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
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
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, 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
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
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, 2026
Leonardo Christov-Moore, Félix Schoeller, Mathilda Von Guttenberg et al.
A guided loving kindness meditation combined with chills-inducing music enhances mood, self-transcendence, emotional breakthrough, and psychological insight more than meditation alone. In a randomized online study with 398 participants, loving kindness meditation increased connectedness to others compared to a mindfulness-based control, while adding chills-inducing music to either meditation boosted self-transcendence, mood, emotional breakthrough, and psychological insight. The experience of aesthetic chills during meditation predicted these positive effects. Individual traits like absorption, interoceptive awareness, and vividness of internal imagery also independently contributed to specific outcomes such as ego-dissolution and connectedness. Chills augmentation appears a viable method for deepening contemplative practices.
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
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.
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
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, 2025
William Brennan, Melissa Field, Catherine Schon et al.
The EMBARK training program for session monitors in clinical trials of psychedelic treatments was developed iteratively by Cybin, Inc. The program has been used in two completed and three ongoing clinical trials. This article describes the three phases of development, including core components, successes, lessons learned, and rationale for changes. The most recent iteration, EMBARKCT, used in Phase 3 trials, incorporates artificial intelligence with expert human oversight to identify when session monitors need additional support and training. Recommendations for the field are also discussed.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2025
Mikel Jimenez, Antonio Prieto, Pedro R Montoro et al.
Research on unconscious perception has faced persistent methodological challenges since the late 19th century. This review discusses key difficulties in demonstrating perception without awareness, examining how objective versus subjective measures of awareness produce different awareness thresholds and lead to alternative experimental approaches. New methodologies include regression-based Bayesian modeling, sensitivity vs. awareness curves from General Recognition Theory, the liminal-prime paradigm, and two-interval forced choice designs. The authors emphasize the need for brain-based approaches and highlight promising studies in this area, along with the role of individual differences and frameworks such as predictive coding and active inference. These advances aim to address challenges in demonstrating cognition without awareness.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2025
Herbert W Harris
Consciousness, especially the subjective, ineffable quality of experience known as qualia, can be better understood by combining phenomenology with neuroscience. Drawing on Thomas Nagel's question about what it is like to be something and Husserlian phenomenology, the paper proposes that predictive error coding (PEC) offers a neuroscientific model for this integration. PEC treats the brain as an active inference system that continuously generates and updates predictions about sensory inputs. The concept of "query acts" is introduced to describe the brain's interrogative engagement with sensory information, linking phenomenological intentionality with predictive mechanisms.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2025
Christopher Gutland, Huan Liu
Liangkang Ni's work identifies deep parallels and divergences between Edmund Husserl's phenomenology and Yogācāra Buddhism, particularly in doctrines like consciousness-only, store-consciousness, and self-consciousness. Ni reads Husserl's own reflections on Buddhism and reconstructs genetic and structural parallels between Husserl's genetic phenomenology and Yogācāra concepts. The article provides conceptual clarification and theoretical integration aimed at informing contemporary debates in consciousness studies, rather than offering new empirical data.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2024
Ignacio Cea, Niccolò Negro, Camilo Miguel Signorelli
Integrated Information Theory of Consciousness (IIT) 4.0 faces two ontological problems: the intrinsicality 2.0 problem and the engineering problem. These problems suggest that genuinely existing conscious entities could depend on, and be engineered from, entities that do not objectively exist—a contradiction, since something that lacks objective existence cannot serve as the material basis for entities that do exist independently. The root cause is IIT's equation of true existence with phenomenal existence (consciousness) and its consequent exclusion of non-conscious physical entities from objective reality. These problems indicate that IIT must reconsider the ontological status of such extrinsic entities, which must exist objectively to account for the theory's own permissible scenarios.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2024
Ken Mogi
Consciousness may enable certain cognitive capacities that unconscious processing and current AI systems cannot replicate, such as flexible attention, handling novel contexts, integrated sensory cognition, and embodied decision-making. While large language models exhibit intelligent behavior without consciousness, and some conscious states lack intelligence, suggesting a dissociation between the two, human conscious processing appears uniquely suited for ad hoc judgments. The author proposes 'conscious supremacy'—analogous to quantum supremacy—to identify computations that require consciousness within practical time and resource limits. This framework has implications for AI alignment, where human and machine computations must be coordinated.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2024
