Conscious Intention Research Articles

The Dharma Within Climate Crisis

The Dharma Within Climate Crisis

Ring finger autophagy after spouse's death

Self-mutilation is defined as self-injury to body tissue without conscious suicidal intent. Self-mutilative behavior can be seen in the context of many psychiatric disorders. Auditory hallucinations in form of voices giving orders increase the risk of self-mutilation. We report a case of “major depressive disorder with psychotic features” who had cut and eat his ring finger in respond to his deceased wife’s ordering voice.

Reducing Vulnerabilities to HIV: Does the Criminalization of HIV/AIDS Patients Contribute?

States ever since the outbreak of HIV/AIDS have been using different methods in order to combat the pandemic if possible and to reduce vulnerability. In spite of this, HIV/AIDS continues to be prevalent especially in a less developed countries to the extent that it to be hurdle for development. Criminalization of HIV/AIDS patients is one of the mechanisms that are used in the fight against the deadly disease. However, employing criminalization as prevention and vulnerability reduction strategy poses a question and stimulates a debate. Hence, the main thrust of this article is to identify this challenge and to assess whether criminalization of HIV/AIDS patients reduce vulnerability to HIV/AIDS. This being the aim it will also go on to analyze the role of criminal law in a public health issue. In doing so, the article will discuss experience of countries in criminalization of HIV/AIDS patients along side with international frameworks. At a glance, criminal law through a vehicle of punishment seems to play a role in reducing vulnerability to HIV/AIDS but, the writer based on the analyses of relevant literature and experiences of countries, argues that the use of criminal law to address HIV is inappropriate except in rare cases where a person acts with conscious intent to transmit HIV and does so, and this is because of the high degree of proof required in criminal case and the difficulty of using criminal law in HIV related issue due to the nature of the disease and the absence of technology used for the required proof in the criminal law, i.e. beyond reasonable doubt.

The Strategic Role of Power and Materiality in Managing Network Change

In this paper we attempt to shed light on how strategic changes occur in networked settings (i.e., partnerships), where power is decentralized and difficult to wield. We take a practice perspective and account for the role of material objects (including artifacts and concepts) in making things happen . We acknowledge and build on research, which highlights that material objects can be used as a tool by strategists for promoting changes; however, we also point to the importance of considering the agentic role of material objects – when objects themselves wield influence, independent of the conscious intention of strategists. We support our claims using extensive fieldwork in a healthcare network and conclude the paper with a call for more research that investigates all aspects of materiality involved in strategizing practices to explain how power (to make changes) unfolds in network settings.

Patterns of Conscious Intentionality

Patterns of Conscious Intentionality

A Note on 2015 Developments in Polish Competition Law: Is it Really a Drive Towards the European Model?

Modern Polish competition law has become highly regulated and codified over the twenty five years of its existence and this article will provide readers with information relating to its recent developments of 2015. Separate subsections present a review of provisions on remedies in infringement decisions as well as settlements. A considerable part of this paper is designed to outline the peculiarities that characterize Poland’s new provisions on fines. Further on, the paper introduces readers to newest trends in the area of concentration control between undertakings. In addition, an assessment of recent developments and suggestions for a further development of Polish competition law are reviewed in the EU context. The conscious intention of the author is to analyse whether the EU competition law pattern, often regarded as a model for Member States, has been used to develop Polish competition law. Has the latter been amended to look more, or less like EU competition law? Has Polish competition law shown the capacity to absorb the best elements of EU competition law into itself? How is the outcome aligned with the declared direction of these amendments?

