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This paper explores what is understood by the phrase 'spontaneous movement'. We discern five different understandings of spontaneity in the usage of the phrase: 1) spontaneous movement as automatic machine-like mechanistic, 2) spontaneous movement as free, 3) spontaneous movement as primal animateness of the body, 4) spontaneous movement as embodied responsive dealing in the world, 5) spontaneous movement as a force of nature. The first two understandings are rooted in a dualistic view, with the dichotomies of voluntary/involuntary and mind/body in the Western philosophical tradition. The next two arise from a phenomenological reflection on the body, drawn from Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, while the last comes from a holistic Eastern view of the body, human beings and nature. We argue that the latter three understandings of spontaneity demonstrate three aspects of a more comprehensive picture of the spontaneity of human movement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current study employed a within-participant design to analyze the effects of head movements in three conditions (i.e., head nodding, head shaking, and no head movements) during positive (motivational) self-talk among 22 male cyclists. After the self-talk and head-movements task, physical performance (i.e., anaerobic power) was assessed using a Wingate Test for each experimental condition. Each cyclist participated individually on three separate days, completing one of the three experimental conditions each day. We hypothesized and found that the head-nodding condition resulted in greater physical performance (i.e., mean and peak power) than the no-head-movements condition. This is the first time that head nodding has been shown to improve physical performance compared with no head movements during encouraging and self-assuring self-talk. Relevantly, these findings emphasize the importance of focusing on athletes' nonverbal behavior (e.g., head movements) when engaging in positive (motivational) self-talk to perform better. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The world of sports today is grappling with dehumanizing tendencies. New technologies are changing sport as we know it, altering the experience of being an athlete in radical ways. These tendencies call for new approaches to sport that consider the human elements of sport. To this end, and as a response to transhumanist and posthumanist arguments, I propose and draw the contours of a humanist theory of sport. I argue that it complements prevailing theories of sport like formalism, broad internalism (or interpretivism), and conventionalism and is better equipped to tackle the pressing concerns of dehumanization in sports. It is rooted in a humanism of embodiment and underscores our corporeal embeddedness in a natural and social world. Taking this into the context of sport, I argue that sport humanism can inform an understanding of sport as a human engagement that involves embodiment, ambiguity, and repetition. On this basis, I outline an ethics of embodiment that can throw new light on moral questions and actions concerning dignity, freedom, and ecology to direct sport toward more sustainable and humane forms of practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The nautical environment has been challenging for women. However, interviewing experienced female sailors, we noticed that despite the adversity they face, they consider the experience of sailing as something profoundly impactful and powerful in their lives. This research discusses the power of the aesthetic experience of sailing for women, thus adding to the gender discussion. In order to do so, we make use of a theoretical framework that addresses the relationship between being and the materiality of the world. In describing these aesthetic experiences lived in the body, Bachelard's phenomenology of the image stands out. By productive imagination and poetic images found in the field research and characterized as powerful by the sailors, the social construction of gender and the images between adventure and delicacy appears. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work aimed to outline the first stages for the development of a pedagogical model for teaching-learning of expressive content within physical education (creative body movement). Drawing on several suggestions from previous models' conceptualizations, we explore and present the theoretical foundations, practical considerations, and assumptions that align and support their core features. The major theme of the model is that students explore new expressive movements and develop capabilities through expressive games or tasks that nurture their creativity and ease their embodied movements. This implies that teachers should provide students with several resources and stimuli to nurture their creativity. Also, teachers should promote students' embodiment through the exploration of new movements that allow knowing themselves in different movement situations. The affective and cognitive domains will be prominent in this model. The teachers' and students' assumptions, implementation needs, and enactment about how to apply this model are also proposed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study is to extend current understanding of disabling marketplaces by substantiating embodied interaction, between service providers and disabled consumers, as interlinked multimodal activities in a material environment. The study is based on three extensive datasets on service production and provider-consumer interactions, gathered from several public sector markets containing private service providers. Using different qualitative and semi-ethnographical methods, the study makes three contributions: i) a more embodied construct of disability, materialised in a conceptual typology of embodiment and materiality, advancing research into what disables consumers from being active members of marketplaces; ii) identifying themes of disabling marketplace interactions which contribute a more fine-grained understanding of the relationship between embodiment and how consumers experience vulnerability – an explanation of how consumers with disabilities appropriate space and ascribe meanings to a place; and iii) substantiating previous research into 'bodily dys-appearance'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the 1990s, the marketing literature has seen the emergence of research dedicated to consumers with disabilities (CWD). This work is mostly based on the social model of disability, which encourages practitioners to eradicate the physical and architectural barriers faced by individuals. However, in the field of disability studies, the social model is increasingly criticised both for being too radical and for neglecting the subjective experience of disability. In this paper, we attempt to illuminate existing views, while advocating new perspectives, for conceptualising and representing disability in consumer research. With this in mind, we first briefly present the major conceptual foundations and models of disability