Disequilibrium in the mind, disharmony in the body

Although it is generally acknowledged that experiences of frustration, confusion, and anxiety are embodied phenomena, very little is known about how these processes modulate presumably unconscious, but constantly present, subtle bodily movement. We addressed this problem by tracking the low-level dynamics of body movement, using 1/f noise, pink noise, or "fractal scaling", during naturalistic experiences of affect in two studies involving deep learning and effortful problem-solving. Our results indicate that body movement fluctuations of individuals experiencing cognitive equilibrium was characteristic of correlated pink noise, but there was a whitening of the signal when participants experienced states that are diagnostic of cognitive distress such as anxiety, confusion, and frustration. We orient our findings within theories that emphasise the embodied nature of cognition and affect and with perspectives that view affective and cognitive processes as emergent products of a self-organising dynamical system (the brain) that is inextricably coupled to the body.     

杜威反射弧概念中的具身认知思想

伴随第二代认知科学的兴起,大量研究者开始在具身认知这一主张上达成共识,即有机体的身体运动以及与身体运动相关的特征和感觉经验（或称身体经验）在认知过程中扮演重要角色,而有机体的身体又嵌入到其所处的动态环境之中,从而形成一个不可分割的整体。杜威在《心理学中的反射弧概念》一文中的论证蕴含了上述具身认知思想的雏形,主要体现在：（1）身体运动协调构成了感觉运动回路。（2）在身体运动协调基础上形成的身体经验在感觉运动回路中具有连续性。（3）感觉运动回路中的身体运动与经验以环境为背景,最终目的是为了适应环境。未来的具身认知研究可以借鉴杜威所论证的反射弧概念,对上述三个方面作出进一步探索。     

Trajectory evolution and changes in the structure of movement amplitude time series

With increases in the index of difficulty [ID = log₂(2A/W)], the time-series structure of movement amplitude values shift from pink to white noise. The appearance of pink noise at low-ID levels may be attributed to the dominance of feedforward control processes, while the appearance of white noise at high-ID levels may be attributed to increased reliance on visuomotor feedback processes needed to guide movement into the target region. Such within-movement corrections may disrupt the pink-noise time-series correlations that exist in the absence of feedback processing. In our prior work, movement amplitude was defined as the distance moved from movement start until its end. In contrast, in the current study we examined the time-series structure of movement amplitude values at each of 10 different percentages of time into the movement trajectory—ranging between 10 and 100% of the movement time (%MT)—at a low (2 bits) and a high (5 bits) ID level. We hypothesized that at both ID levels a pink-noise time-series structure would be seen during the early portions of the movement trajectory when feedforward control should dominate, but during later portions of the trajectory, increased whitening of time-series structure would emerge only under ID 5 as there would be an increased need to engage visuomotor feedback processes. Under ID 2, the same level of pink noise should be maintained across all %MT levels as movement should be under the same level of feedforward control throughout the trajectory. The only unpredicted result occurred at ID 2 where the pink-noise level increased with increases in %MT. We hypothesize that such strengthening of pink noise as a function of %MT reflects the engagement of early trajectory corrections superimposed on the initial feedforward signal, but, once such initial adjustments were made, feedforward processes increasingly took over as the trajectory neared its goal.     

具身概念表征的研究及理论述评

具身认知强调认知在本质上是具身的, 身体在认知的实现中发挥着关键作用。传统的符号加工理论认为, 概念表征独立于主体的知觉运动系统并以抽象符号的形式储存于语言记忆中。概念表征的具身理论则认为, 概念表征与知觉运动系统具有共同的神经基础, 概念在本质上是主体经验客体时知觉与运动体验的神经记录, 而概念加工的基本形式则是身体经验的模拟与还原。关于该理论的实证研究主要集中于概念加工引发的知觉动作变化、身体动作对概念加工的影响、抽象概念加工的具身特征等领域。今后的研究应关注符号加工理论与具身理论的整合等。     

Moving arms: the effects of sensorimotor information on the problem-solving process

Embodied cognition postulates a bi-directional link between the human body and its cognitive functions. Whether this holds for higher cognitive functions such as problem solving is unknown. We predicted that arm movement manipulations performed by the participants could affect the problem-solving solutions. We tested this prediction in quantitative reasoning tasks that allowed two solutions to each problem (addition or subtraction). In two studies with healthy adults (N?=?53 and N?=?50), we found an effect of problem-congruent movements on problem solutions. Consistent with embodied cognition, sensorimotor information gained via right or left arm movements affects the solution in different types of problem-solving tasks.     