Politico-theologic dispute on identity

The phenomenology of identity can distinguish identity as an ontological status and identity as a social-discursive construction. Identity as ontological status is based on the presence of transcendence. It is the result of grace, heritage, tradition. Identity as a social and discursive construction is based on the forgetting of transcendence. It is the result of self-eroticism and self-constituting intentional consciousness. In the first case, the identity is immersed in logos-order community (higher, wider and deeper levels of reality), which is why it is a catholic term of pre-intentional mindedness (polis as a paradigm of the world). In the second case, the identity is an expression of self-erotic intentionality that self reified as the beginning (positive datum ego-cogito), making it an expression of self-constituting awareness that denies any form of experience of otherness that precedes its act of self.

“ALLE DE SOM SITTER HER, HAR EN NY MULIGHET” PERSPEKTIVER PÅ PÅVIRKNING OG UTVIKLING AV FENGSLEDE I NORSKE HØYSIKKERHETSAVDELINGER

Perspectives on impacts on and the development of prisoners in Norwegian high-securitywings. Rehabilitation and improvement of a prisoner are at the center of the discourse of correctional services in Norway. It is investigated in this article how the task of rehabilitation and improvement during imprisonment is understood and interpreted by prison officerswho are responsible for guarding, handling and interacting with the prisoners in Norwegianhigh-security wings. Firstly, I will describe how punishment is justified in the criminal justice literature and in policy documents in the perspective of the so-called improving effects of punishment. After the presentation of data materials and method,I present two different approaches in the prison officers’ affecting and organizing work with prisoners. One approach emphasizes that the work of prison officers contains a correctional element; the officers should practice their role with a conscious intention of transmitting a set of values, attitudes and skills to the inmates. The other focuses on the officers’ role as an organizer of opportunities and ways to create better living conditions for the prisoners. Here the attention is primarily on the inmate’s future, on how things will be for them when they are released from prison: if, for example, they have jobs to go to and/or have a permanent place to live. The article ends with some value-oriented reflections on these two approaches.

“ALLE DE SOM SITTER HER, HAR EN NY MULIGHET” PERSPEKTIVER PÅ PÅVIRKNING OG UTVIKLING AV FENGSLEDE I NORSKE HØYSIKKERHETSAVDELINGER

Perspectives on impacts on and the development of prisoners in Norwegian high-securitywings. Rehabilitation and improvement of a prisoner are at the center of the discourse of correctional services in Norway. It is investigated in this article how the task of rehabilitation and improvement during imprisonment is understood and interpreted by prison officerswho are responsible for guarding, handling and interacting with the prisoners in Norwegianhigh-security wings. Firstly, I will describe how punishment is justified in the criminal justice literature and in policy documents in the perspective of the so-called improving effects of punishment. After the presentation of data materials and method,I present two different approaches in the prison officers’ affecting and organizing work with prisoners. One approach emphasizes that the work of prison officers contains a correctional element; the officers should practice their role with a conscious intention of transmitting a set of values, attitudes and skills to the inmates. The other focuses on the officers’ role as an organizer of opportunities and ways to create better living conditions for the prisoners. Here the attention is primarily on the inmate’s future, on how things will be for them when they are released from prison: if, for example, they have jobs to go to and/or have a permanent place to live. The article ends with some value-oriented reflections on these two approaches.

L’impegno al tempo della globalizzazione, fra discorso ed egemonia: due prospettive rivisitate attraverso Foucault e Gramsci

This contribution compares discourse and hegemony through their distinctive elaboration in the humanities and the social sciences by two major twentieth century theoreticians, Michel Foucault and Antonio Gramsci. In discourse Foucault unmasks the speaker’s – or the scientist’s - conscious and unconscious intentions in representing phenomena as if they were part of a coherent and readable whole. This whole results from an ensemble of discursive practices which prescribe what can be accepted and what has to be excluded within a certain social formation, a body of recognized and authoritative knowledge crucial in managing and maintaining power. Gramsci also acknowledges a close link between knowledge and power, but his idea of hegemony, unlike foucauldian discourse, does not deny the possibility of political agency through which individuals can forge a political strategy to improve their lot. Discourse and hegemony are nowadays essential tools for gauging social confrontations and understanding forms of coercion or negotiations in cultural exchange.

