Perceiving subjectivity in bodily movement: The case of dancers

This paper is about one of the puzzles of bodily self-consciousness: can an experience be both and at the same time an experience of one′s physicality and of one′s subjectivity? We will answer this question positively by determining a form of experience where the body′s physicality is experienced in a non-reifying manner. We will consider a form of experience of oneself as bodily which is different from both “prenoetic embodiment” and “pre-reflective bodily consciousness” and rather corresponds to a form of reflective access to subjectivity at the bodily level. In particular, we argue that subjectivity is bodily expressed, thereby allowing the experience of the body′s subjectivity directly during perceptual experiences of the body. We use an interweaving of phenomenological explorations and ethnographical methods which allows validating this proposal by considering the experience of body experts (dancers).     

The phenomenology of self-presentation: describing the structures of intercorporeality with Erving Goffman

Self-presentation is a term that indicates conscious and unconscious strategies for controlling or managing how one is perceived by others in terms of both appearance and comportment. In this article, I will discuss the phenomenology of self-presentation with respect to the phenomenological insights of Edmund Husserl and Merleau-Ponty regarding the visibility of the body within intercorporeal relations through ‘behaviour’ and ‘expression.’ In doing so, I will turn to the work of the Canadian sociologist and social theorist Erving Goffman. Goffman’s account of self-presentation suggests why embodied subjects adopt certain styles of ordered bodily behaviour as determined by the broader social order, giving existential and social significance to the ontological structures of intercorporeal bodily communication. Following Goffman, I will suggest that the embodied subject is continuously—and constitutionally—engaged in implicit and explicit strategies to manage how the body is presented to others. In articulating self-presentation as a feature of intercorporeality, my aim in this article is to use Goffman’s insights to extend Husserl’s and Merleau-Ponty’s accounts of bodily communication by demonstrating that bodily communication that is instantiated at the level of intercorporeality is always expressed through social life with its various historical, cultural and linguistic dimensions.     

Public health, well-being and reciprocity

Public-health measures are very effective and efficient means of improving health, yet public health is either neglected by the literature or fraught with unease, mainly due to the combination of the aggregate-distributive tension with the element of compulsion. I argue that this unease can be decreased by 1) a pluralist-holistic view of health, situating the normative value of health in its effect on well-being, incorporating both the objective and subjective source of the value of health; and 2) by a rich concept of reciprocity. This article supports Martha Nussbaum's critique of social-contract thinking for placing too much weight on the scale of normal functioning and productive reciprocity, as well as Sen's distinction between well-being and agency freedom. To reach an adequate understanding of the value and goal of public health within the general setting of health care, a pluralist conception of health, well-being and reciprocity is necessary.     

Water Crisis Adaptation: Defending a Strong Right Against Displacement from the Home

This essay defends a strong right against displacement as part of a basic individual right to secure access to one’s home. The analysis is purposefully situated within the difficult context of climate change adaptation policies. Under increasing environmental pressures, especially regarding water security, there are weighty reasons motivating the forced displacement of persons—to safeguard water resources or prevent water-related disasters. Even in these pressing circumstances, I argue, individuals have weighty rights to secure access to their homes. I explain how the home provides a functional context for conditions of autonomous agency. Being coerced from the home disrupts and subverts the conditions necessary for autonomous processes. I conclude by suggesting that the right to the home could be a foundational element of territorial rights.     

Motivating Empathy: The Problem of Bodily Similarity in Husserl’s Theory of Empathy

Husserl’s theory of empathy plays a crucial role in his transcendental phenomenology and has ever since been critically examined. Among various critiques leveled at Husserl, the issue of bodily similarity between oneself and the other lies at the core, not only because Husserl conceives of it as the motivating factor of empathy but also because his account of it has been taken to be problematic. In this article, I review a main interpretation of the issue of bodily similarity in Husserl, which takes the bodily similarity in question to be a visual resemblance between oneself and the other. By contrast, I give a new interpretation of bodily similarity by taking into account Husserl’s emphasis on tactual experience with regard to the constitution of one’s own lived body and the foreign body. I argue that the bodily similarity in question amounts to a similar manner of twofold bodily manifestation in oneself and the other, and I also suggest that this interpretation further enables a new understanding of interpersonal relation in Husserl.     

