Search results for " mind"

Psychic retreats or psychic pits?: Unbearable states of mind and technological addiction.

2010

New technologies are highly interactive. They promote imaginative involvement and allow the experience of different self-states, such as those involving withdrawal or “psychic retreat”. According to Steiner, psychic retreats are areas of the mind populated by imagination and ideas which are poorly aligned with reality. Psychic retreats are not necessarily pathological in themselves—for instance, they can be used positively for counteracting anxiety or enhancing creativeness. However, with technological addiction there is a misuse of psychic retreat: here the total absorption with computer applications serves to hide painful or unbearable states of mind, and to protect the patient from overw…

Consciousness and Moral Status of Animals

2021

Consciousness is the basis for granting moral status, but it is ephemeral and elusive. Both the ontological and epistemic dimension of consciousness cause hard problems for modern science and the philosophy of mind. On the one hand, consciousness is subjective, and includes conscious states with a phenomenal or qualitative character – “qualia”. It consists of mental states which are accessible to a subject only from the first-person perspective. A being is phenomenally conscious when there is something that is like to be that being. Utilitarianism uses the hedonistic strategy of the moral status, ascribing to that the demand for us to treat sentience as the fundamental property for obtainin…

Representation

2020

Representation is a primitive notion of many philosophical theories and of cognitive science. It is assumed as an intuitively understandable label assigned to the functions by which a biological or an artificial agent takes part in the world in an epistemological or a behavioral manner. It is employed to define the conditions for the semantic individuation of the states of the agent. The notion of representation was introduced systematically in the Scholastics’ view of cognition. In modern philosophy, the term is often used as a verb. Representation becomes the function of a class of mental states. In contemporary philosophy, the debate over the semantic individuation of states is intertwin…

Immagini mentali, creatività e schizofrenia.

2011

Promoting Sustainability: The Effects of Workplace Mindfulness Training

2018

Mindfulness training is enjoying growing popularity in workplaces. In the current study, the effects of workplace mindfulness training were evaluated using quantitative and qualitative methods. The study’s novelty value arises from the implementation of workplace training among factory employees and the mixed-methods approach to evaluation. The quasi-experimental design with training and control groups included pre- and postmeasurements and four focus group interviews. The results of the pre-post-test indicated that, compared with the participants in the control group, the participants in the mindfulness-based training group displayed significantly greater increases in mindfulness, positive…

2019

Trust is a critical issue in human–robot interactions: as robotic systems gain complexity, it becomes crucial for them to be able to blend into our society by maximizing their acceptability and reliability. Various studies have examined how trust is attributed by people to robots, but fewer have investigated the opposite scenario, where a robot is the trustor and a human is the trustee. The ability for an agent to evaluate the trustworthiness of its sources of information is particularly useful in joint task situations where people and robots must collaborate to reach shared goals. We propose an artificial cognitive architecture based on the developmental robotics paradigm that can estimate…

The effects of 8-weeks Mindfulness-Based Stress Reduction program on cognitive control: an EEG study

2019

Objectives: Mindfulness practice can enhance different aspects of attentional functions, such as the ability to sustain the attentional focus over time. However, it is still unclear whether this practice might indeed impact higher cognitive functions, such as control mechanisms that allow the appropriate and flexible allocation of attentional resources. In this longitudinal study, changes associated with a mindfulness-based stress reduction (MBSR) program were investigated, with a focus on proactive and reactive cognitive control mechanisms, namely, the ability to maintain task-relevant information and to prepare in advance the response, and the ability to promptly adjust overlearned behavi…

Roots of the Savage Mind. Apophenia and Imagination as Cognitive Process

2009

l'articolo studia il ruolo cognitivo dell'immaginario con particolare riferimento alle culture di caccia e raccolta e al problema della costruzione simbolica del paesaggio

Developing Intercultural Mindedness through an Experiential Learning Activity—A Case Study from Singapore

2022

Recent incidents of alleged racism worldwide amid the COVID-19 pandemic have challenged us to ponder on the meaning and importance of intercultural education. However, it can be difficult to understand the ways in which intercultural discourse can be beneficial for learning, as well as prepare young people to act against racism and inequalities to work towards a more sustainable future. This study presents analysis of learning materials from a case study conducted in one secondary school in Singapore. The objective of the activity is for students to engage in intercultural learning by participating in walking trails with different themes in a few neighborhoods, to learn more about the histo…

Longitudinal evidence for an emotion-action lag on desire: The role of emotional understanding

2021

Abstract Many previous studies have found that children understand much earlier what a character who has a false belief will do than what a character will feel. This gap between the understanding of action and emotion is known as the belief-emotion lag and to this day there is no convincing explanation as to why it happens. There are also no studies that have explored whether this same gap occurs in the understanding of desire. This longitudinal study had a twofold objective: to explore the existence of a lag between the prediction of action and emotion based on desire, and to search for the role that specific emotions could have in children’s answers. To this end, we administered the Test …