The body in clinical cognitive theory: from beck to mindfulness

Working with the body in Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy (MBCT) is often seen as a ‘means to an end’; that is, a vehicle for diverting attention from negative thought patterns, thereby fostering a detached metacognitive awareness of problematic thinking. The MBCT literature, however, accords the body a more central role. The literature expresses both the idea that the body is integral to a basic level of meaning creation experienced as a ‘bodily felt sense of something’ and that direct sensory or bodily awareness can contribute to a critical change in the felt sense of emotional difficulties. Tracing the development of the concept of the body in clinical cognitive theory, the paper concludes that these ideas of the body are anticipated in earlier revisions to Beck's schema theory. The paper concludes that research into the psychological mechanisms behind bodily awareness would be a fruitful supplement to the current research focus on metacognitive awareness.     

Effects of a physical exercise session on state body image: The influence of pre-experimental body dissatisfaction and concerns about weight and shape

The effects of a physical exercise session on state body image and mood were examined. In a cross-over design, participants were randomised to two groups starting either with physical exercise (PE; experimental condition) or with reading a newspaper (RN; control condition). Before and after PE and RN, participants (N = 65) rated their body dimensions using a digital photo distortion technique and indicated their attitudinal body image and mood. Participants’ judgements of their ‘felt’ body dimensions and attitudes toward their own body were affected differently by PE and RN, indicating that participants felt slightly slimmer and were more satisfied with their bodies after PE. Exercise-induced changes in body perception were greater, the higher the pre-experimental drive for thinness, body dissatisfaction and weight/shape concerns were. Especially in those participants with higher body image disturbances, physical exercise can have a reinforcing effect on immediate body image and mood improvement.     

Embodied free will beliefs: Some effects of physical states on metaphysical opinions

The present research suggests that people’s bodily states affect their beliefs about free will. People with epilepsy and people with panic disorder, which are disorders characterized by a lack of control over one’s body, reported less belief in free will compared to people without such disorders (Study 1). The more intensely people felt sexual desire, physical tiredness, and the urge to urinate, the less they believed in free will (Study 2). Among non-dieters, the more intensely they felt hunger, the less they believed in free will. However, dieters showed a trend in the opposite direction (Study 3).     

Body-ownership for actively operated non-corporeal objects

Rubber-hand and virtual-hand illusions show that people can perceive body ownership for objects under suitable conditions. Bottom-up approaches assume that perceived ownership emerges from multisensory matching (e.g., between seen object and felt hand movements), whereas top-down approaches claim that novel body parts are integrated only if they resemble some part of a permanent internal body representation. We demonstrate that healthy adults perceive body ownership for a virtual balloon changing in size, and a virtual square changing in size or color, in synchrony with movements of their real hand. This finding is inconsistent with top-down approaches and amounts to an existence proof that non-corporeal events can be perceived as body parts if their changes are systematically related to one’s actions. It also implies that previous studies with passive-stimulation techniques might have underestimated the plasticity of body representations and put too much emphasis on the resemblance between viewed object and real hand.     

Neuroscience and the Embodiment of Psychoanalysis—With an Appreciation of Damasio’s Contribution

ABSTRACT

This article contends that psychoanalysis benefits from a neurobiological perspective. It is suggested that Antonio Damasio’s view on the neurobiology of mind and self is particularly useful in this regard. The article presents a review and discussion of Damasio’s basic assumptions on body, emotion, feeling, unconscious and conscious mind, and embodied self. It explains how Freud’s hypotheses that ego is first and foremost a bodily ego is underpinned by contemporary neurobiological research and theory. A clinical illustration highlights that changes in sense of self encompasses changes throughout the whole body, as felt from the inside and as observed from the outside.     

