Mental Space Research Articles

Cognitive Analysis of Euphemisms in The Big Bang Theory under CBT

This research delves into the pragmatic function of euphemisms in the context of the American sitcom The Big Bang Theory, utilizing Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT) as the analytical framework. The purpose is to understand how euphemisms, as a form of polite language, are constructed to avoid direct and potentially offensive expressions, thus promoting social harmony. The methodology involves a detailed analysis of euphemistic language within the sitcom, focusing on the integration of mental spaces as proposed by CBT. The study identifies key euphemisms and constructs a conceptual integration network for each, revealing the input spaces, generic space, and the blended space that emerges, offering new meanings. The main results demonstrate that euphemisms are cognitively processed through the blending of spaces, where elements from different domains combine to form a less confrontational meaning. The conclusion underscores the efficacy of CBT in explaining the complexity of euphemistic language, showcasing its role in navigating social norms and cultural sensitivities. This research provides insights into American cultural nuances and the strategic use of language in social interactions, enhancing the understanding of euphemisms as a cross-cultural communication tool.

When Gestures also Argue: Multimodal Viewpoint Shift as a Rhetorical Strategy in American Political Talk Shows

Drawing on Mental Spaces Theory and Conceptual Blending Theory in Cognitive Linguistics, we examine the interaction between speech and co-speech gestures in The Daily Show with Trevor Noah. Statistical analysis shows that viewpoint shift in the self-built multimodal corpus, generally following the pattern: Base Space->News Narrative Space(->Base space)->Source Viewpoint Space(+)(->Base space), is significantly related to the use of verbal markers and gestural types. Moreover, multimodal viewpoint shift in political talk shows can achieve such rhetorical functions as enhancing ironic effects, solidifying and highlighting opposing positions, and simplifying political issues. Since verbal markers and gestures can mobilize the audience’s embodied experience by primarily activating mental images and motor programs, we claim that mental simulation and perspective taking play a pivotal role in the cognitive processing of multimodal viewpoint shifts by promoting viewpoint alignment between the audience and the host.

Describing the Framework for AI Tool Assessment in Mental Health and Applying It to a Generative AI Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder Platform: Tutorial.

As artificial intelligence (AI) technologies occupy a bigger role in psychiatric and psychological care and become the object of increased research attention, industry investment, and public scrutiny, tools for evaluating their clinical, ethical, and user-centricity standards have become essential. In this paper, we first review the history of rating systems used to evaluate AI mental health interventions. We then describe the recently introduced Framework for AI Tool Assessment in Mental Health (FAITA-Mental Health), whose scoring system allows users to grade AI mental health platforms on key domains, including credibility, user experience, crisis management, user agency, health equity, and transparency. Finally, we demonstrate the use of FAITA-Mental Health scale by systematically applying it to OCD Coach, a generative AI tool readily available on the ChatGPT store and designed to help manage the symptoms of obsessive-compulsive disorder. The results offer insights into the utility and limitations of FAITA-Mental Health when applied to "real-world" generative AI platforms in the mental health space, suggesting that the framework effectively identifies key strengths and gaps in AI-driven mental health tools, particularly in areas such as credibility, user experience, and acute crisis management. The results also highlight the need for stringent standards to guide AI integration into mental health care in a manner that is not only effective but also safe and protective of the users' rights and welfare.

From anecdotes to insights: Streamlining the research idea generation process

AbstractThis paper explores strategies for generating and evaluating novel research ideas. Researchers can identify promising ideas by systematically exposing themselves to new, practitioner‐relevant information and by contrasting emerging facts with existing theories. Additionally, by identifying the necessary conditions that are required for an idea to become a viable research project, researchers can quickly discard low‐prospect ideas, freeing up mental space and time to evaluate new research opportunities.

