Journal of Religion and Health
February 1, 2015
Jean Evans
The practice of spiritual direction concerns the human experience of God. As praxis, spiritual direction has a long tradition in Western Christianity. It is a process rooted in spirituality with theology as its foundation. This paper explores the convergences between aspects of philosophy (contemplative awareness), psychology (Rogerian client-centered approach) and phenomenology. There are...
Psychiatry Research
January 30, 2015
C. Kellner, S. Lisanby, Richard D. Weiner et al.
Electroconvulsive therapy (ECT) has long been regarded as the standard for quick antidepressant response. Recently, ketamine has been touted as an even faster antidepressant, notably in the report by Ghasemi et al. (2014) in which 18 patients (nine in each group) were given three intravenous ketamine infusions or three ECT treatments and followed for 1 week (Ghasemi et al., 2014). While the...
Journal of anthropological sciences = Rivista di antropologia : JASS
January 29, 2015
Emiliano Bruner, Marina Lozano, Carlos Lorenzo
Visuospatial integration concerns the ability to coordinate the inner and outer environments, namely the central nervous system and the outer spatial elements, through the interface of the body. This integration is essential for every basic human activity, from locomotion and grasping to speech or tooling. Visuospatial integration is even more fundamental when dealing with theories on extended...
Cognitive Processing
January 29, 2015
William Benjamin St Clair, David C Noelle
Is conceptual space continuous? The answer to this question depends on how concepts are represented in the brain. Vector space representations, which ground conceptual states in the instantaneous firing rates of neurons, have successfully captured cognitive dynamics in a broad range of domains. There is a growing body of evidence, however, that conceptual information is encoded in...
The Encyclopedia of Clinical Psychology
January 23, 2015
Sara Worley
Abstract: Materialism is the doctrine that the world is entirely physical, whereas dualism is the doctrine that there are two fundamentally different kinds of things in the world: mind and bodies. Dualists say that minds are not made out of physical stuff, and they are not subject to the laws of nature. There are a number of arguments for dualism, ranging from concerns about free will, to...
Buddhist Studies Review
January 15, 2015
Eran Laish
This article focuses on the main contemplative principles of the ‘Heart Essence’ (sNying thig), a Tibetan Buddhist tradition that is characterized by a vision of non-duality and primordial wholeness. Due to this vision, which asserts an original reality that is not divided into perceiving subject and perceived object, the ‘Heart Essence’ advocates a contemplative practice that undermines the...
Frontiers in Psychology
January 14, 2015
Marc Wittmann, Simone Otten, Eva Schötz et al.
Experienced meditators typically report that they experience time slowing down in meditation practice as well as in everyday life. Conceptually this phenomenon may be understood through functional states of mindfulness, i.e., by attention regulation, body awareness, emotion regulation, and enhanced memory. However, hardly any systematic empirical work exists regarding the experience of time in...
Frontiers in Psychology
January 6, 2015
Boris Bornemann, B. Herbert, W. Mehling et al.
Interoceptive body awareness (IA) is crucial for psychological well-being and plays an important role in many contemplative traditions. However, until recently, standardized self-report measures of IA were scarce, not comprehensive, and the effects of interoceptive training on such measures were largely unknown. The Multidimensional Assessment of Interoceptive Awareness (MAIA) questionnaire...
January 5, 2015
Joel Krueger
I respond to Kersten’s criticism in his article “Music and Cognitive Extension” of my approach to the musically extended emotional mind in Krueger (2014). I specify how we manipulate—and in so doing, integrate with—music when, as active listeners, we become part of a musically extended cognitive system. I also indicate how Kersten’s account might be enriched by paying closer attention to the...
Annual Review of Psychology
January 3, 2015
Jonathan Smallwood, Jonathan W. Schooler
Conscious experience is fluid; it rarely remains on one topic for an extended period without deviation. Its dynamic nature is illustrated by the experience of mind wandering, in which attention switches from a current task to unrelated thoughts and feelings. Studies exploring the phenomenology of mind wandering highlight the importance of its content and relation to meta-cognition in...