Measuring emotions during epistemic activities: the Epistemically-Related Emotion Scales

Measurement instruments assessing multiple emotions during epistemic activities are largely lacking. We describe the construction and validation of the Epistemically-Related Emotion Scales, which measure surprise, curiosity, enjoyment, confusion, anxiety, frustration, and boredom occurring during epistemic cognitive activities. The instrument was tested in a multinational study of emotions during learning from conflicting texts (N?=?438 university students from the United States, Canada, and Germany). The findings document the reliability, internal validity, and external validity of the instrument. A seven-factor model best fit the data, suggesting that epistemically-related emotions should be conceptualised in terms of discrete emotion categories, and the scales showed metric invariance across the North American and German samples. Furthermore, emotion scores changed over time as a function of conflicting task information and related significantly to perceived task value and use of cognitive and metacognitive learning strategies.     

Experiencing affect through site-specific dance

Our embodied experiences of affect, feeling and emotion within the context of site-specific dance are the focus of this article. The specific sites of our dance are designed gardens and our performances are offered within the context of an arts festival. In performing within these gardens, we aim to complement and enhance the site through our embodiment. Both as dancers in, and as audience members of dance, we recognize that affect, feeling and emotion arise during special live performance events. We understand affect as a fluid and relational, collective experience that extends beyond our individual experiences as performers to being shared with and between particular audiences at particular times and places. However, it is often difficult to express these embodied, collective experiences. Drawing on a feminist and phenomenological approach, we offer vignettes of key moments in these performances to illustrate the affective practices in our work. These vignettes draw on moments when we felt we shared an experience with audiences, supported by written responses, recorded anecdotal comments from audience members, and discussions between performers. We conclude by reflecting on how we might offer our community an enhanced emotional experience of the gardens.     

对话心智与身体：具身认知的内感受研究转向

具身认知观念试图强调心智是根植于身体的,身体经验会对认知过程产生重要影响。但对于心智与身体的对话是如何进行的？身体通过何种渠道如何影响心智？等问题困扰着具身认知的支持者。传统的具身认知研究遭遇可重复性危机,身体状态改变影响高级认知的结论受到质疑。近年来,越来越多的证据表明内感受与身体表征、具身情绪以及社会认知等存在着密切的联系,因而内感受很有可能在身体加工和高级认知过程中起着重要的调节作用。     

Emotions while writing about emotional and non-emotional topics

Research on the effects of expressive writing about emotional experiences and traumatic events has a long history in the affective and social sciences. However, very little is known about the incidence and impact of affective states when the writing activities are not explicitly emotional or are less emotionally charged. By integrating goal-appraisal and network theories of affect within cognitive process models of writing, we hypothesize that writing triggers a host of affective states, some of which are tied to the topic of the essays (topic affective states), while others are more closely related to the cognitive processes involved in writing (process affective states). We tested this hypothesis with two experiments involving fine-grained tracking of affect while participants wrote short essays on topics that varied in emotional intensity including topics used in standardized tests, to socially charged issues, and personal emotional experiences. The results indicated that (a) affect collectively accounted for a majority of the observations compared to neutral, (b) boredom, engagement/flow, anxiety, frustration, and happiness were most frequent affective states, (c) there was evidence for a proposed, but not mutually exclusive, distinction between process and topic affective states, (d) certain topic affective states were predictive of the quality of the essays, irrespective of the valence of these states, and (e) individual differences in scholastic aptitude, writing apprehension, and exposure to print correlated with affect frequency in expected directions. Implications of our findings for research focused on monitoring affect during everyday writing activities are discussed.     

“具身”涵义的理论辨析

“具身”是当代心理学和认知科学领域的热门话题, 其基本涵义是指认知对身体的依赖性。经典认知科学主张“非具身”, 认为认知是一种信息的表征与加工, 从本质上讲与承载它的身体无关。“弱具身”强调了认知对身体的依赖性, 但是却保留了认知的计算和表征功能。“强具身”则极力主张认知是被身体作用于世界的活动塑造出来的, 身体的特殊细节造就了认知的特殊性。在怎样理解“具身”方面, 存在着不同的解释。从本文作者的观点来看, 具身的性质和特征表现在4个方面：(1)身体参与了认知, 影响了思维、判断、态度和情绪等心智过程。(2)我们对于客观世界的知觉依赖于身体作用于世界的活动, 身体的活动影响着关于客观世界表象的形成。(3)意义源于身体, 抽象的意义有着身体感觉—运动系统的基础。(4)身体的不同倾向于造就不同的思维和认识方式。有关具身的研究将从理论和实践两个层面对心理学产生冲击。     

情感一致性及其对认知加工的影响

具身情绪观认为情感的核心功能是评价,这种评价信息会同时表征在低层感知系统和高层认知系统中,它们相互影响、互为因果。情感一致性反映的是情感具身反应（心理感受、情感相关的身体动作和表情等）与情感认知评价（情感的观念性内容,积极与消极）在效价上的耦合关系。这种关系突出的表现为效价上是否一致,情感一致促进其后的认知加工,情感不一致的作用相反。该观点在短时记忆、叙事建构、刻板印象和说服效果等领域得到了证实。未来的研究应重视情感一致性的情感意义,扩展情感一致性定义及假设,并检验情感一致性的评价本质。     

Living (dys)regulated and alienated young masculinity—Young men's embodied experiences of mental disorders and suicidality

Introduction

Mental disorders, such as depression and anxiety with interlinked suicidality, are the leading cause of health-related disability among young men. Knowledge of the interaction between emotional, bodily, social and gendered mental health processes in young men is limited and therefore needed.