Does retrieval intentionality really matter? Similarities and differences between involuntary memories and directly and generatively retrieved voluntary memories.

Theories of autobiographical memory distinguish between involuntary and voluntary retrieval as a consequence of conscious intention (i.e., wanting to remember). Another distinction can be made between direct and generative retrieval, which reflects the effort involved (i.e., trying to remember). However, it is unclear how intention and effort interacts. For example, involuntary memories and directly retrieved memories have been used interchangeably in the literature to refer to the same phenomenon of effortless, non-strategic retrieval. More recent theoretical advances suggest that they are separate types of retrieval, one unintentional (involuntary), another intentional and effortless (direct voluntary retrieval), and a third intentional and effortful (generative voluntary retrieval). Whether this also entails differing phenomenological characteristics, such as vividness, rehearsal, or emotional valence, has not been previously investigated. In the current study, participants reported memories in an experimental paradigm designed to elicit voluntary and involuntary memories and rated them on a number of characteristics. If intention affects the retrieval process, then we should expect differences between the characteristics of involuntary and directly retrieved memories. The results imply that retrieval intention seems to differentiate how a memory appears in a person's mind. Furthermore, we argue that these differences in part could result from differences in encoding and consolidation.

How automatic activation of emotion regulation influences experiencing negative emotions.

The existence of automatic, unconscious processes influencing human emotion, cognition, and behavior is widely accepted and confirmed by numerous studies (e.g., Ohme et al., 2001; Jarymowicz, 2002; Hassin et al., 2005; Wentura and Degner, 2010; Bargh et al., 2012; Bargh, 2014; Wentura and Rothermund, 2014). Researchers demonstrated the mechanisms of implicit social cognition, including implicit attitudes and stereotypes (e.g., Greenwald and Banaji, 1995; Nosek et al., 2009; Molden, 2014), implicit affect (e.g., Zajonc, 1980, 2004; Murphy and Zajonc, 1993; Feldman-Barrett et al., 2005; Ohme, 2005; Kobylinska, 2007; Kolanczyk, 2007), as well as automatic processes in perception, evaluation and motivation (Bargh, 1997; Bargh et al., 2012; Rotteveel et al., 2015). Such mechanisms are described as automatically occurring and hard to control or modify. However, more and more researchers (Baumeister and Vohs, 2004; Koole, 2009; Kobylinska and Karwowska, 2014; Jarymowicz and Imbir, 2015) are starting to explore whether an individual always remains under the unconscious, automatic influence of these processes. Even if intentional, voluntary control is not possible, some evidence suggests that automatic self-regulation, including emotion regulation (which does not require person's conscious knowledge and intention, Fitzimons and Bargh, 2004; Koole and Rothermund, 2011) can operate outside of conscious awareness and influence the course of other processes (e.g., emotion) even the implicit ones (e.g., Kolanczyk and Pawlowska-Fusiara, 2002; Kobylinska, 2007; Wentura and Degner, 2010; Teige-Mocigemba and Klauer, 2013; Koole et al., 2015). In this opinion article we base our understanding of emotion regulation on the process model of emotion regulation proposed by Gross (2008, 2014, 2015a,b), who defined emotion regulation as a series of processes which cause changes in the dynamics, duration and speed of emotional activation, as well as changes in accompanying behavior, experience, and physiology. Accordingly, Gross (2008) argued that regulation could result in decreasing, intensifying or sustaining of either positive or negative emotions. He distinguished between antecedent-focused and response-focused regulation showing evidence that the antecedent-focused strategies (e.g., reappraisal) are more effective and adaptive then the response focused strategies (e.g., suppression) (Gross et al., 2006). More and more researchers, including ourselves, agree that emotion regulation manifests itself in a flexibility in experiencing positive and negative emotions by using different emotion regulation strategies (e.g., Ekman and Davidson, 1994; Bonanno and Burton, 2013; Sheppes et al., 2014; Aldao et al., 2015). Still, the majority of current research concentrates on the regulation of negative emotions, as decreasing the intensity or duration of negative emotions seems especially important for people in a present world (Gross, 2015a). We also focus on regulation of negative emotion. Our aim is to present some results that indirectly suggested the existence of automatic emotion regulation as well as some direct evidence (including replication) for this kind of regulation. Results of our own experiments described below add to the discussion about automatic emotion regulation showing consensus with previous studies.

