Focusing on bodily feelings: When words are not enough.

2021 ◽  
pp. 143-160
Author(s):  
Leslie S. Greenberg
Keyword(s):  
Bodily Feelings

scholarly journals Phenomenology of Visuo-spatial Working Memory Task Performance

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aleš Oblak ◽  
Anka Slana Ozimič ◽  
Grega Repovš ◽  
Urban Kordeš
Keyword(s):  
Working Memory ◽  
Cognitive Psychology ◽  
Task Performance ◽  
Present Article ◽  
Spatial Working Memory ◽  
Memory Task ◽  
Bodily Feelings ◽  
Psychological Tasks

In experimental cognitive psychology, objects of inquiry have typically been operationalized with psychological tasks. If we are interested in measuring the target phenomena, we must inquire into the validity of the task; that is, to what extent does the task elicit the phenomenon in question. If we subscribe to the second view, evaluating the validity and the interpretation of the gathered data can be supplemented by understanding the experience of solving psychological tasks. The aim of the present article is to investigate how individuals experience performing a psychological task, specifically, a visuo-spatial working memory task. We present ethnographic descriptions of different ways individuals can experience the same task. We focus on aspects of experience that comprise the overall sense of experience (e.g., bodily feelings, emotional atmosphere, mood). We discuss the methodological implications of our findings and the possibility of conducting a neurophenomenology of visuo-spatial working memory.

scholarly journals L’effet de réel revisited: Barthes and the affective image

2008 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 113-136
Author(s):  
Sirkka Knuuttila
Keyword(s):  
Social Neuroscience ◽  
Reading Practice ◽  
Collège De France ◽  
Wu Wei ◽  
Bodily Feelings ◽  
Reality Effect ◽  
Embodied Self ◽  
Zen Buddhist

This article addresses Barthes’s development from a structuralist semiotician towards an affectively responding reader in terms of ‘postrational’ subjectivity. In light of his whole oeuvre, Barthes anticipates the understanding of emotion as an integral part of cognition presented in contemporary social neuroscience. To illustrate Barthes’s growing awareness of the importance of this epistemological move, the article starts from his textual ‘reality effect’ as a critical vehicle of realist representation. It then shifts to his attempt at conceptualising an affective reading which resists the universalising idea of one ideologically determined signified. Barthes’s progress towards embracing the actual reader’s embodied self-feeling is prompted by two conceptual milestones: the obtuse meaning found in cinematic stills, and the experience of punctum felt in photos. In light of his lectures in the Collège de France, Barthes substitutes the Husserlian disembodied method of introspection with the Chinese wu-wei as a reading practice. As a result, his Zen-Buddhist concentration on bodily feelings elicited by visual/verbal images becomes a method capable of creating a fruitful link between language and wordless cognition. Finally, the article proposes an idea of the ‘embodied reality effect’ by reading affectively two similar scenes interpreted by the early and late Barthes himself.

Degrees of Embodiment in Literary Reading

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marco Caracciolo
Keyword(s):  
Lived Experience ◽  
Literary Reading ◽  
Motor Resonance ◽  
Embodied Simulation ◽  
Psychological Mechanisms ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
Bodily Feelings ◽  
Literary Narrative

This chapter surveys some of the key issues in the study of embodiment in literary reading. Recent research in psycholinguistics has called attention to the role of motor resonance and experiential models in understanding language—two psychological mechanisms often brought together under the heading of “embodied simulation.” How does literary reading, and particularly reading literary narrative, leverage these embodied phenomena? Does embodiment always matter in reading or only in specific circumstances? Building on linguist David Ritchie’s scalar account of embodied simulation, and using Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho as a case study, this chapter distinguishes among various types of embodied involvement and shows how they shape the experience of reading Ellis’s novel. It also draws attention to the question of consciousness, calling for empirical research on the interplay between unconscious processes and lived experience (mental imagery, bodily feelings, etc.) in engaging with literary narrative.

The Intelligence of Emotions

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rick Anthony Furtak
Keyword(s):  
Affective Experience ◽  
Bodily Feelings ◽  
Human Emotions

In recent decades, there has been a remarkable amount of controversy within the disciplines of philosophy and psychology (among others) about how we ought to understand the cognitive and the bodily aspects of human emotions. Although numerous philosophers and psychologists have accepted a conception of emotions as cognitive phenomena, which are elicited and differentiated according to what information they take in about the person-environment relationship, others have identified emotions as bodily feelings. Yet we should not assume that the distinctly somatic element in our experience of such emotions as fear, awe, and grief is unrelated to the potentially truth-revealing function of affective experience. Nor does affective cognition need to prove its epistemic worth by being measured against the standard of some other mode of rationality—such as dispassionate judgment.

Complex Emotions: Relations, Feelings and Images in Emotional Experience

2002 ◽  
Vol 50 (2_suppl) ◽  
pp. 151-167 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Burkitt
Keyword(s):  
Emotional Experience ◽  
Relational Patterns ◽  
Complex Process ◽  
Complex Emotions ◽  
The Social ◽  
Structures Of Feeling ◽  
Bodily Activity ◽  
Bodily Feelings ◽  
Relational Experience ◽  
The Relationship

In this chapter I argue that emotions are experienced primarily as structures of feeling which give meaning to relational experience. These feelings can be articulated through speech genres or discourses which give them form as specific emotions that have a place in the emotional vocabulary of a culture. Thus, I seek to distinguish between feeling and thought and attempt to trace the complex process through which feelings become emotions. This involves a reconsideration of the relation between body and thought, and the material and the ideal, as it appears in the work of various thinkers. Central to this is the role of image-schemata (Johnson, 1987) that mediate between the recurring relational patterns of bodily activity in the world, which makes experience meaningful, and the symbolic structures of the social group that can be used to articulate bodily feelings metaphorically. Feelings and emotions, then, while in a complex relationship to one another, are not always identical: they can in fact diverge, giving rise to the ambiguous nature of much emotional experience. Finally, all of this is considered in the light of power relations and the way that emotional dynamics play a central role in power. Anglo-Saxons who are uncomfortable with the idea that feelings and emotions are the outward signs of precise and complex algorithms usually have to be told that these matters, the relationship between the self and others, and the relationship between self and environment, are, in fact, the subject matter of what are called ‘feelings’— love, hate, fear, confidence, anxiety, hostility, etc. It is unfortunate that these abstractions referring to patterns of relationship have received names, which are usually handled in ways that assume that the ‘feelings’ are mainly characterized by quantity rather than by precise pattern. This is one of the nonsensical contributions of psychology to a distorted epistemology (Bateson, 1973: 113).

The Stream of Consciousness: XIV. Two Contrasting Accounts of Pervasive Bodily Self-Awareness

1997 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-64 ◽  
Author(s):  
Thomas Natsoulas
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Personal Identity ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
Bodily Feelings

The present installment in this series of articles continues in consideration of the role that bodily self-awareness plays in the very structure of the basic durational components constituting William James's stream of consciousness. The focus here is dual, on both the prominent phenomenologist Aron Gurwitsch's account of this role and on James's account. Critically addressed is Gurwitsch's claim concerning the awareness of the behaviors involved in the process of perceiving. Such awareness is proposed to be typically marginal, in the sense of having a distinct and separate content within each component of the stream. Addressed too is James's account of pervasive bodily self-awareness as integrated within each state, or pulse, of consciousness although varying in attentiveness. Such awareness is always part of, at least, the fringe of every pulse of consciousness, which is not to be confused with Gurwitsch's margin. The present article explains how the awareness of bodily feelings is crucial to James's account of personal identity.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document