The Effect of Simultaneous Exercise and Exposure to Thin-Ideal Music Videos on Women’s State Self-Objectification, Mood and Body Satisfaction

The present study examined the simultaneous impact of thin-ideal music videos and exercise on state self-objectification, mood and body satisfaction, in order to assess whether exercise can ameliorate the usually found negative effects of appearance-focused media. One-hundred and eighty-four South Australian undergraduate women viewed appearance-focused or neutral music videos, with half in each condition simultaneously participating in a bout of exercise or in quiet rest. Participants completed pre- and post- state measures of mood, body satisfaction and self-objectification. As expected, exposure to appearance-focused music videos produced increased state self-objectification in comparison to neutral images. For body satisfaction, an interaction emerged for the dimension of physical attractiveness, whereby women who exercised and watched appearance-focused video clips felt more attractive than women watching the same clips who did not exercise, and felt no less attractive than women who watched neutral clips. The findings demonstrate that thin-ideal music videos serve to increase state self-objectification, but that exercise can ameliorate the negative effects of idealized media images on women’s feelings of physical attractiveness.     

Appearance feedback in intimate relationships: The role of self-verification and self-enhancement

To better understand how body image operates within the context of intimate relationships, we investigated women's responses to appearance feedback from an intimate partner. Participants (N = 192) imagined receiving feedback from their partner that was either consistent with their own appearance self-view (i.e., self-verifying), more positive (i.e., self-enhancing), or less positive (i.e., devaluing), and then provided their affective and cognitive reactions. As expected, women's perceptions of their own appearance moderated their reactions. Women with more negative self-views felt happier with enhancing feedback, but thought that it meant their partner understood them less well. They also felt less happy when they received verifying feedback, but felt more understood by their partners. Thus, women with body image dissatisfaction may find themselves stuck in the “cognitive-affective crossfire” reacting ambivalently whether their partner enhances their appearance or confirms their negative self-views. Further examination of partners’ actual feedback is needed.     

A Feminist Genealogy of the Lived Body? Rethinking the Gendered Body as a Site of Excess and Indeterminacy

This essay offers a rethinking of the gendered body as both lived and historically constituted. These two dimensions are sometimes seen as irreconcilable, especially by some proponents of post-structuralism who are critical of phenomenology. My contention is that when approaching gender, Merleau-Ponty’s paradoxical formulation of the body as “always something other than what it is” can accompany a genealogy of the body. The body, as excessive, indeterminate, and ambiguous in Merleau-Pontian phenomenology, is at the same time the very object and product of certain techniques and procedures developed since the nineteenth century, as Foucault documents. Not only are phenomenology and genealogy compatible in this context, but thinking them together is necessary in order to illuminate the multi-faceted complexity of the embodiment of gender. The weight of this necessity is especially felt when approaching sexual violence, which tends to take place at the very intersection of the body-as-lived and the body-as-constituted.     

A taste of reflecting practice

This article describes a training exercise in which students who are new to systemic practice but have some experience in therapeutic work in other modalities were invited to experience reflecting practice. The students were asked to follow a role‐played therapy session by offering reflections on the connections felt to a ‘family’ member. The students stood beside the ‘family member’, reflected on the problems and accounted for the connections felt in terms of particular resonances felt. The students thus experienced a therapeutic use of self congruent with the reflecting team approach and the therapeutic position adopted in reflecting practice.     

Willingness to express emotion depends upon perceiving partner care

Two studies document that people are more willing to express emotions that reveal vulnerabilities to partners when they perceive those partners to be more communally responsive to them. In Study 1, participants rated the communal strength they thought various partners felt toward them and their own willingness to express happiness, sadness and anxiety to each partner. Individuals who generally perceive high communal strength from their partners were also generally most willing to express emotion to partners. Independently, participants were more willing to express emotion to particular partners whom they perceived felt more communal strength toward them. In Study 2, members of romantic couples independently reported their own felt communal strength toward one another, perceptions of their partners’ felt communal strength toward them, and willingness to express emotions (happiness, sadness, anxiety, disgust, anger, hurt and guilt) to each other. The communal strength partners reported feeling toward the participants predicted the participants’ willingness to express emotion to those partners. This link was mediated by participants’ perceptions of the partner’s communal strength toward them which, itself, was a joint function of accurate perceptions of the communal strength partners had reported feeling toward them and projections of their own felt communal strength for their partners onto those partners.     

A physically handicapped teenager is helped to own her body

In this paper I am presenting my work with a 15-year-old girl, Nina, who was born premature with congenital feet deformities. Her twin had died at birth, and Nina spent eight weeks in a Special Care Baby unit. She had also suffered from bronchial asthma, which was under control during the months she was in therapy with me.