Semantics of Transition: Death and Resurrection of the Hero in Film Fantasy at the Turn of the 20th—21st Centuries

The article is devoted to the study of human metaphysical experience through cinema art. The material of the study is widely known fantasy films (“The Lord of the Rings”, “The Matrix”, “Harry Potter”, “The Chronicles of Narnia”, “Avatar”), in which the sacral space is realized as a magical fairy tale or a dream, and the hero acting in it is identified with the concept of “soul” or “consciousness”. The aim of the study is to semantically and cognitively analyze the visual image of transition through death, which is offered to the viewer by cinematography, and to model the director’s concepts included in it. The author’s concept of transition is based on the works of M. Eliade, A. van Gennep, C.G. Jung, M.P. Hall and is revealed as a multi-phase process of soul transformation in the conditions of spiritual or perceptual crisis. It is established that the transition scenario in the films considered includes an “entry point” into another world, a series of initiations and an “exit point”. In this context, death and resurrection are the climactic phase and have different symbolic connotations, their essence depending on the prototype that the hero imitates. As it has been revealed, the imitation of cyclical forces of nature (solar, agrarian deities) by contemporary directors is interpreted by them as a long stage of soul maturation, which is no longer opposed to, but naturally precedes the imitation of the “divine archetype” (in the Christian tradition, Christ the Saviour). The axis of transition from forced submission to the endless cycle of renewal to the evolutionary stage of spiritual maturity is the act of “awakening” expressed in the willingness to voluntarily sacrifice oneself out of love and compassion for others. Death and resurrection in this case manifest the metaphysical transformation of the soul aspect into the spiritual one. At the same time, in the process of studying the film material, a tendency of a transgressive nature was detected, namely the replacement of the concept “soul” by the concept “brain”. As a result of identifying the functions of the human brain with the functions of a computer in the mental space, there is a danger of substitution of the divine image by artificial intelligence, which can provoke the blocking of the channel “soul – spirit” and the involutionary turn from spirit to matter.

›Less Voice, more Viewpoint‹ – Towards a Cognitive Reconceptualization of the Centres of Orientation in Poetry

Abstract Analysing the centres of orientation in a literary text, narratologists since Genette have always worked with the distinction between voice (who speaks?) and viewpoint (who sees?). In contrast, nearly all lyricologists have remained entirely focussed on the category of voice, trying to identify, apart from the speaking voice, at best further speech instances in the poems under discussion. The present article challenges this voice-restricted tradition. It criticizes the deficiencies of various traditional one-voice-models (such as the identification of the speaking voice with the poet, a persona or the ›lyric I‹) as well as those of more recent voice-oriented approaches (by Hempfer and by Culler). It also discusses the blind spots of the multi-voice models developed in the course of lyricology’s ›narrative turn‹ (by Hühn and by Burdorf) and rejects Zymner’s recent suggestion to replace the notion of ›voice‹ by the purely textual concept of an ›addresser‹ as a ›structure of signs‹. Subsequently, the framework of an alternative, viewpoint-oriented lyricology is sketched by adopting from Cognitive Linguistics such key-concepts as viewpoint-multiplicity, mental spaces and deictic markers as well as from Cognitive Grammar the notions of ›viewing arrangement‹ and ›split conceptualiser‹. Further instruments that can help to account for those poems in which the centre of perception seems to unite in itself the viewpoints of different ›voices‹ are such concepts as ›viewpoint-blends‹ and ›viewpoint-zooms‹. More akin to cognition, in which there are no strict boundaries, but only transitions, they can help to overcome long-lasting, hardly successful attempts to establish rigid divisions in the lyric (e. g. between personal and impersonal, monologic and dialogic, biographical and non-biographical or lyric and narrative poems). Instead, the viewpoint-framework does justice to the fact that such binaries constitute no polar oppositions but mere scales of difference. Moreover, a viewpoint-approach makes possible a much more fine-grained analysis of poetry – in a way better even than an earlier attempt by Petzold (2012) to extend lyricology’s voice-centred methodology by integrating into it a Genette-inspired distinction of three types of focalization. The last section of this article is devoted to the complex problem of viewpoint-taking by the readers, which is aggravated by the underdetermined deixis and situational generality of many poems. As is finally illustrated by drawing on a poem with a particularly complicated deictic set-up (Eichendorff’s »Lockung« [»Lure«]), readers will admittedly not always be able to process all viewpoints contained in a text. Nevertheless, it can be shown with the help of this example that viewpoint-perception is often an indispensable prerequisite for a full understanding of a poem’s meaning.