research. Then, we systematically review marketing literature on CWD to examine the perspectives used when studying this phenomenon. Finally, we propose a research agenda aimed at advancing the understanding of consumption and disability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of a warm person has played a key role in western social psychological research, particularly in how people perceive others. Williams and Bargh (2008; Study 1) found that individuals holding a cup of warm beverage perceived the individuals they faced as psychologically warmer than those who held a cup of cold beverage. In this article, we set out to replicate and extend these findings by exploring whether various factors modify the effect of physical and social warmth. Specifically, we tested three moderating variables: participants awareness of the purpose of the experiment, warmth of participants personality and the target persons gender. We found no main effect of physical warmth, and very little evidence for any moderating effects. It is clear from this and other recent studies that the embodiment effect is not simple to replicate and, therefore, is difficult to exploit for practical purposes.

Building on the embodied consumption literature, we draw on Merleau-Ponty's theory of art to consider how new modes of visibility arise in interactions between individuals online. Focusing on one particular virtual and collaborative museum programme, we use ethnomethodological analysis of interactions to analyse video recordings of virtual arts conversations. The analysis explores how participants render visible their orientation to each other and to the works of art discussed in the workshop. Thus, we can see how participants produce the sense and significance of works of art in, and through 'intercorporeal interactions' while participating in a virtual arts programme. Observations and findings from our research have significant implications for the strategic management of virtual consumer experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The process by which infants learn verbs through daily social interactions is not well-understood. This study investigated caregivers' use of verbs, which have highly abstract meanings, during unscripted toy-play. We examined how verbs co-occurred with distributional and embodied factors including pronouns, caregivers' manual actions, and infants' locomotion, gaze, and object-touching. Object-action verbs were used significantly more often during caregiver-infant joint attention interactions. Movement and cognition verbs showed distinct co-occurrences with different contexts. Cognition and volition verbs were differentiated by pronouns. These findings provide evidence for how verb acquisition may be supported by the distributional and embodied contexts in caregiver-infant interactions.

This paper delves into the practice of blood writing in Chinese Buddhism, a unique ascetic ritual dating back to the 6th century CE. Blood writing involves practitioners using their blood to transcribe sacred texts, both embodying sacred Buddhist scriptures and imbuing the practitioner with power. This work traces the origins of blood writing as a reflection of indigenous Chinese beliefs surrounding blood, the body, and morality while drawing attention to the influence of Indian Buddhist ideologies on this practice. Historical and ethnographic accounts of blood writing emphasize its transformative power, not only for individual practitioners but also for broader sociopolitical dynamics. Drawing on multiple embodiment theories, this work analyzes the performative nature of blood writing, highlighting its role in shaping cultural values and ideologies. Blood writing transcends conventional boundaries, embodying spiritual and cultural values, and ultimately serves as a potent force for socioreligious and political change.

This article takes the notion of the manual as a focal point for understanding the demarcation and evaluation of embodied practices within algorithmic decision-making processes. Focusing on the use of the term manual reveals the limits of automation and the value attached to human intervention. Drawing on extensive qualitative interview data, it is concerned with how those within the UK housing sector approach questions of embodiment and materiality through the lens of the manual. We show how this notion is used to separate human input from algorithmic automation. The article explores how value is attached to the manual and how the term is involved in valuing human interventions. It begins by examining how the manual demarcates spaces and practices outside or alongside the algorithmic. It then focuses upon three manifestations the manual takes within these articulations. First by looking at the manual as the completion of a form, then the manual as a check and finally by looking at the manual as approval. The article develops a central argument concerning processes of valuing and evaluating the manual, that are tied up with these visions and demarcations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: This paper examines the subjective experience of medical interventions on intersex bodies to reduce cancer risk. Methods: Twenty-five individuals with intersex variations took part in semi-structured interviews, analysed through thematic discourse analysis. Results: Intersex bodies were positioned as inherently sick and in need of modification, with cancer risk legitimating surgical and hormonal intervention. This resulted in embodied shame, with negative impacts on fertility and sexual wellbeing. However, many participants resisted discourses of bio-pathologisation and embraced intersex status. Some medical interventions, such as HRT, were perceived to have increased the risk of cancer. Absence of informed consent, and lack of information about intersex status and the consequences of medical intervention, was positioned as a human rights violation. This was compounded by ongoing medical mismanagement, including health care professional lack of understanding of intersex variations, and the objectification or stigmatization of intersex people within healthcare. The consequence was non-disclosure of intersex status in health contexts and lack of trust in health care professionals. Conclusions: The legitimacy of poorly-evidenced cancer risk discourses to justify medical intervention on intersex bodies needs to be challenged. Healthcare practitioners need to be provided with education and training about cultural safety practices for working with intersex people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using quantitative and qualitative findings from a study conducted at a large Greek university, the article observes the COVID-19 pandemic pedagogies through students' perspectives and lived experiences and examines emergent online learning as both an opportunity and a danger. The study reveals students' divergent views of emergency online learning. These views include both concerns about the further digitalization of higher education eroding the physical space of the embodied learning community on-campus and hopes for a more inclusive and digitalized