Happiness in action: the impact of positive affect on the time of the conscious intention to act.

The temporal relationship between our conscious intentions to act and the action itself has been widely investigated. Previous research consistently shows that the motor intention enters awareness a few 100 ms before movement onset. As research in other domains has shown that most behavior is affected by the emotional state people are in, it is remarkable that the role of emotional states on intention awareness has never been investigated. Here we tested the hypothesis that positive and negative affects have opposite effects on the temporal relationship between the conscious intention to act and the action itself. A mood induction procedure that combined guided imagery and music listening was employed to induce positive, negative, or neutral affective states. After each mood induction session, participants were asked to execute voluntary self-paced movements and to report when they formed the intention to act. Exposure to pleasant material, as compared to exposure to unpleasant material, enhanced positive affect and dampened negative affect. Importantly, in the positive affect condition participants reported their intention to act earlier in time with respect to action onset, as compared to when they were in the negative or in the neutral affect conditions. Conversely the reported time of the intention to act when participants experienced negative affect did not differ significantly from the neutral condition. These findings suggest that the temporal relationship between the conscious intention to act and the action itself is malleable to changes in affective states and may indicate that positive affect enhances intentional awareness.

Religious-Commitment Signaling and Impression Management amongst Pentecostals: Relationships to Salivary Cortisol and Alpha-Amylase

Religious-commitment signaling is thought to indicate willingness to cooperate with a religious group. It follows that a desire to signal affiliation and reap concomitant benefits would lend itself to acting in socially desirable ways. Success or failure in such areas, especially where there is conscious intent, should correspond to proximal indicators of well-being, such as psychosocial or biological stress. To test this model, we assessed religious-commitment signaling and socially desirable responding among a sample of Pentecostals with respect to salivary biomarkers of stress and arousal. Results indicate that cortisol levels on worship and non-worship days were significantly influenced by religious-commitment signaling when moderated by impression management, a conscious form of socially desirable responding. No significant influences on salivary alpha-amylase were detected. These findings are important for understanding how religious-commitment signaling mechanisms may influence stress response when moderated by socially desirable responding and the role of communal orientation to psychosocial health.

Franz Brentano (1838–1917), philosophe et psychologue, inspirateur de Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Meinong

Franz Brentano is the founding father of modern psychology (descriptive psychology and intentional consciousness). He was an inspiring force for Freud, Husserl, Heidegger, Meinong. He gave the concept of Bejahung to psychoanalysis…

Puzzling Confabulations – An Overview of Classifications and Theories

Abstract. Confabulations comprise a puzzling collection of false statements, produced without conscious intent to deceive. They have been classified according to the mode of elicitation (spontaneous vs. provoked), the content (fantastic vs. plausible), the memory domain in which they become manifest (episodic vs. semantic), their stability (stable vs. ephemeral), or their selectivity (monothematic vs. multithematic). All classifications appear to be problematic, because there are no clear-cut dichotomies, and confabulations often seem to fall into overlapping categories. There are, in fact, many theories, presumably explaining different kinds of confabulations; the best bet is to regard them as complementary rather than competing.