An attempt to overdose, and a letter she had written to a teacher, brought Nina to our services and to individual psychotherapy. The weekly sessions gave Nina the opportunity to elaborate her mourning for the dead twin and to face her physical problems more realistically. She had coped with these by idealising a beautiful body and giving it, in her phantasy, to her dead sister for whose death she felt responsible. Her identification with characters from horror stories, of which she was an avid reader, was a key to understanding how she felt trapped in her deformed body, to which she would refer in the phrase ‘It doesn't bother me.’ The working through of her feelings of guilt, anger, and envy enabled her to lessen the split and to own her body.     

Felt emotions,and verbally communicated emotions: the case of pride

Potential discrepancies between felt and verbally communicated emotions elicited by two Pride events (‘selected for a job among a large group’ and ‘being congratulated for one's own new partner’) were studied by means of a structured questionnaire. Italian male (n = 88) and female (n = 107) university students attributed felt and communicated emotions to the event protagonist P, choosing from a list of 14 emotions; the communication occurred with P‘s partner or friend, or with an acquaintance. Statistical analyses of subjects’ attributions confirmed the hypothesis that felt emotions are regulated in verbal communication to others: pride, triumph, self-satisfaction and excitement were de-emphasized in communication; joy, satisfaction, happiness and surprise were intensified; other emotions were communicated as felt. Event type, and to a lesser extent sex of subject, significantly influenced the direction and extent of regulation. The results are interpreted as showing that the verbal communication of emotion is influenced by emotion-related social norms and beliefs.     

Dissociational body experiences: Differences between respondents with and without prior out‐of‐body‐experiences

Many people report having had an experience in which they felt as if their phenomenal self was separated in Cartesian space from their physical body. This phenomenon is often referred to as an ‘out‐of‐body’ (OBE) experience. Prior work has found OBE experients to score higher on measures of dissociation and to differ in regards to the perceptual experience of their body. Based upon this work, we theorized that the daily bodily experiences of people with and without a prior OBE would differ along a number of dimensions. In order to test this theory a questionnaire study was conducted. Of 243 respondents, 62 reported at least one prior OBE. Six scales on different aspects of bodily experience were administered. Respondents reporting a previous OBE were found to score significantly higher on measures of somatoform dissociation, self‐consciousness, body dissatisfaction, and lower on a measure of confidence in their physical self‐presentation than respondents without a previous OBE. The findings are discussed as supporting a dissociational theory of the OBE.     

The body of the analyst and the analytic setting: Reflections on the embodied setting and the symbiotic transference

In this paper the author questions whether the body of the analyst may be helpfully conceptualized as an embodied feature of the setting and suggests that this may be especially helpful for understanding patients who develop a symbiotic transference and for whom any variance in the analyst's body is felt to be profoundly destabilizing. In such cases the patient needs to relate to the body of the analyst concretely and exclusively as a setting ‘constant’ and its meaning for the patient may thus remain inaccessible to analysis for a long time. When the separateness of the body of the analyst reaches the patient's awareness because of changes in the analyst's appearance or bodily state, it then mobilizes primitive anxieties in the patient. It is only when the body of the analyst can become a dynamic variable between them (i.e. part of the process) that it can be used by the patient to further the exploration of their own mind.     

Research off the couch: Re-visiting the transsexual conundrum

This paper outlines the findings of a qualitative study involving interviews with eight transsexual individuals who had volunteered to take part in a television (TV) documentary about transsexuality. The participants were interviewed before taking part in the documentary and after its screening on national TV. The author proposes that for either biological and/or psychological reasons, some transsexual individuals experience early on a profound and disturbing incongruence at the level of the bodily self. In turn, this experience of incongruity is not contingently mirrored by primary attachment figures and remains unmentalized, thus disrupting self-coherence. In an attempt to restore self-coherence, the individual searches for the ‘right’ body that is anticipated to relieve the felt incongruity. The way this modified body relieves the incongruity is through the certainty it imparts that the image in the ‘mirror’ will match the subjective experience of the body. In this study, the experience of being mirrored through the group process during filming and the audience's response to the TV series, which was very positive, appeared to be associated with an attenuation in the urgency with which planned body modifications were being discussed post-TV screenings.     