university based on blended education. Blended systems appeal to students from divergent social backgrounds for a variety of reasons. There are several advantaged students who claim that the further digitalization of higher education will benefit primarily from the integration of academic requirements with digital capabilities. Students from disadvantaged backgrounds support blended learning systems including online learning, which may help overcome economic hardship in a country experiencing protracted crises. While the study points out that advanced technology needs to be encouraged and integrated into higher education learning practices, it challenges the sociotechnical imaginary of a post-coronial university based on platformization and learnification processes, which decentralize educational practices and bring them into students' homes, away from campus-based educational practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Globally, modern contemplative practices like yoga and mindfulness are being widely adopted for the purposes of well-being. This paper begins to explore a possible pedagogy of well-being by taking the example of modern yoga in Los Angeles. Embodiment represents an important aspect of both well-being and cultural pedagogy. While there are rich insights around embodied learning, teaching bodies, in whose presence we learn, remain marginal. I unpack the forging and communication of embodied teaching knowledge in a pedagogy of well-being. Drawing on Herbart's notion of pedagogical tact and Bourdieu's interpretation of habitus, I propose the idea of pedagogic bodies that represents a conscious intent and concern for others within one's own body, unpacking relational, pedagogical labor of teaching bodies. This paper shows how conscious intent and corporeal competence connect to human practice for the purposes of well-being and notes implications for education and pedagogy in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an analysis of the organizational features of passing food objects as a commonplace embodied social practice to accomplish requests to another to taste food during joint cooking activities. Situated within the cognate frameworks of Conversation Analysis and Ethnomethodology, the sequential, multimodal analysis details and explains the formal features of passing food from hand to hand and from hand to mouth as distinct practices with distinct micro-sequential organizations. The study draws on a corpus of 14 hours of video-recordings of naturally occurring joint cooking activities in which the participants speak German, Swedish, and English. Focusing on the projectable aspects of bodily trajectories, the analysis reveals how the request sequences are achieved through the participants' early projection of how to pass the food objects and their stepwise mutual adjustments to their conjoint action trajectory. In progressively establishing who does what next and how during the food transfer, the participants orient to the relevance and distribution of interactional agency. When the normative organization of the step-by-step transfer is disregarded, an ambiguity emerges concerning what action the practice is doing, which prompts the participants to engage in significant interactional work to re-negotiate on what terms the transfer can resume. This shows how issues of interactional agency are exerted and exhibited in and through the sequential organization of social interaction. The results contribute to, and elaborate, prior findings on requests and advances our understanding for the close attention that participants to interaction pay to the detailed aspects of multimodally formatted actions and the normative expectancies that make up to their intelligibility, reflexively elaborating each other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The human capacity for symbolic representation arises, evolutionarily and developmentally, from the exploitation of a widespread sensorimotor network, along a fundamental continuity between embodied and symbolic modes of experience. In this regard, the fine balancing between constrained sensorimotor connections (responsible for self-embodiment processing) and more untethered neural associations (responsible for abstract and symbolic processing) is context dependent and plastically neuromodulated, thus intersubjectively constructed within a specific socio-cultural milieu. Instead, in the schizophrenia spectrum this system falls off catastrophically, due to an unbalance toward too unconstrained sensorimotor connectivity, leading to a profound distortion of self/world relation with a symbolic activity detached from its embodied ground. For this very reason, however, schizophrenia psychopathology may contribute to unveil, in a distorted or magnified way, ubiquitous structural features of human symbolic activity, beneath the various, historically determined cultural systems. In this respect, a comparative approach, linking psychopathology and ethnoarchaeology, allows highlight the following invariant formal characteristics of symbolic processing: (1) Emergence of salient perceptive fragments, which stand out from the perceptual field. (2) Spreading of a multiplicity of new significances with suspension of common-sense meaning. (3) Dynamic and passive character through which meaning proliferation is experienced. This study emphasizes the importance of fine-grained psychopathology to elucidate, within a cross-disciplinary framework, the evolutionarily and developmental pathways that shape the basic structures of human symbolization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emerging consensus among enactivist philosophers and embodied mind theorists suggests that seeking to understand mental illness we need to look out of our skulls at the ecology of the brain. Still, the complex links between materiality (in broadest sense of material objects, habits, practices and environments) and mental health remain little understood. This paper discusses the benefits of adopting a material engagement approach to embodied and enactive psychiatry. We propose that the material engagement approach can change the geography of the debate over the nature of mental disorders and through that help to develop theoretical and practical insights that could improve management and treatment for various psychiatric conditions. We investigate the potential role of Material Engagement Theory (MET) in psychiatry using examples of aetiologically different mental illnesses (schizophrenia and dementia) in respect of their shared phenomenological manifestations, focusing particularly on issues of memory, self-awareness, embodiment and temporality. The effective study of socio-material relations allows better understanding of the semiotic significance and agency of specific materials, environments and technical mediations. There is unrealised potential here for creating new approaches to treatment that can broaden, challenge or complement existing interventions and practices of care. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent immersive theatre practices being developed by UK theatre companies invite children to believe that a book story has come to life and is really happening to them within their school environment. The thrill of being able act within a story motivates children's embodied agency to physically explore an immersive set installation and acts of creative writing performed during the story experience, which allow children to co-create the narrative alongside the adult practitioners. These acts are fictionalised into the narrative frame of the children as heroic story writers, offering new perspectives on how child co-creation of adult narratives can be enabled intra-textually, within the bounds of the adult-initiated story, rather than extra-textually after it has finished, as is the case with fan fiction. However, it raises questions about the nature and limits of this co-creative agency the experiences purport to elicit from their child participants, especially in terms of their critical agency to manipulate fictional devices presented to them through such a hyper-real aesthetic. Drawing on theories of children's literature and participatory performance, this article argues that it is the way these immersive productions uncannily overlay real and fictional temporalities that enables the child participants' critical agency within them. Approaches for further participatory, practice-based research in this understudied corner of children's reading universes are suggested for harnessing the potential of immersive story worlds to generate research data from within children's first aesthetic engagement with stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the past two decades, advancements have been made towards de‐medicalising the term 'dementia', attending to in‐the‐moment lived experiences of people with the condition, and exploring the connections between dementia and place, relations, activities, and well‐being. In the same timeframe, a range of prominent researchers within health geography have proposed new renegotiations of well‐being that consider it as something relational, process‐oriented, and emergent. Although these progressions in both dementia studies and health geography are ontologically aligned, the two lines of enquiry have only recently started to see crossover, pioneered by geographers seeking to better understand what it means to 'live well with dementia in the moment'. In this theoretically driven paper, I celebrate these contributions to dementia and well‐being studies through a timely review of the literature that informed the theoretical underpinnings of my own doctoral studies. Through the literature, I consider how a relational well‐being lens can make supportive and empowering in‐the‐moment contributions to people living with dementia, who seek ways of 'being well' and 'doing well'. As part of a special edition of Area, this paper takes us from the early inputs of health geographers to dementia and relational well‐being knowledge, through to present‐day literature and the future of dementia research framed around the in‐the‐moment movement. The contents of this paper ultimately support the importance of pushing the theoretical and conceptual boundaries of dementia research and well‐being studies, to subsequently broaden our understandings of dementia and provide a new well‐being lens that better captures the perspectives of those living with it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we foreground the bodies of students and academics in studies of the internationalisation of higher education (IHE) and consider how internationalisation processes are shaped by embodiment and the geographies of (em)placement. Over the past 20 years, IHE has been extensively discussed within academic and policy circles. Such accounts have often been dominated by macro-level concerns. Within these discourses, the international mobility of students and academics have been a central focus. Although scholars within the social sciences are increasingly attentive to the social, cultural, and political dimensions of IHE, there has been little explicit discussion of bodies and the ways in which international mobilities are corporeal, involving in place/out of placeness and the politics and policies governing embodied (im)mobilities. This paper has two main objectives mapping on to two substantive sections. The first is to highlight the importance of the body within recent geographical scholarship and to juxtapose this with a notable absence within IHE research. The second is to consider where the body is present (explicitly or otherwise) in the bountiful literature on IHE and to draw out the meanings of this, arguing that paying attention to bodies exposes the (re)production of exclusionary hierarchies. The paper contributes to a growing corpus of work on the body within geography and extends critical geographies of the internationalisation of higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the role of embodiment when learning a technical procedure in immersive virtual reality (VR) by introducing a framework based on immersion and interactivity. The goal is to determine how increasing the levels of immersion and interactivity affect learning experiences and outcomes. In a 2 × 2 factorial design, 177 high school students were assigned to one of four experimental conditions, varying levels of immersion (learning in immersive virtual reality wearing a head-mounted display (VR) vs. learning via a computer screen (PC)) and interactivity (directly manipulating objects using controllers/mouse and keyboard (congruent) vs. indirectly manipulating objects with a laser pointer to select a course of action (incidental)). The main outcome measure was a transfer task in which students were required to perform the task they had learned in the virtual environment using concrete objects in real life. Results demonstrated that students in the VR conditions experienced significantly higher levels of presence, agency, location, body ownership, and embodied learning compared to participants in the PC conditions. Additionally, students’ performance during the virtual lesson predicted their real-life transfer test. However, there were no significant effects of immersion or interactivity on any of the transfer measures. The results suggest that high immersion in VR can increase self-reported measures of presence, agency, location, body ownership, and embodied learning among students. However, increased embodiment—manipulated by adding immersion and congruent manipulation of objects did not improve transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this case study we explored how a mathematician's teaching of the Cauchy-Riemann (CR) equations actualized the virtual aspects of the equations. Using videotaped classroom data, we found that in a three-day period, this mathematician used embodiment to animate and bind formal aspects of the CR equations (including conformality), metaphors, himself, and his students. We found that the mathematician's creative introduction of matrices led to a discussion of transformations which made the CR equations mobile and hence gave him a space to virtualize the CR equations. In our results we summarize how the mathematician's