The replication crisis in psychology is now widely recognized as a crisis of measurement itself, not merely of questionable research practices. Recent critical work has revealed that many psychological scales may be measuring semantic associations rather than the psychological phenomena they purport to assess. This Hypothesis and Theory article makes three contributions. First, it synthesizes...
Contemporary developmental psychology, positive psychology, prevention science, and contemplative research have substantially advanced understanding of human growth, resilience, flourishing, and the factors associated with psychological and behavioural outcomes across the lifespan. However, comparatively less theoretical attention has been devoted to whether the developmental processes that...
Synaesthesia is commonly defined as an involuntary and consistent phenomenon in which stimulation in one sensory or cognitive domain elicits an additional experience in another domain. Yet definitions derived from perceptual psychology, neuroscience, aesthetics, cultural anthropology, and artistic practice often speak past one another. This article proposes a boundary-preserving conceptual...
This nightmare-focused study was conducted based on data collected in an open-label, controlled treatment pilot trial conducted at the Johns Hopkins Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research (CPCR) under an approved protocol (IRB00407008; NCT06407635). Participants completed screening, baseline assessment, four preparatory sessions, two psilocybin dosing sessions, seven post-session...
This paper develops a phenomenological investigation into the dissolution of psychological conditioning through choiceless observation and non-dual awareness. Building upon earlier inquiries into identity, democracy, anthropocentrism, and relational dependency, the work argues that the thinker itself is a product of conditioning and therefore cannot liberate consciousness through effort or...
This Hypothesis and Theory article draws on a targeted, non-systematic synthesis of relevant literature and does not report new empirical data. Suggestion-based interventions show clinical promise across several medical conditions, yet their uptake in routine care remains limited. Psychiatry may be a particularly informative context in which to examine framing-related barriers because treatment...
One way to theorize about we-identities-the identities that individual subjects have as 'one of us'-is in terms of the uniformity, interchangeability, and prototypicality of group members. The social-psychological theory of self-categorization epitomizes this approach, which has strongly influenced contemporary phenomenological research on the we. This paper argues that this approach has one...
Recent debates about AI "guardrails" in mental health have framed a problem as one of detecting delusion. This paper argues that such framing misunderstands both psychiatry and large language models. In clinical practice, delusion is not simply a false belief but a structure of conviction that stabilizes meaning under conditions of uncertainty. Large language models, by contrast, generate...
Conscious experience depends on the coordinated activity of neural processes that span multiple scales: from synapses to whole-brain dynamics. A recently introduced measure, dynamical independence (DI), identifies, characterises, and quantifies these multi-scale relationships using an information-theoretic dimensionality reduction approach. Here, we use DI to examine changes in the emergent...
Objective: This study explores how the Kololi Kie ritual is experienced and interpreted as healing within the Ternate community, with particular attention to how Islamic values inform meaning-making processes in an indigenous counseling-oriented context. Methods and Materials: The study adopts a qualitative phenomenological approach grounded in Alfred Schutz’s social phenomenology. Data were...