Aim

This study aimed to explore young men's lived embodied experiences of mental disorders and suicidality, and to conceptualise these by integrating affective–emotional, physiological, social and gendered processes.

Methods

Semistructured individual interviews were conducted with 13 young men who had sought professional help for mental disorders and suicidality. Grounded theory (GT) was used with a social constructivist perspective.

Results

The results comprise one core category—Living (dys)regulated and alienated young masculinity—with related categories “battling with the emotional body,” “suffering in social silence” and “balancing embodied darkness and distress.” The GT illustrates how young men navigate and manage their embodied and emotional suffering in a context of “regulative” masculine and social norms alongside insufficient social support.

Conclusion

Our results suggest that young men's lived embodied experiences of mental disorders and suicidality can be understood as a dynamic process of internal and external “(dys)regulation and alienation.” The generated GT provides a broad tentative explanation model, contributing to theory development, and serves as a basis for gender-sensitive interventions—in both psychotherapy and physiotherapy—integrating body, mind and the social context.     

Bodies as open projects: reflections on gender and sexuality

Abstract

This article argues that the social constructivist paradigm falls into the same dualistic trap as biological essentialism when attempting to respond to questions of gender and sexuality. I argue that social constructivism, like biological determinism, presumes a ‘split’ world, where subjective lived experiences are separated from the world of socio-cultural forces. Following a phenomenological approach, grounded in Merleau-Ponty’s ontological view of the body, this article attempts to move beyond the dualistic metadiscourses of social constructivism in maintaining that identity is a fully embodied process. I see gender and sexuality as necessarily embodied and corporeally constituted. In the light of this, I propose an understanding of gender and sexuality that focuses on the centrality of the body as open project. This approach sees gender and sexuality as embodied processes that are enmeshed with the complex fabric of lived everyday experiences and concurrent socio-cultural and historical processes. Drawing on real-life examples, I conclude that gender and sexual embodiment are not one-dimensional according to a binary system of male versus female. Rather, given the documented experience of the indeterminacy and ambiguity of human existence, there are a variety of possible embodiments of humankind.     

Self-organization of cognitive performance

Background noise is the irregular variation across repeated measurements of human performance. Background noise remains after task and treatment effects are minimized. Background noise refers to intrinsic sources of variability, the intrinsic dynamics of mind and body, and the internal workings of a living being. Two experiments demonstrate 1/f scaling (pink noise) in simple reaction times and speeded word naming times, which round out a catalog of laboratory task demonstrations that background noise is pink noise. Ubiquitous pink noise suggests processes of mind and body that change each other's dynamics. Such interaction-dominant dynamics are found in systems that self-organize their behavior. Self-organization provides an unconventional perspective on cognition, but this perspective closely parallels a contemporary interdisciplinary view of living systems.     

Changes in affect during treatment for depression and anxiety

We tested the hypothesis that the tripartite model [Clark, L. A., & Watson, D. (1991). Tripartite model of anxiety and depression: Psychometric evidence and psychometric implications. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 100, 316-336] can be extended to account for change during treatment for anxiety and depression. Forty-one patients treated naturalistically in private practice with cognitive behavior therapy completed weekly measures of depression, anxiety, negative affect (NA), positive affect (PA), and anxious arousal (AA). Consistent with the model, NA was associated with anxiety and depression during treatment, PA was more strongly related to depression than to anxiety, and AA was more strongly related to anxiety than to depression. As predicted, symptoms of depression and anxiety and NA all decreased during treatment. As predicted, AA also decreased, particularly for patients with panic disorder. PA increased during treatment, but only for patients who showed a significant decline in depression and only over an extended period of treatment. Nearly two-thirds of the variance in anxiety change was accounted for by changes in depression and NA, and just over three-fourths of the variance in depression change was accounted for by changes in anxiety and NA, indicating that much of the change in anxiety and depression across the course of treatment is shared in common.     