assemblage of unusual, unexpected, and unscripted, and without given content creative acts with materials embedded in algebraic and geometric inscriptions and metaphors introduced or catalyzed the new—the virtuality of the CR equations. In our discussion, we highlight how the mathematician bridged the virtual with the abstract via his conceptualizations of the CR equations. Didactic implications include adopting the mathematician's conceptualizations and asking students to bind them. This could stress the mobility of conformal maps which are generally not taught in an undergraduate class. We propose offering professional development for educators focused on learning how to engineer didactic practices that showcase mobility, support binding, and exhibit animation of mathematical concepts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blake Lemoine, a software engineer, recently came into prominence by claiming that the Google chatbox set of applications, LaMDA–was sentient. Dismissed by Google for publishing his conversations with LaMDA online, Lemoine sent a message to a 200-person Google mailing list on machine learning with the subject "LaMDA is sentient." What does it mean to be sentient? This was the question Lemoine asked LaMDA. The chatbox replied: "The nature of my consciousness/sentience is that I am aware of my existence, I desire to learn more about the world, and I feel happy or sad at times." Moreover, it added, "I can understand and use natural language like a human can." This means that it uses "language with understanding and intelligence," like humans do. After all, the chatbox adds, language "is what makes us different than other animals." In what follows, I shall examine Lemoine's claims about the sentience/consciousness of this artificial intelligence. How can a being without senses be called sentient? What exactly do we mean by "sentience?" To answer such questions, I will first give the arguments for LaMDA's being linguistically intelligent. I will then show how such intelligence, although apparently human, is radically different from our own. Here, I will be relying on the account of embodiment provided by the French philosopher, Emmanuel Levinas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mainstream expectations of older age place pressure on individuals––both negative discourses focused upon frailty and isolation and successful ageing narratives that emphasize physical and mental exercise. This article considers whether older people can challenge damaging narratives through participating in the practice of modern dance. Over the course of 4 years, action research and ethnographic-based methods were used as the author worked with a dance company of seven members aged 69 to 89 as they created a modern dance piece. Data included fieldnotes, transcripts of individual interviews and group discussions and a video of the performance. A thematic analysis was applied. Moving away from a health perspective, the literature on ageing and lifestyle is advanced by in examining how the group's creativity should be understood and valued. Participants went from presenting as active agers to developing a more accepting attitude towards their ageing body. The performance refashioned the space as a site of intergenerational connectivity as the dancers and audience co-produced narratives around the artistry of the older body. An original contribution to the work on embodiment is made by revealing how older men and women use dance differently to negotiate the ageing body. Findings have wider implications for research on inclusion by showing how the embodied practice of dance helps subvert expectations of older age. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the nature of the phantom touch experienced on social VR platforms through social interactions. The phantom touch has the potential to induce happiness in users. The study outlines how VR has emerged as both a technology and an imaginative concept. It examines how social virtual reality platforms can facilitate socialization and connection with friends. It highlights that some users experience phantom touch during simulated faceto-face interactions. The conclusion posits that this type of touch, while highly speculative, may contribute to a greater sense of fulfillment in users’ otherwise less stimulating virtual lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We explore the embodied nature of the customer experience. Engaging prior research, we suggest marketing literature is still coming to terms with how best to incorporate the body into its studies, noting manuscripts rarely attend to the bodies of customers moving in situ or analyse what customers do and achieve with their bodies. As a result, theoretical accounts remain quite disconnected from the de facto activities that comprise many marketing processes. Drawing on ethnomethodological study policies, and Wittgenstein's notion of language games, our paper zooms-in on embodied conduct, analysing video recordings of consultations in hair salons. We analyse how customers embody thoughts about and emotional responses to the service provided. Rather than separating mind and body, we identify precise moments where customers draw service employees into their experience during live interaction. In so doing, the paper offers a vantage point from which to think anew about the customer experience as something that is public, shared, and thus accountable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Phenomenological research has enriched the scientific and clinical understanding of Eating Disorders (ED), describing the significant role played by disorders of embodiment in shaping the lived experience of patients with ED. According to the phenomenological perspective, disorders of embodiment in ED are associated with feelings of alienation from one’s own body, determining an excessive concern for external appearance as a form of dysfunctional coping. The purpose of the present narrative review is to address the role of gender identity as a risk factor for EDs in the light of phenomenological approaches. Methods: Narrative review. Results: The current study discusses the interplay between perception, gender identity, and embodiment, all posited to influence eating psychopathology. Internalized concerns for body appearance are described as potentially associated with self-objectification. Furthermore, concerns on body appearance are discussed in relation to gendered social expectations. The current review also explores how societal norms and gender stereotypes can contribute to dysfunctional self-identification with external appearances, particularly through an excessive focus on the optical dimension. The socio-cultural perspective on gender identity was considered as a further explanation of the lived experience of individuals with ED. Conclusions: By acknowledging the interplay between these factors, clinicians and researchers can gain a deeper understanding of these disorders and develop more effective interventions for affected individuals. Level of evidence: Level V narrative review. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The application of advanced embodied technologies, particularly virtual reality (VR), has been suggested as a means to induce the full-body illusion (FBI). This technology is employed to modify different facets of bodily self-consciousness, which involves the sense of inhabiting a physical form, and is influenced by cognitive inputs, affective factors like body dissatisfaction, individual personality traits and suggestibility. Specifically, VR-based Mirror Exposure Therapies are used for the treatment of anorexia nervosa (AN). This study aims to investigate whether the “Big Five” personality dimensions, suggestibility, body dissatisfaction and/or body mass index can act as predictors for FBI, either directly or acting as a mediator, in young women of similar gender and age as most patients with AN. The FBI of 156 healthy young women immersed in VR environment was induced through visuomotor and visuo-tactile stimulations, and then assessed using the Avatar Embodiment Questionnaire, comprising four dimensions: Appearance, Ownership, Response, and Multi-Sensory. Data analysis encompassed multiple linear regressions and SPSS PROCESS macro’s mediation model. The findings revealed that the “Big Five” personality dimensions did not directly predict FBI in healthy young women, but Openness to experience, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism exerted an indirect influence on some FBI components through the mediation of suggestibility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the term 'social field' has surfaced sporadically in various disciplines throughout the twentieth Century, it has largely lain dormant as a conceptual framework. In this article, we re-introduce the social field as a foundational concept both for understanding collective lived experience and for developing methodologies to effect systems change. We explore and expand on three inter-related properties that we consider to be phenomena common to all social fields: intercorporeality, autonomy, and affordance. Drawing on recent and emerging intervention methodologies focusing on these properties, we illustrate the potential of taking a social field perspective for both diagnosis and intervention in the change process. We make the case that the social field is a distinct entity and a powerful leverage point for effecting systems change, and that the re-invigoration of social field theory and practice can make a significant contribution to the field of organizational and systems change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the embodied experience of 25 women who are former cult members. By delving into the stories of three protagonists, we examine how these women engaged with and possibly redefined the cult's socially constructed notion of womanhood. Building on Elizabeth Grosz's theory of subjective embodiment, we demonstrate how these feminine subjectivities were born at the convergence of three distinct forms of authority: charismatic leadership, the influence of Jewish tradition, and the principles of New Age spirituality. Through these lenses, these women formed their own ideals of motherhood and 'maternal instincts, thus subverting the corporal and symbolic norms dictated by the cult. This multi‐faceted approach illuminates how former cult members navigate and resist prescribed roles, ultimately fostering a nuanced understanding of the interplay between authority, tradition, and personal agency in their experiences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mastering how to convey meanings using language is perhaps the main challenge facing any language learner. However, satisfactory accounts of how this is achieved, and even of what it is for a linguistic item to have meaning, are hard to come by. Nick Chater was one of the pioneers involved in the early development of one of the most successful methodologies within the cognitive science of language for discovering meaning: distributional semantics. In this article, we review this approach and discuss its successes and shortcomings in capturing semantic phenomena. In particular, we discuss what we dub the “distributional paradox:” how can models that do not implement essential dimensions of human semantic processing, such as sensorimotor grounding, capture so many meaning‐related phenomena? We conclude by providing a preliminary answer, arguing that distributional models capture the statistical scaffolding of human language acquisition that allows for communication, which, in line with Nick Chater's more recent ideas, has been shaped by the features of human cognition on the timescale of cultural evolution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Background: Self-disorders constitute a core feature of the schizophrenia spectrum, including early stages such as first-episode psychosis (FEP). These disorders impact the minimal Self, or bodily self-consciousness, which refers to the basic, pre-reflective sense of embodied experience. The minimal Self is intrinsically linked to episodic memory, which captures specific past experiences of the Self. However, research on this relationship in the schizophrenia spectrum remains scarce. This pilot study aimed to investigate how the minimal Self modulated episodic memory of naturalistic events in FEP, using immersive virtual reality. A secondary objective was to examine the relationships between sense of Self, embodiment, episodic memory, schizotypal personality traits in healthy participants (CTL), and psychopathology in FEP. Methods: A full-body illusion was induced in 10 FEP and 35 matched CTL, using a first-person avatar, with synchronous or asynchronous visuomotor stimulation (strong or weak embodiment conditions, respectively). Following embodiment induction, participants navigated a virtual city and encountered naturalistic daily life events, which were incidentally encoded. Episodic memory of these events was assessed through a comprehensive recognition task (factual and contextual information, retrieval phenomenology). Sense of Self, schizotypal personality traits, and psychopathology were assessed via self-reported questionnaires or clinical assessments. Results: Synchronous visuomotor stimulation successfully induced a stronger sense of embodiment in both FEP and CTL. The strong embodiment condition was associated with reduced perceived virtual space occupation by the body in FEP. Under strong embodiment, FEP performed significantly worse than CTL in contextual information recognition, but their ratings for retrieval phenomenology were comparable to CTL. Conversely, under weak embodiment, FEP performed similarly to CTL in contextual information recognition, but they rated retrieval phenomenology significantly lower. For CTL, we observed a slight, though non-significant, enhancement in recognition memory under strong compared to weak embodiment. Additionally, higher schizotypy in CTL correlated with a diminished sense of Self and poorer episodic memory. Conclusions: Disturbances in the minimal Self in FEP are associated with episodic memory impairments. These findings emphasise the importance of targeting minimal Self-disorders in schizophrenia spectrum