit (individual transcendence) or a community-oriented one (collective transcendence). A survey of 402 business students in Mexico, analyzed with a structural equation model, showed that these two orientations are clearly different. Young participants preferred seeking personal meaning over collective meaning, suggesting that collective transcendence may be a prerequisite for personal transcendence. The findings can inform job profile design for staff development and serve as a positive model for life education and society.
Frontiers in Psychology
August 6, 2021
Daniel Meling
20 citations
The enactive approach in cognitive science holds that cognition is sense-making: organisms enact a meaningful world rather than receiving a pre-given one. This sense-making has no fixed, substantial ground; it arises from a dynamic web of relations and is therefore groundless. The article argues that this groundlessness is not merely a theoretical concept but is directly accessible in lived experience. It explores what it means to know groundlessness and how one can come to know it, describing how this knowing fits within enactive theory and can be experienced when certain conditions are met. A reflexive analysis highlights the context-dependency and observer-relativity of these claims.
Frontiers in Psychology
June 25, 2020
Leonor Irarrázaval
20 citations
Phenomenology in psychiatry and psychology is best suited to qualitative research, particularly through phenomenological interviews. This article clarifies what makes an interview phenomenological, why such interviews are conducted with patients, and how they should be performed and analyzed. It argues that merely testing phenomenological hypotheses or concepts does not do justice to patients' involvement. The article also points to the broader scientific paradigm of phenomenology, which holds that reality is mind-dependent, and suggests future directions for research.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2020
David Travieso, Lorena Lobo, Carlos De Paz et al.
20 citations
Enactivism and ecological psychology share more common ground than is often recognized, as illustrated by the example of dynamic touch—a form of touch involving muscles and tendons that allows perception of hand-held objects wielded but not seen. Dynamic touch necessarily implies active exploration because perceivers perform wielding movements with effort. The example has been formalized at the level of laws governing the organism-environment system, providing empirically supported instantiations of sensorimotor contingencies (in enactivist terms) and intentional exploration and information detection (in ecological terms). It also exemplifies the enactivist concepts of bringing-forth the world and sense-making. The article also clarifies key ecological concepts of invariance and affordance, highlighting the crucial difference between perceiving and actualizing affordances for dialogue between the approaches.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2023
Pascal Michael, David Luke, Oliver Robinson
19 citations
A person who had a near-death experience (NDE) while in a coma from bacterial meningoencephalitis later took 5MeO-DMT, an endogenous psychedelic. A thematic analysis of the NDE account and an interview about the drug experience found high comparability, including ego dissolution and transcendence of time and space. However, the NDE uniquely included a life review, encounters with the deceased, and a threshold experience. Despite similarities, the participant felt the two experiences were not similar enough to attribute the NDE to endogenous psychedelics. The authors speculate that the brain inflammation may have triggered neural activity similar to that of psychedelics, but note this hypothesis is speculative.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2023
Josh Kaplan, Vanessa C Somohano, Belle Zaccari et al.
19 citations
Mind-body interventions (MBIs) for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) show promise but have inconsistent evidence. A review of 26 randomized controlled trials found low-strength evidence for mindfulness-based and meditation- or mantra-based interventions due to contradictory results and high risk of bias. Movement-based interventions (e.g., yoga, tai chi) had moderate-strength evidence, with individual studies consistently favoring the intervention across a relatively large number of studies and participants. Only two of the 26 studies used objective outcome measures. The review highlights the need for better comparator conditions, standardized measurement, and objective outcomes in future research.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2022
Ido Hartogsohn
19 citations
The concept of cyberdelics, linking digital technologies with psychedelic drugs, re-emerges alongside renewed interest in virtual reality and psychedelics. Advocates envision transformative technologies fostering awe and transcendence rather than consumerism, but cultural and economic conditions may suppress this potential. Drawing on psychedelic humanities, which emphasize how cultural context (set and setting) shapes drug effects, the paper examines how these principles apply to cyberdelic media, its prospects, and its challenges.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2021
Laura Tolbaños-roche, Praseeda Menon
19 citations
Yoga practitioners show better self-awareness and self-regulation than non-practitioners, as measured by interoceptive awareness and decentering abilities, according to a test of the S-ART neurobiological model of well-being. Among 362 Indian and Spanish yoga practitioners and non-practitioners, those who practiced yoga scored higher on these abilities. Perseverance in yoga practice predicted self-awareness and self-regulation in the combined sample, but cultural differences emerged: for Indian practitioners with over a year of practice, yoga practice and perseverance predicted interoceptive awareness and decentering, whereas for Spanish participants, physical exercise and frequency of practice were better predictors. The findings provide preliminary support for the S-ART model's application to yoga's self-regulatory mechanisms.
