Search results for "Embodied"

2020

Abstract In classroom settings, laughter and smiles are resources for action that are available to both teachers and students. Recent interactional studies have documented how students use these resources to deal with trouble of various kind, but less is known about the sequential and activity contexts of teachers’ laughter-relevant practices, as well as their pedagogical functions. We use multimodal conversation analysis (CA) to investigate the interactional unfolding and pedagogical orientations of teacher smiles during instructional IRE (initiation-response-evaluation) sequences in a corpus of 37 bilingual lessons collected in schools in Finland and Spain. In analysing the focal smiles, …

Towards understanding nonmanuality : A semiotic treatment of signers’ head movements

2019

This article discusses a certain type of nonmanual action, signers’ head movements, from a semiotic perspective. It presents a typology of head movements and their iconic, indexical and symbolic features based on Peircean and post-Peircean semiotics. The paper argues for the view that (i) indexical strategies are very prominent in head movements, (ii) iconic features are most evident in enacting, while non-enacting description is less common, (iii) symbolic types for tokens are infrequent, although some movements—such as nodding and shaking the head—may become more conventional or schematized, and (iv) different types of head movements involve different proportions of iconicity, indexicalit…

Soft Prosody and Embodied Attunement in Therapeutic Interaction: A Multimethod Case Study of a Moment of Change

2016

This study focused on a moment of weeping in one psychotherapy case. The overall aim was toexplore the role of “soft prosody” in psychotherapy interaction—that is, the participants’ use ofpauses, a lower volume, slower rhythms, and softer intonation than in the surrounding speech. Amixed-method, micro-analytic perspective was applied to investigate (a) social interaction, includ-ing its verbal and nonverbal elements; (2) the participants’ bodily responses, including autonomicnervous system (ANS) measurements; and (3) the participants’ thoughts and feelings during thetherapy session, as reported in subsequent individual interviews. Soft prosody was observed to be animportant conversational t…

The Relational Mind in Couple Therapy : A Bateson-Inspired View of Human Life as an Embodied Stream

2018

Research on human intersubjectivity has found that humans participate in a dialogue throughout their life, and that this is manifested not only via language, but also nonverbally, with the entire body. Such an understanding of human life has brought into focus some basic systemic ideas concerning the human relational mind. For Gregory Bateson, the mind works as a system, formed from components that are in continuous interaction with each other. In our Relational Mind research project, we followed twelve couple therapy processes involving two therapists per session, looking at the ways in which the four participants attuned to each other with their bodies, including their autonomic nervous s…

Self-Organized Linguistic Systems: From traditional AI to bottom-up generative processes

2018

Este trabajo busca explorar el potencial de los procesos generativos bottom-up en el contexto de la producción conlang, con el objetivo de describir las bases de un nuevo campo de investigación: los Sistemas Lingüísticos Autoorganizados o SOLS, específicamente bajo la perspectiva doble de sistemas autoorganizados y lenguajes construidos. El enfoque SOLS proporciona un marco para la creación de lenguajes artificiales autogenerados y puede servir como punto de partida para el desarrollo de lenguajes dependientes del contexto o específicos del dominio. Reconoce que el desarrollo de conlangs puede ocurrir en sociedades artificiales de agentes simples, como resultado de interacciones sociales en…

How the Context Matters. Literal and Figurative Meaning in the Embodied Language Paradigm

2014

The involvement of the sensorimotor system in language understanding has been widely demonstrated. However, the role of context in these studies has only recently started to be addressed. Though words are bearers of a semantic potential, meaning is the product of a pragmatic process. It needs to be situated in a context to be disambiguated. The aim of this study was to test the hypothesis that embodied simulation occurring during linguistic processing is contextually modulated to the extent that the same sentence, depending on the context of utterance, leads to the activation of different effector-specific brain motor areas. In order to test this hypothesis, we asked subjects to give a moto…

Rewinding Frankenstein and the body-machine: organ transplantation in the dystopian young adult fiction seriesUnwind

2016

While the separation of body and mind (and the entailing metaphor of the body as a machine) has been a cornerstone of Western medicine for a long time, reactions to organ transplantation among others challenge this clear-cut dichotomy. The limits of the machine-body have been negotiated in science fiction, most canonically in Mary Shelley9s Frankenstein (1818). Since then, Frankenstein9s monster itself has become a motif that permeates both medical and fictional discourses. Neal Shusterman9s contemporary dystology for young adults, Unwind , draws on traditional concepts of the machine-body and the Frankenstein myth. This article follows one of the young protagonists in the series, who is en…

Bodily self-relatedness in vicarious touch is reflected at early cortical processing stages.

2019

Studies have suggested that there is a strong link between the bodily self and the mechanisms underlying vicarious representations. Here, we used somatosensory ERPs to investigate the temporal dynamics of vicarious touch for stimuli that are more or less related to one's own body (human hands vs. rubber gloves). We found that vicarious touch effects were restricted to self-relatable events (human hands) at early implicit stages of somatosensory processing (P45). At later more cognitive stages of processing (late positive complex, LPC), the vicarious touch effect was stronger for self-relatable events (touch on human hands) than nonself-relatable events (touch on rubber gloves) but present f…

Visual inference of arm movement is constrained by motor representations

2015

International audience; Several studies support the idea that motion inference is strongly motor dependent. In the present study, we address the role of biomechanical constraints in motion prediction and how this implicit knowledge can interfere in a spatial prediction task. Right-handed (RHS) and left-handed subjects (LHS) had to estimate the final position of a horizontal arm movement in which the final part of the trajectory was hidden. Our study highlighted a direction effect: end point prediction accuracy was better to infer the final position of horizontal motion directed toward the median line of human body. This finding suggests that the spatial prediction of end point is mapped ont…

How can movement quality be promoted in clinical practice? A phenomenological study of physical therapist experts.

2010

Background In recent years, physical therapists have paid greater attention to body awareness. Clinicians have witnessed the benefits of supporting their patients' learning of movement awareness through the promotion of their movement quality. Objective The aim of this study was to investigate how physical therapist experts promote movement quality in their usual clinical settings. Design A phenomenological research design that included a sampling strategy was devised. Using specific criteria, 6 lead physical therapists nominated a group of physical therapist experts from the fields of neurology, primary health care, and mental health. Fifteen informants, 5 from each field, agreed to parti…