Spiritual care in psychiatry: Professionals’ views

In this study we explored the views of Mental Health professionals and general practitioners (GPs) regarding spiritual care and the effect of personal and cultural background on their views. Data were collected through anonymous questionnaires posted to hospital nursing and medical staff at Hollins Park Hospital, Warrington, UK, and to all GPs within the hospital catchments area. Forty-five percent of GPs, 33% of psychiatrists, and 76% of nursing staff (p < 0.05) felt strongly that human beings are made up of spirit as well as body. More nurses felt that spiritual care is equally as important as other forms of care (52%) compared with psychiatrists (33%) and GPs (29%). A higher percentage of nursing than medical staff had previous training in this area and were more likely than medical staff to consider themselves appropriate to give spiritual advice. A total of 20% of GPs and 33% of psychiatric staff stated the need for training in this area and GPs especially felt they lacked time. Professionals’ views are influenced by cultural and religious backgrounds, with significantly more non-UK born respondents feeling strongly that human beings all have a spiritual component. Many doctors do not consider spiritual care has a role for them to be involved in and many feel too pressured in daily life to take this on. Nurses are more inclined to take a holistic approach to care in this respect. Some people with mental health problems have spiritual care needs and we should be aware of this as an important facet to therapy.     

The multisensory basis of the self: From body to identity to others

By grounding the self in the body, experimental psychology has taken the body as the starting point for a science of the self. One fundamental dimension of the bodily self is the sense of body ownership that refers to the special perceptual status of one’s own body, the feeling that “my body” belongs to me. The primary aim of this review article is to highlight recent advances in the study of body ownership and our understanding of the underlying neurocognitive processes in three ways. I first consider how the sense of body ownership has been investigated and elucidated in the context of multisensory integration. Beyond exteroception, recent studies have considered how this exteroceptively driven sense of body ownership can be linked to the other side of embodiment, that of the unobservable, yet felt, interoceptive body, suggesting that these two sides of embodiment interact to provide a unifying bodily self. Lastly, the multisensorial understanding of the self has been shown to have implications for our understanding of social relationships, especially in the context of self–other boundaries. Taken together, these three research strands motivate a unified model of the self inspired by current predictive coding models.     

Bodily awareness in the Wing Chun system

This paper was given in conjunction with a demonstration of Wing Chun Kung Fu at the conference, ‘The Body and Comparative Spirituality’. University of Lancaster, 1983. The paper examines the psycho-physical implications of a traditional Chinese martial art. It focuses on how the art and its training methods entail a non-dualistic understanding of body and mind, and emphasises the importance of bodily felt awareness. The roles of Taoism and Buddhism in association with traditional Chinese martial arts are considered as they contributed to this developing non-dualistic understanding. The paper briefly examines the notions of bodily awareness in the work of M. Merleau-Ponty and D. M. Levin and concludes with a brief consideration of the possible educational, ethical and social implications of the practice of traditional martial arts.     

Infant brain responses to felt and observed touch of hands and feet: an MEG study

There is growing interest concerning the ways in which the human body, both one's own and that of others, is represented in the developing human brain. In two experiments with 7‐month‐old infants, we employed advances in infant magnetoencephalography (MEG) brain imaging to address novel questions concerning body representations in early development. Experiment 1 evaluated the spatiotemporal organization of infants’ brain responses to being touched. A punctate touch to infants’ hands and feet produced significant activation in the hand and foot areas of contralateral primary somatosensory cortex as well as in other parietal and frontal areas. Experiment 2 explored infant brain responses to visually perceiving another person's hand or foot being touched. Results showed significant activation in early visual regions and also in regions thought to be involved in multisensory body and self–other processing. Furthermore, observed touch of the hand and foot activated the infant's own primary somatosensory cortex, although less consistently than felt touch. These findings shed light on aspects of early social cognition, including action imitation, which may build, at least in part, on infant neural representations that map equivalences between the bodies of self and other.