Avowals and First-Person Privilege

When people avow their present feelings, sensations, thoughts, etc., they enjoy what may be called "first-person privilege." If I now said: "I have a headache," or "I'm thinking about Venice," I would be taken at my word: I would normally not be challenged. According to one prominent approach, this privilege is due to a special epistemic access we have to our own present states of mind. On an alternative, deflationary approach the privilege merely reflects a socio-linguistic convention governing avowals. We reject both approaches. On our proposed account, a full explanation of the privilege must recognize avowals as expressive performances, which can be taken to reveal directly the subject's present mental condition. We are able to improve on special access accounts and deflationary accounts, as well as familiar expressive accounts, by explaining both the asymmetries and the continuities between avowals and other pronouncements, and by locating a genuine though non-epistemic source for first-person privilege.     

In my ‘Mind’s Eye’: introspectionism,detectivism, and the basis of authoritative self-knowledge

It is widely accepted that knowledge of certain of one’s own mental states is authoritative in being epistemically more secure than knowledge of the mental states of others, and theories of self-knowledge have largely appealed to one or the other of two sources to explain this special epistemic status. The first, ‘detectivist’, position, appeals to an inner perception-like basis, whereas the second, ‘constitutivist’, one, appeals to the view that the special security awarded to certain self-knowledge is a conceptual matter. I argue that there is a fundamental class of cases of authoritative self-knowledge, ones in which subjects are consciously thinking about their current, conscious intentional states, that is best accounted for in terms of a theory that is, broadly speaking, introspectionist and detectivist. The position developed has an intuitive plausibility that has inspired many who work in the Cartesian tradition, and the potential to yield a single treatment of the basis of authoritative self-knowledge for both intentional states and sensation states.     

Attending to emotions is sharing of emotions – A multidisciplinary perspective to social attention and emotional sharing. Comment on Zahavi and Rochat (2015)

Attending to bodily expression of emotions plays an important role in the human social world. It provides subjects with valuable information, constructs opportunities to act, and importantly, as Daniel Stern pointed out, it is involved in the constitution of the direct experience of others. Whether mutual or one-sided, these direct experiences, in which the subject can share the perspectives and attitudes of other subjects, always comprise one person’s bodily expression of emotions that is available to another person. In this article I suggest that attending to other subjects’ expressed emotions involves a special (social) mode of attention and emotional sharing. This suggestion challenges Dan Zahavi’s view that confines the sharing of emotions solely to reciprocal experiences.     

The Interaction Between Culture, Health and Psychological Well-Being: Data Mining from the Italian Culture and Well-Being Project

The purpose of this study is to understand the impact of health status and cultural participation upon psychological well-being, with special attention to the interaction between patterns of cultural access and other factors known to affect psychological well-being. Data for this report were collected from a sample of 1,500 Italian citizens. A multi-step random sampling method was adopted to draw a large representative sample from the Italian population. Subjects underwent a standard questionnaire for psychological well-being [the Italian short form of the Psychological General Well Being Index (PGWBI)], and a questionnaire related to the frequency of participation to 15 different kinds of cultural activities during the previous year. The results show that, among the various potential factors considered, cultural access unexpectedly rankes as the second most important determinant of psychological well-being, immediately after the absence or presence of diseases, and outperforming factors such as job, age, income, civil status, education, place of living and other important factors. According to a semantic map generated by a powerful data mining algorithm, it turns out that different factors (among which cultural access and health status in particular) may be viewed as concurrent elements of a complex multi-causal scheme that seems to play a primary role in determining psychological distress or well-being. In particular, distress seems to be tightly connected with: living in the Southern part of Italy, average income level, living in semi-urban and urban areas, age group 46–60, presence of more than two concomitant diseases and a low level of cultural access. Well being, on the other hand, is tightly connected with: male gender, high cultural access, and absence of diseases. Some of these associations are confirmed by Principal Component Analysis.     

Relation of life goals at age 70 to activity participation and health and psychological well-being among Terman's gifted men and women

In this study I investigated the relation of life goals to activity participation and health and psychological well-being for men and women in Terman's Study of the Gifted. The subjects were between the ages of 65 and 75 years (M = 70.2 years) when they responded to a mail-out survey in 1982. The study included three goals scales-Autonomy, Involvement, and Achievement Motivation-as well as measures of activity participation and health and psychological well-being. Multiple regression analyses in which the three goals scales were used to predict health and psychological well-being were both significant. Path analyses demonstrated both a direct and an indirect contribution, through activity participation, of life goals to health and well-being. In most cases, the indirect effect of life goals on health and well-being accounted for more than one half of the total effect. Implications of the results for life satisfaction in aging are discussed.     