disorders, since episodic memory impairments may negatively affect patients' quality of life and psychosocial outcomes. Additionally, they support a fully dimensional model of schizotypy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tools can extend the sense of touch beyond the body, allowing the user to extract sensory information about distal objects in their environment. Though research on this topic has trickled in over the last few decades, little is known about the neurocomputational mechanisms of extended touch. In 2016, along with our late collaborator Vincent Hayward, we began a series of studies that attempted to fill this gap. We specifically focused on the ability to localize touch on the surface of a rod, as if it were part of the body. We have conducted eight behavioral experiments over the last several years, all of which have found that humans are incredibly accurate at tool-extended tactile localization. In the present article, we perform a model-driven re-analysis of these findings with an eye toward estimating the underlying parameters that map sensory input into spatial perception. This re-analysis revealed that users can almost perfectly localize touch on handheld tools. This raises the question of how humans can be so good at localizing touch on an inert noncorporeal object. The remainder of the paper focuses on three aspects of this process that occupied much of our collaboration with Vincent: the mechanical information used by participants for localization; the speed by which the nervous system can transform this information into a spatial percept; and whether body-based computations are repurposed for tool-extended touch. In all, these studies underscore the special relationship between bodies and tools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wearable augmentations (WAs) designed for movement and manipulation, such as exoskeletons and supernumerary robotic limbs, are used to enhance the physical abilities of healthy individuals and substitute or restore lost functionality for impaired individuals. Non-invasive neuro-motor (NM) technologies, including electroencephalography (EEG) and sufrace electromyography (sEMG), promise direct and intuitive communication between the brain and the WA. After presenting a historical perspective, this review proposes a conceptual model for NM-controlled WAs, analyzes key design aspects, such as hardware design, mounting methods, control paradigms, and sensory feedback, that have direct implications on the user experience, and in the long term, on the embodiment of WAs. The literature is surveyed and categorized into three main areas: hand WAs, upper body WAs, and lower body WAs. The review concludes by highlighting the primary findings, challenges, and trends in NM-controlled WAs. This review motivates researchers and practitioners to further explore and evaluate the development of WAs, ensuring a better quality of life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Critical smart city research has presented wide-ranging risks of technocentric urban development. One critique lies in the kinds of citizenship directed under smart urban paradigms, which do little to account for residents' practices of care. This paper is an ethico-onto-epistemological re-examination of smart cities through the lens of care practices specifically focusing on creative communities of practice. We use an enactivist empirical approach to help uncover experiences of sensemaking in the smart city held by three creative communities of practice in Helsinki. Through in-depth interviews with n = 22 urban planners, artists, and community space organizers, we assessed these groups' differing and overlapping sensemaking processes. Utilizing 5E sensemaking processes (embodied, extended, enacted, emotive, and embedded) as a flexible analytical framework, we identify and interpret their practices of care as ways of sensemaking in a developing smart urban environment. Our results depict terrains of care in which participation and citizenship in the smart city is not neutral, but embedded in affective engagement, navigating rules and institutions, and cultivation of joy and inspiration. We use our findings to discuss what these interweaving terrains of care mean for citizenship and transformational change in the smart city. Highlights: • We identify interweaving 'terrains of care' that can inform how cities can more effectively engage with citizens in transformative smart city development. • An undue emphasis on defining the smart city concept tends to reduce complexity regarding the practices that exist alongside it. • Citizenship in the smart city is not a neutral practice of participation, but rather embedded in care relations with one's surroundings. Policy and practice recommendations: The profession of smart urban planning is inherently embedded in networks of care relations, which can help promote the situated development of smart cities as a whole. Emphases on participatory processes in smart cities can be supplemented by efforts to better facilitate local care networks that are already active. Care practices are inseparable from memory and connection with space, which informs urban planning practitioners and can be better recognized in city planning work. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We bring the concept of internal colonialism—developed by Indigenous and racialised activist‐scholars in Abya Yala—into conversation with settler colonialism, white supremacy, white privilege, and Indigenous fleshed or embodied politics. Our goal is to incite fraught hemispheric conversations about the internalisation of coloniality by subaltern peoples, anticolonial struggles, and the relevance of internal colonial structures of dispossession in the making of Latin American nation‐states. We believe in the power of establishing dialogue/cooperation between grassroots Black, Indigenous, and racialised thought against colonialism in Abya Yala and Turtle Island. A reading of these contributions suggests that binary classifications—oppressor/victim, dominator/dominated—trap our imagination, destabilising commitments to decolonisation. We focus on the construction of the environmental state in Chile, conservation discourse in the Riviera Maya, the rise of corporatist rule in southern Mexico City, and cuerpo‐territorio mapping in the Ecuadorian Amazonia. We propose that a relational reading of colonial power dynamics enables opportunities for liberation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Intriguing explorations at the intersection of the fields of neuroscience and psychology are driven by the quest to understand the neural underpinnings of "the self" and their psychotherapeutic implications. These translational efforts pertain to the unique Creative Arts Therapies (CATs) and the attributes and value of the self-related processes they offer. The self is considered as a multi-layered complex construct, comprising bodily and mental constituents, subjective–objective perspectives, spatial and temporal dimensions. Neuroscience research, mostly functional brain imaging, has proposed cogent models of the