Search results for "embodied"

Editorial: Reaching to Grasp Cognition: Analyzing Motor Behavior to Investigate Social Interactions

2018

Ethical Stance and Evolving Technosexual Culture : A Case for Human-Computer Interaction

2021

Issues relating to ethics and how moral principles evolve are imminently engrained in culture. Culture and technology cannot be separated from one another, as both are processes and reflections of social cognition and experience through action and practice. Technology is the embodiment of values and enabler of culture. As technology develops and human relationships to information technology (IT) become ever more intricate and intimate the cultural framework underpinning values and ethics also morphs. The Internet is everywhere and humans are reliant on it for everything from banking to maintaining family relationships. Anything an individual could possibly desire can be found within the mas…

Software/Hardware Issues in Modelling Insect Brain Architecture

2011

The concept of cognitive abilities is commonly associated to humans and animals like mammals, birds and others. Nevertheless, in the last years several research groups have intensified the studies on insects that posses a much simpler brain structure even if they are able to show interesting memory and learning capabilities. In this paper a survey on some key results obtained in a joint research activity among Engineers and Neurogeneticians is reported. They were focussed toward the design and implementation of a model of the insect brain inspired by the Drosophila melanogaster. Particular attention was paid to the main neural centers the Mushroom Bodies and the Central Complex. Moreover a …

Mobilities and the network of personal technologies: Refining the understanding of mobility structure

2017

Our ambition here is to refine the various typologies that compose the mobility structure. We aim to complement the work done by Urry and investigate the role played in the structure of mobility by what we call the “network of personal technologies”. Our new model consists of four different levels: macro-mobilities, micro-mobilities, media mobility and disembodied mobilities. By “macro-mobilities,” we refer to the actions which imply consistent physical displacement, such as travels, tours and commuting. By “micro-mobilities,” we mean small-scale displacements, including bodily movements and emotions. With moving media, we refer both to the new mobility provided by the smartphone to the tra…

A greasy-skinned worker: gender, class and work in the 20th-century life story of a female labourer

2013

Affective Arousal During Blaming in Couple Therapy: Combining Analyses of Verbal Discourse and Physiological Responses in Two Case Studies

2016

Blaming one’s partner is common in couple therapy and such moral comment often evokes affective arousal. How people attune to each other as whole embodied beings is a current focus of interest in psychotherapy research. This study contributes to the literature by looking at attunement during critical moments in therapy interaction. Responses to blaming in verbal dialogue and at the level of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) were investigated in two couple therapy cases with a client couple and two therapists. Video-recorded couple therapy sessions were analyzed using discursive psychology and a narrative approach. The use of positioning, a discourse analytic tool, was also studied. ANS res…

Fluent Speakers of a Second Language Process Graspable Nouns Expressed in L2 Like in Their Native Language

2017

According to embodied cognition, language processing relies on the same neural structures involved when individuals experience the content of language material. If so, processing nouns expressing a motor content presented in a second language should modulate the motor system as if presented in the mother tongue. We tested this hypothesis using a go-no go paradigm. Stimuli included English nouns and pictures depicting either graspable or non-graspable objects. Pseudo-words and scrambled images served as controls. Italian participants, fluent speakers of English as a second language, had to respond when the stimulus was sensitive and refrain from responding when it was not. As foreseen by emb…

Bodies That Matter: Miniaturisation and the Origin(s) of ‘Art’

2020

Small things matter, especially in the so-called ‘arts’. From the visual arts to music and literature, ‘miniatures’ are a transcultural and transhistorical phenomenon that involves our aesthetic attitudes but also our everyday life, our emotional, social and cognitive life. Miniaturisation characterises our cognitive life and, of course, the ‘cognitive life of things’ that we produce, manipulate and discard. My paper is articulated into two sections: the first gives a quick overview of the miniatures of Homo sapiens, especially those of the paleolithic age, and a brief survey of the very challenging history of miniature-interpretation in twentieth-century philosophy of culture. In the secon…

The Significance of Silent Moments in Creating Words for the Not-Yet-Spoken Experiences in Threat of Divorce

2015

In the context of couple therapy involving the threat of divorce, the study examined the significance of silent moments for arriving at words for the not-yet-spoken experiences. It also examined whether interactional and embodied synchrony occurred during such silent moments. A mixed method analysis was conducted, focusing on the therapeutic dialogue, psychophysiological data (the Autonomic Nervous System, ANS), and the participants’ thoughts and feelings during individual Stimulated Recall interviews. Two episodes containing several silent moments were analyzed. The analysis indicated that during the silent moments the participants continued the therapeutic conversations through their enti…

Challenges and added value of measuring embodied variables in psychotherapy

2022

Research on embodied aspects of clinical encounters is growing, but discussion on the premises of including embodied variables in empirical research is scarce. Studies have repeatedly demonstrated that embodied aspects of psychotherapy interaction are vital in developing a therapeutic alliance, and these should be considered to better understand the change process in psychotherapy. However, the field is still debating which methods should be used and which features of the embodied aspects are relevant in the clinical context. The field lacks methodological consistency as well as a theoretical model. In the Relational Mind research project, we have studied the embodied aspects of interaction…