Developments in the Measurement of Subjective Well-Being and Poverty: An Economic Perspective

Drawing on unique survey data for rural Pakistan, we estimate a happiness model to explore to what extent an economic perspective adds to our understanding of subjective wellbeing poverty. The data elicits information on subjective well-being in general and particularly on financial well-being in terms of household’s happiness with the current income or expenditure. We find that the well-being approach closely depicts the idea of well-being poverty in terms of the level education, health and income which matter significantly. Moreover unlike developed nations this study suggests a positive impact of children on well-being and poverty due to their productive contribution. As studies employing good data from developing countries are rare, this paper can potentially make a good contribution to the existing happiness literature, with special reference to Pakistan. Secondly, it brings new and strong empirical evidence to alternative approaches to subjective well-being poverty.     

Access to antiretroviral treatment,issues of well-being and public health governance in Chad: what justifies the limited success of the universal access policy?

Universal access to antiretroviral treatment (ART) in Chad was officially declared in December 2006. This presidential initiative was and is still funded 100% by the country’s budget and external donors’ financial support. Many factors have triggered the spread of AIDS. Some of these factors include the existence of norms and beliefs that create or increase exposure, the low-level education that precludes access to health information, social unrest, and population migration to areas of high economic opportunities and gender-based discrimination. Social forces that influence the distribution of dimensions of well-being and shape risks for infection also determine the persistence of access barriers to ART. The universal access policy is quite revolutionary but should be informed by the systemic barriers to access so as to promote equity. It is not enough to distribute ARVs and provide health services when health systems are poorly organized and managed. Comprehensive access to ART raises many organizational, ethical and policy problems that need to be solved to achieve equity in access. This paper argues that the persistence of access barriers is due to weak health systems and a poor public health leadership. AIDS has challenged health systems in a manner that is essentially different from other health problems.     

Regulatory fit at work: gravitational effects and associations with employee well-being

ABSTRACT

Using a task approach, this study examined the extent to which employee regulatory focus would “gravitate” employees towards promotion- versus prevention-oriented tasks within their jobs, and whether a subsequent regulatory fit/misfit would be associated with their well-being (i.e., mental health and job satisfaction). In a pre-study among 37 employees, we determined the regulatory focus of work tasks from the Netherlands Skill Survey, which are relevant to the general working population, resulting in a selection of 7 promotion and 11 prevention tasks. For our main study, we used the Dutch Longitudinal Internet Studies for the Social Sciences (LISS) panel and collected data from 1,606 respondents. In 2011, we collected respondents’ regulatory focus and in 2012, we collected their work tasks and well-being. Promotion-oriented employees considered both promotion and prevention tasks to be highly relevant in their jobs, and this relevance was associated with their mental health. Prevention-oriented employees, however, did not respond to the relevance of promotion or prevention tasks and generally reported lower well-being, irrespective of the regulatory focus of their tasks. We tentatively conclude that promotion focus gravitates employees towards job with a richer task content, containing both promotion and prevention tasks.     

Exploring Predictors of Subjective Well-Being in Ghana: A Micro-Level Study

Subjective well-being has been studied by social scientists for decades mostly in developed countries. Little is known about determinants of subjective well-being in developing countries and more particularly in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Using 2005–2008 World Values Survey (n = 1,533) this study adds to existing literature on well-being in developing countries focusing on Ghana. The paper explores the predictors of two measures of subjective well-being—happiness and satisfaction in life at micro-level in Ghana. The analyses are divided into two main sections. The first part describes the distribution of happiness and satisfaction in life among Ghanaians. The second section elucidates factors influencing the selected measures of subjective well-being separately. The data reveal that both happiness and life satisfaction among Ghanaians are shaped by multitude of factors including economic, cultural, social capital and health variables. Relatively, perceived health status emerged as the most salient predictor of both measures of well-being. Besides religiosity, all the religion variables emerged as significant predictors of how Ghanaians appraise their own well-being. Equally, income, ethnicity and social capital variables emerged as predictors of happiness and life satisfaction at micro-level in Ghana. Policy implications of the findings are discussed alluding to multidimensional approach to well-being promotion in the country. The outcome of the study also establishes the fact that factors predicting subjective well-being at the micro level vary in SSA context compared to the developed world.     