Voluntary control of a phantom limb

Voluntary actions are often accompanied by a conscious experience of intention. The content of this experience, and its neural basis, remain controversial. On one view, the mind just retrospectively ascribes intentions to explain the occurrence of actions that lack obvious triggering stimuli. Here, we use EEG frequency analysis of sensorimotor rhythms to investigate brain activity when a participant (CL, co-author of this paper) with congenital absence of the left hand and arm, prepared and made a voluntary action with the right or the phantom “left hand”. CL reported the moment she experienced the intention to press a key. This timepoint was then used as a marker for aligning and averaging EEG. In a second condition, CL was asked to prepare the action on all trials, but then, on some trials, to cancel the action at the last moment. For the right hand, we observed a typical reduction in beta-band spectral power prior to movement, followed by beta rebound after movement. When CL prepared but then cancelled a movement, we found a characteristic EEG pattern reported previously, namely a left frontal increase in spectral power close to the time of the perceived intention to move. Interestingly, the same neural signatures of positive and inhibitory volition were also present when CL prepared and inhibited movements with her phantom left hand. These EEG signals were all similar to those reported previously in a group of 14 healthy volunteers. Our results suggest that conscious intention may depend on preparatory brain activity, and not on making, or ever having made, the corresponding physical body movement. Accounts that reduce conscious volition to mere retrospective confabulation cannot easily explain our participant's neurophenomenology of action and inhibition. In contrast, the results are consistent with the view that specific neural events prior to movement may generate conscious experiences of positive and negative volition.

Are intentions in tension with timing experiments?

Libet’s timing experiments (Brain 106:623–642, 1983; Mind time. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 2004) have resulted in some strong and unsavoury claims about human agency. These range from the idea that conscious intentions are epiphenomenal to the idea that we all lack free will. In this paper, I propose a new type of response to the various sceptical conclusions about our agency occasioned by both Libet’s work and other experiments in this testing paradigm. Indeed, my argument extends to such conclusions drawn from fMRI-based prediction experiments. In what follows, I will provide a brief description of these experiments, sketch arguments one may be tempted to draw on their basis, and argue that such arguments rely on a questionable premise: that experimental subjects have relevant proximal intentions (which, thus far, both proponents and opponents of these arguments agree on).

Conscious intention: a challenge for AIR theory.

A primary goal of any theory of consciousness is to provide an informative account of what makes the difference between conscious and nonconscious mental states. Typically, whether or not a given theory is successful in this regard is measured with respect to its ability to explain what it is for paradigmatically sensory states, for example, visual, auditory, or somatosensory states, to be conscious. And it is often assumed, either implicitly or explicitly, that whatever account is supplied for such states can be safely generalized to accommodate other types of mental state as well.

Conscious versus Nonconscious Mind and Leisure

Why do we do what we do? This article reviews research on nonconscious and conscious processes and reveals the dominant role of the nonconscious mind in human behavior in general and in leisure behavior in particular. Neural preparation for voluntary action starts well before a conscious intention to act. The nonconscious is the default system, and it seeks to avoid any kind of straining activity. Much of human behavior (e.g., TV watching) is driven by stimulus cues in the environment, and people struggle with choosing demanding cognitive and physical leisure activities. Occasionally, though, the conscious mind intervenes and overrides the default system resulting in engagement in activities that increase neuroplasticity and neurogenesis. The task is difficult, however, as the nonconscious mind operates best in the freedom of leisure where the triggering of explanations and excuses for not doing demanding activities is most likely. The struggle is further compounded when people typically use up their finite self-control resources at work, thus leaving little or nothing of these for resisting participation in less demanding and potentially less beneficial leisure. Ironically, freedom in leisure, which is supposed to be a good thing, poses two major problems: (1) the nonconscious effect, when it facilitates the acceptance of excuses for not doing demanding activities, and (2) the conscious effect, when “should-do” leisure activities (e.g., exercise) stir up reactance and conscious resistance to a possible loss of freedom. As a result, freedom in leisure undermines, consciously and nonconsciously, one's initiative for self-development activities when it, in theory, would be expected to promote involvement in various kinds of self- and health-enhancing activities.