Using Dynamic Field Theory to extend the embodiment stance toward higher cognition

The embodiment stance emphasizes that cognitive processes unfold continuously in time, are constantly linked to the sensory and motor surfaces, and adapt through learning and development. Dynamic Field Theory (DFT) is a neurally based set of concepts that has turned out to be useful for understanding how cognition emerges in an embodied and situated system. We explore how the embodiment stance may be extended beyond those forms of cognition that are closest to sensorimotor processes. The core elements of DFT are dynamic neural fields (DNFs), patterns of activation defined over different kinds of spaces. These may include retinal space and visual feature spaces, spaces spanned by movement parameters such as movement direction and amplitude, or abstract spaces like the ordinal axis along which sequences unfold. Instances of representation that stand for perceptual objects, motor plans, or action intentions are peaks of activation in the DNFs. We show how such peaks may arise from input and are stabilized by intra-field interaction. Given a neural mechanism for instantiation, the neuronal couplings between DNFs implement cognitive operations. We illustrate how these mechanisms can be used to enable architectures of dynamic neural fields to perform cognitive functions such as acquiring and updating scene representations, using grounded spatial language, and generating sequences of actions. Implementing these DFT models in autonomous robots demonstrates how these cognitive functions can be enacted in embodied, situated systems.     

Effect of affect on social cost bias in social anxiety disorder

Abstract

The cognitive model of social anxiety disorder (SAD) assumes that cognitive biases are important maintaining factors of the disorder. Research and theory have highlighted the impact of cognitive self-regulatory processes on affect, but have not sufficiently focused on the influence of affect on self-regulatory cognitions. The present study examined the influence of affect on cognitive self-regulatory mechanisms in SAD by focusing on one critical cognitive bias, estimated social cost. Individuals with SAD (N=48) and non-anxious controls (N=48) were randomly assigned to one of three experimental, affect induction conditions (negative, positive, or neutral) before giving a 10-minute impromptu, videotaped speech. As expected, the affect manipulation resulted in changes in estimated social cost. However, this effect was not specific to individuals with SAD. Participants in the positive affect condition in both groups had the highest social cost estimates post-speech challenge. These results suggest that social cost bias is dependent on the affective state in both individuals with SAD and controls.     

Swimming as an accretive practice in healthy blue space

Cultural geographers are increasingly interested in research on water and water-based practices as sites of study. Parallel literatures on therapeutic landscapes, especially emergent work on healthy blue space, have also begun to explore emotional geographies. This paper is an empirical study of outdoor swimming in Ireland with a specific focus on health and wellbeing. A key aim is to uncover evidence on how specific blue places and practices enable health. The idea of a continuum is utilised to link theory and practice and connect rather than divide affect, feeling and emotion. This is articulated through a set of embodied experiential practices that proposed swimming as a process of therapeutic accretion. Both personal and shared histories are used to identify the importance of both swimming practices and places to show how therapeutic accretions emerge to build healthy resilience. Additional insights suggest aspects of embodied health that are enhanced by outdoor swimming, especially in relation to bodies perceived to be inactive due to age, illness or disability. While the risks are not ignored, the need to better value outdoor swimming in cooler climates for public health is proposed, suggesting new directions for research on outdoor swimming to simultaneously capture active and passive embodied and emotional experiences within blue space.     

Toward an Ethical Reflective Practice of a Theory in the Flesh: Embodied Subjectivities in a Youth Participatory Action Research Mural Project

The focus of this paper is to demonstrate how embodied subjectivities shape research experiences. Through an autoethnography of my involvement in a Youth Participatory Action Research (YPAR) after‐school program with low‐income and working‐class youth of Color from predominantly Latinx communities I examined my embodied subjectivities, via an ethical reflective practice, as these surfaced in the research context. Autoethnography is presented as a tool to facilitate an ethical reflective practice that aligns with heart‐centered work. Drawing from an epistemology of a theory in the flesh (Anzaldúa & Moraga, 1981), embodied subjectivities are defined by the lived experiences felt and expressed through the body, identities, and positionalities of the researcher. The article concludes with implications for the development of community psychology competencies that attend to the researcher's embodied subjectivities.     

The embodied nature of spatial perspective taking: Embodied transformation versus sensorimotor interference

Humans are able to mentally adopt the spatial perspective of others and understand the world from their point of view. We propose that spatial perspective taking (SPT) could have developed from the physical alignment of perspectives. This would support the notion that others have put forward claiming that SPT is an embodied cognitive process. We investigated this issue by contrasting several accounts in terms of the assumed processes and the nature of the embodiment. In a series of four experiments we found substantial evidence that the transformations during SPT comprise large parts of the body schema, which we did not observe for object rotation. We further conclude that the embodiment of SPT is best conceptualised as the self-initiated emulation of a body movement, supporting the notion of endogenous motoric embodiment. Overall our results are much more in agreement with an ‘embodied’ transformation account than with the notion of sensorimotor interference. Finally we discuss our findings in terms of SPT as a possible evolutionary stepping stone towards more complex alignments of socio-cognitive perspectives.