Scott Andersen
Consciousness arises from multiple goals for action and their continuous adjudication to implement behavior, a framework called the maps of meaning (MoM) theory. The theory proposes that an organism's goals are not intentional but emerge from Darwinian inclusive fitness—randomization and survival of the fittest—as embodiment meets the world. These goals form through gradual descent under inclusive fitness, matching the evolutionary environment. Human consciousness implements the brain efficiency hypothesis, driven by genetics, epigenetics, and experience-crystallized efficiencies that are objectively arbitrary but determine consciousness's operation and level, termed extreme thrownness. Perception is the operant process of consciousness, involving information intake and discrimination based on Bayesian priors of efficiency. Consciousness is modular and dimensionalized, with meta dimensions including intelligence quotient, personality, richness of perception intake, and discrimination.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2024
Burkhard Peter
Hypnosis is examined across its 250-year history, from Franz Anton Mesmer's animal magnetism to modern applications in psychotherapy, psychosomatics, and medicine. Imagination was recognized as essential as early as 1784. Hypnosis contributed to psychoanalysis but was abandoned by Freud after 1900. Techniques combining imagination and relaxation integrate findings from cognitive psychology. The debate continues whether hypnosis is a special state of consciousness or normal social interaction. Experiments depend on hypnotizability; difficult phenomena like paralysis or hallucinations occur only in highly hypnotizable subjects, yet moderately hypnotizable individuals also benefit. Imaging studies confirm these are not mere compliance.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2022
Mel Slater, Maria V Sanchez-Vives
The abstract contrasts two views of consciousness: the standard scientific view that matter is primary and consciousness arises from brain activity, versus an alternative view that consciousness is a primary force in nature from which physical laws might derive. The authors argue that virtual reality (VR) provides an experimental context where consciousness is a first-order phenomenon, making the alternative view intuitively accessible. They discuss the Interface Theory of Perception, which holds that perceptions are not veridical but based on evolutionary payoffs, and suggest this theory accurately describes perception and consciousness within VR. They propose an experimental study to explore this but do not draw conclusions about physical reality or challenge the emergence of consciousness from brain function.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2022
Vincent Ringgaard Christoffersen, Borut Škodlar, Mads Gram Henriksen
Tranquility is a fundamental human experience that has been pursued across Eastern and Western philosophical, religious, and spiritual traditions, yet its experiential nature has not been systematically compared. This theoretical study examines central experiences of tranquility from both traditions, sorting them into four categories based on focus: the body, emotions, the mind, and mysticism. The authors propose that these diverse tranquil experiences share common features: a sense of presence and inner peace as content, and a structure involving detachment and absorption. The account is exploratory, aiming to identify what different tranquil experiences may have in common.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2021
Carlotta Langer, Nihat Ay
The Integrated Information Theory offers a quantitative way to study consciousness and can be applied to neural networks. An embodied agent controlled by such a network interacts with its environment, involving morphological computation in goal-directed action and integrated information within the controller, the agent's brain. This article combines methods to examine information flows among and within the body, brain, and environment of an agent. In a simple experimental setup, the optimal policy for goal-directed behavior is calculated using the planning as inference method, where the information-geometric em-algorithm optimizes the likelihood of the goal.
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2020
Thomas Fuchs
The mind-body problem is reframed as the 'body-body problem': the relation between the lived, subjective body and the physiological, objective body. Circularity is proposed as a concept to explain how phenomenology of lived experience connects with the dynamics of organism-environment interactions, linking enactive approaches with ecological psychology. This circularity is developed in three forms: (1) the circular structure of embodiment via homeostatic and sensorimotor cycles linking brain, body, and environment; (2) circular causality between parts and whole within the organism and the organism-environment system; and (3) circularity of process and structure in development and learning, where subjective experience as sense-making...
Frontiers in psychology
January 1, 2020
Victor A F Lamme
Vision progresses through four stages: fully invisible, subjectively invisible, unattended, and clearly visible. Feature extraction, categorization, and some visual inference occur during full and subjective invisibility. Perceptual organization functions like grouping and figure-ground segregation operate during both inattention and full visibility. Perceptual organization is central to the transition from unconscious to conscious seeing. This has implications for Recurrent Processing Theory, Higher Order Thought Theory, Integrated Information Theory, and Global Neuronal Workspace Theory.