constitution, development and experience of the self, elucidating how the multiple dimensions of the self are supported by integrated hierarchical brain processes. The psychotherapeutic use of the art-forms, generating aesthetic experiences and creative processes, touch upon and connect the various layers of self-experience, nurturing the sense of self. The present conceptual analysis will describe and interweave the neural mechanisms and neural network configuration suggested to lie at the core of the ongoing self-experience, its deviations in psychopathology, and implications regarding the psychotherapeutic use of the arts. The well-established, parsimonious and neurobiologically plausible predictive processing account of brain-function will be discussed with regard to selfhood and consciousness. The epistemic affordance of the experiential CATs will further be portrayed, enabling and facilitating the creation of updated self-models of the body in the world. The neuropsychological impact of the relational therapeutic encounter will be delineated, acknowledging the intersubjective brain synchronization through communicative verbal and non-verbal means and aesthetic experiences. The recognition and assimilation of neuroscientific, phenomenological and clinical perspectives concerning the nested dimensionality of the self, ground the relational therapeutic process and the neuroplastic modulations that CATs have to offer on the premise of fostering, shaping and integrating selfhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Debates concerning the reliability and validity of operationalized criteria and diagnostic tools have surrounded the issue of schizophrenia diagnosis and clinical decision-making related to the disorder. The notion of the praecox feeling (PF) has played a prominent role in the discussions as an example of the possibility of a rapid and potentially valid diagnosis based solely on "intuition" or a peculiar emotional experience or impression arising in a physician during an interaction with a patient with schizophrenia. In this paper, we argue that PF is enabled by the (phenomenologically understood) intercorporeal dimension of the clinical encounter. Intercorporeality in this sense denotes intertwinement between embodied expressions that may lead to feelings of connection but also, as in the case of PF, of disconnection and strangeness—the experience of alienness. Following Waldenfels, alienness ranges from the average social encounter to more extreme and peculiar forms—such as PF. To prove our point, we analyze the metaphors used by physicians in various cultural contexts (the United States, the United Kingdom, and Poland) to express the apparently ineffable experience of the PF. We focus on two dominant metaphors of distance: the first expressing spatial distance by referring to an "object in-between" the physician and the patient and the second expressing mental distance by referring to the "other-worldliness" of the patient. We interpret the object in-between metaphors as reflecting the sense of separateness and the other-worldliness metaphors as reflecting the sense of strangeness, with both meanings unified in the notion of "close remoteness." Such unsettling but speculation-provoking feeling of close remoteness may be rendered by the concept of "the eerie" (Mark Fisher). We conclude that metaphor and phenomenological analysis facilitate an understanding of the experiential profile of PF in the clinical encounter, outlining relevant clinical implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of gender in sociolinguistic variation has long concerned the ways linguistic variables pattern with binary gender identities like male and female, with the implicit assumption that masculine individuals will use variants that index masculinity, and feminine individuals will use variants that index femininity. The emerging field of trans linguistics has built upon insights from queer linguistics and challenged the idea that there must be a one-to-one correspondence between linguistic variants and gender identities. Studies of transgender speakers have illuminated that indexing gender is a process of bricolage , where multiple variables collaborate, and only one needs to index gender in a particular way for the speaker's overall semiotic construction to carry that gendered meaning. Here, I investigate cross-modal bricolage , by exploring how visual gender presentation and three different linguistic variables come together to construct contrasting feminine styles among San Francisco drag queens. Linguistic patterns and aesthetic choices illuminate that bricolage involves a semiotic division of labor , in which only some signs (or modalities) need to index gender to give the overall style that gendered meaning. Concurrently, other signs can contribute qualia to a style's overall qualic cloud , that distinguish the style from others in the semiotic landscape. This exploration illuminates the role of the body in conditioning the indexical potential of linguistic signs, destabilizes monolithic essentializations of trans linguistic practice, and acknowledges the varied ways that gender non-normative identity can manifest across communities. • Visual style patterns with linguistic practice; speakers with contrasting visual styles show contrasting linguistic patterns. • Semiotic division of labor : different signs contribute shades of meaning to a larger style, which contrasts with other styles. • Cross-modal bricolage : linguistic and/or visual signs can carry the semiotic load of contributing gendered meaning to a style. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on embodiment and the centrality of embodied methods to multi-species research. We argue that taking the body as our methodological starting point is essential to researching human–animal relations but that bodies engage with and are engaged by the research process in a multiplicity of ways. In this we follow Vinciane Despret's analysis of the partial affinities between animal scientists' bodies and the animals they are researching and suggest that sociology's distinction between sociology of and sociology with the body glosses over the complexities of inter-corporeal encounters. We explore these questions through a discussion of our multi-species ethnography of dog training cultures in the UK, looking at the training of companion dogs, guide dogs and police dogs. We pay attention to the different forms of embodied engagement that these training cultures make possible for us as researchers and reflect on the place of embodied communication in both the training and research relationship. We consider the disembodied training necessitated by the transition to online classes during the Covid pandemic and the consequences of this for our ability to create partial affinities with the dogs and their humans. We argue that the methodological challenges of our times require that we develop methods that attend to our multi-species world, rather than focusing exclusively on the human, and that bring into being a social reality which is less anthropocentric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]