Frontiers in Psychology
September 17, 2020
Eric van Lente, Michael Hogan
19 citations
Experienced meditators describe oneness experiences as involving changes in the sense of space (unboundedness), time, identity, wholeness, and flow, with these aspects forming an interrelated system. The study used a collective intelligence method called Interactive Management across five groups to identify and model these perceptions, which were consistent across sessions. Findings suggest that shifts in self-perception during meditation—toward a sense of non-separation from the world—may be a key mechanism linking mindfulness practice to well-being outcomes.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2020
Joseph Glicksohn, Tal Dotan Ben-Soussan
19 citations
A female participant who scored the maximum on the Absorption Scale reported a spiritual experience—feeling she was meeting God—while immersed in a whole-body perceptual deprivation tank. Her experience included imagery of a spaceship, corridors, a man in white, speaking to God, the sun, supernova, concentric images, and an out-of-body experience. Her EEG showed frontal and parietal left-greater-than-right alpha asymmetry at baseline, and during the tank condition, a global increase in alpha power with a sharp increase in right-frontal alpha power. Comparing her data with another high-absorption participant and two low-absorption participants suggests that verbalizable spiritual experiences may be linked to increased right-frontal alpha power, whereas ineffable mystical experiences might involve increased left-frontal alpha power.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2015
Zuzanna Rucińska, Ellen Reijmers
19 citations
The paper presents the enactive account of pretend play (EAPP), a non-standard philosophical view that describes pretend play as arising from interaction and affordances rather than from internal mental representations. This re-characterization helps explain how shared meanings and interaction function in systemic therapies, where play is used to enhance dialog rather than to uncover hidden meanings. The authors conclude by connecting insights from therapeutic practice with philosophical analysis.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2024
Dong Gao, Yuqin Su, Xing Zhang et al.
18 citations
Virtual reality (VR)-based mindfulness, including VR meditation and VR mind-body exercises, is a promising approach to improve older adults' health. VR meditation relies on headsets and effectively improves mental health, pain, and quality of life. VR mind-body exercises require motion capture sensors, main consoles, and display screens; they enhance mental health and physical function and may be combined with other exercises. These interventions improve accessibility and the meditation experience but face challenges such as cost, technical anxiety, and apparatus issues. Future research should examine optimal exercise doses for VR mind-body exercises to maximize health benefits.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 28, 2021
Dylan Thomas Lott, Tenzin Yeshi, N. Norchung et al.
18 citations
Recent EEG studies on the early postmortem interval suggest the persistence of electrophysiological coherence and connectivity in the brain of animals and humans, reinforcing the need for further investigation of brain activity during the dying process. Under the direction of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, research was conducted in India on a postmortem meditative state (tukdam) cultivated by some Tibetan Buddhist practitioners, in which decomposition is putatively delayed. For healthy baseline and postmortem subjects, resting state EEG, mismatch negativity, and auditory brainstem response data were collected. Living subjects displayed well-defined MMN and ABR responses, but no recognizable EEG waveforms were discernable in any of the tukdam cases.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2021
Serena Scarpelli, Valentina Alfonsi, Anita D'Anselmo et al.
18 citations
During the Italian COVID-19 lockdown, people with narcolepsy type-1 (NT1) reported more lucid dreams than matched controls, and those lucid dreams were linked to greater creativity and problem-solving during waking hours. The study compared 43 NT1 patients with 86 controls. NT1 patients had higher sleepiness, while controls had more sleep disturbances—a difference that disappeared after accounting for medication. Among NT1 patients, nightmare frequency correlated with female gender, longer sleep, and more wakefulness within sleep; dream recall, nightmares, and lucid dreams all correlated with sleepiness. The findings confirm a connection between lucidity and creativity in NT1 but cannot establish causality due to the small sample and cross-sectional design.
Frontiers in Psychology
January 1, 2020
Takuya Niikawa
18 citations
A map of consciousness studies is presented, listing five fundamental categories of questions: Definitional, Phenomenological, Epistemological, Ontological, and Axiological. Each category is subdivided into more specific questions, and existing approaches to each question are classified into groups with principal researchers. The map is then applied to examine the integrated information theory and the global workspace theory of consciousness, demonstrating its usefulness.