What could have been done (but wasn’t). On the counterfactual status of action in Alva Noë’s theory of perception

Alva Noë’s strategy to solve the puzzle of perceptual presence entirely relies on the principle of presence as access. Unaccessed or unattended parts or details of objects are perceptually present insofar as they are accessible, and they are accessible insofar as one possesses sensorimotor skills that can secure their access. In this paper, I consider several arguments that can be opposed to this claim and that are chiefly related to the modal status of action, i.e. the fact that the action that would secure access to the absent aspects is a possibility, something that can (or maybe could) be done. The main difficulty Noë’s account must face is –as several situations demonstrate– that the action that should be performed for the absent aspects to be actually accessed does not have to be itself available for these aspects to be perceptually present. What matters for the absent aspects to be present is not their de facto (i.e. effective) accessibility, but their de jure accessibility. To overcome those difficulties, I propose to rely on a ternary model of the role of action possibilities in perceptual awareness. This model builds on Husserl’s analysis of the role of perceptual circumstances in perception and connection between sense (Sinn) registering and horizontal intentionality.     

After Adversity Strikes: Predictions, Recollections and Reality Among People Experiencing the Onset of Adverse Circumstances

Numerous studies on affective forecasting have demonstrated that people frequently underestimate their ability to adapt to adverse circumstances. But to date, these studies have not assessed people’s affective forecasts early in the experience of these new circumstances. We present two longitudinal studies of people experiencing new adversities. In the first study 54 patients experiencing new limb amputations were recruited to participate in a mailed survey. Patients assessed their well-being, functioning and general health (1) two weeks after discharge from the hospital and (2) three months later. At the first time point patients also predicted their well-being, functioning and general health at three months. In the second study 55 patients experiencing new colostomies were recruited and received mailed surveys at three time points; (1) at baseline (within one week after leaving the hospital), (2) one month after baseline, and (3) seven months after baseline. Again we assessed their actual and predicted well-being, functioning and general health. In both studies the actual change was compared to the change expected by patients. Across both studies, patients expected to significantly improve on all three domains but reported little actual improvement. Together, these studies demonstrated that people with new disabilities overestimate hedonic adaptation—they expect their overall well-being to improve more than it actually does.     

Health care as an essential building block for a free society: the convergence of the Catholic and secular American imperative

As the twentieth century closes, marked by triumphal strides in medical advances, the American society has yet to ensure that each person has access to affordable health care. To correct this injustice, this article calls on the nation's political and corporate leaders, providers, and faith-based groups to join all Americans in a new national conversation on systemic health care reform. The Catholic faith tradition is one that compels both a proclamation to ministry values and a commitment to speak out against the challenges or threats to what are essential to the well-being of individuals and society. The Catholic health ministry must therefore be both a voice for the voiceless and an agent of transformation. The nation's goal should be to "reposition" health care from its status as an important, but ultimately optional building block to one that is essential.     

Disabled – therefore,Unhealthy?

This paper argues that disabled people can be healthy. I argue, first, following the well-known ‘social model of disability’, that we should prefer a usage of ‘disabled’ which does not imply any kind of impairment that is essentially inconsistent with health. This is because (a) one can be disabled only because limited by false social perception of impairment and (b) one can be, if impaired, disabled not because of the impairment but rather only because of the social response to it. Second, I argue that it is often wrong to use the term ‘healthy’ in a way that makes health inconsistent with any degree whatsoever of health-relevant bodily dysfunction. Whether someone is ‘healthy’ properly-so-called depends on standards of health presupposed in conversational context. Sometimes, I argue, these standards are or ought to be lax enough to allow some people with some health deficits still to count as ‘healthy’ per se. Taking inspiration from David Lewis and Mary Kate Mcgowan, I go on to argue that denying that someone is ‘healthy’ in a context typically succeeds in shifting going presuppositions to require standards strict enough to make that denial acceptable. And this, I conclude by arguing, often constitutes an abuse of conversational power.     

My body as an object: self-distance and social experience

In phenomenology the body is often referred to as the lived body which makes the world familiar to me. In this paper, however, I discuss bodily self-consciousness in terms of self-distance. Self-distance is the suggestion that bodily self-consciousness consist in a reflective stance where you conceive of your body as a physical thing, an object in the world as well as the subject of bodily experiences. I argue that we are bodily self-conscious because we experience our own body in more than one way and that these ways are not derivative of one another or hierarchically ordered. This latter claim conflicts with certain phenomenological readings of how the body is experienced, one of which I will refer to and discuss as the Familiarity Objection to my idea of self-distance. I end the paper with a discussion of why we need the conception of experienced objectification that is entailed in the notion of self-distance to account for both pathological and non-pathological bodily self-experiences. The notion of self-distance improves our understanding of how the body plays a central role in psychosis for the experience of distorted inter-subjective relations.     

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.