An Integrated Framework of Critical Metaphor Analysis and Multi-level View with an Application to Metaphors for the Vietnam War

Since Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980) was introduced, methods of studying conceptual metaphor have kept improving to respond to methodological criticisms. Critical Metaphor Analysis (CMA) proposed by Charteris-Black (2004) has been considered as a “thought-provoking contribution” to metaphor analysis (Deignan, 2005) when approaching metaphor from various perspectives: critical discourse analysis, corpus analysis, pragmatics and cognitive linguistics. CMA is originally applied to one conceptual level in metaphor – domain. However, this paper argues that CMA can be exploited at four conceptual levels in Multi-level View of conceptual metaphor (Kövecses, 2017b) - image schema, domain, frame, and mental space. The combined framework of Critical Metaphor Analysis – CMA (Charteris-Black, 2004) and Multi-level View of conceptual metaphor – MLV (Kövecses, 2017b) can gain deeper insights into ideologies motivating metaphorical concepts for the Vietnam war as well as elucidate the conceptual structure of metaphor via the four levels. Hence, this combination fills the gap of lacking a framework with optimal balance of semantic, pragmatic, cognitive and critical dimensions. It also features the intriguing relationship between ideologies and conceptual structure, i.e., ideologies are embedded in all the four conceptual levels and systematically develop with increasing specificity from image schema to domain, frame and mental space. The focus of this paper is on our argument for an integrated framework of conceptual metaphor and the newspaper articles written by American war correspondents during the Vietnam war are used for illustration of how the integrated framework can help us better understand the conceptual metaphors in the articles.

The emotional labour of peer work: encountering stigma in mental healthcare spaces

ABSTRACT This article focuses on the workplace experiences of peer workers with a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder (BPD) in mental healthcare settings in Australia. Our article is located at the intersection of political, social, cultural, and legislative forces that have fostered the development of peer work as a paid profession. We draw on the concept of stigma to analyse findings from qualitative interviews with peer workers conducted in [state], Australia. By examining peer work in the broader context of lifeworlds of BPD, we address the interplay of work and professional identity, and the experience of a profoundly stigmatised diagnosis at this intersection. Our findings demonstrate the physical and emotional effects of stigma and how it produces boundaries and inequalities between peer workers and other health practitioners. These boundaries are reinforced by invisible markers that delineate what is expected, ‘normal’ and deemed professional in the workplace. Moreover, these same medico-socio-political relations help shape peer workers’ identities and experiences. The development of peer workforces in mental healthcare service delivery is a prominent area of reform in Australia and internationally. Our research highlights the urgency of efforts to transform current socio-cultural-political relations that inhibit peer workers in their roles and impact workplace experiences.

The allocentric nature of ground-surface representation: A study of depth and location perception

When observers perceive 3D relations, they represent depth and spatial locations with the ground as a reference. This frame of reference could be egocentric, that is, moving with the observer, or allocentric, that is, remaining stationary and independent of the moving observer. We tested whether the representation of relative depth and of spatial location took an egocentric or allocentric frame of reference in three experiments, using a blind walking task. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants either observed a target in depth, and then straightaway blind walked for the previously seen distance between the target and the self; or walked to the side or along an oblique path for 3 m and then started blind walking for the previously seen distance. The difference between the conditions was whether blind walking started from the observation point. Results showed that blind walking distance varied with the starting locations. Thus, the represented distance did not seem to go through spatial updating with the moving observer and the frame of reference was likely allocentric. In Experiment 3, participants observed a target in space, then immediately blind walked to the target, or blind walked to another starting point and then blind walked to the target. Results showed that the end location of blind walking was different for different starting points, which suggested the representation of spatial location is likely to take an allocentric frame of reference. Taken together, these experiments convergingly suggested that observers used an allocentric frame of reference to construct their mental space representation.

Application of Social Space as a Tool for Physical Planning: Case Study of Mymensingh Town

Space has a social dimension. Social space consists of physical space and mental space. Physical and mental perspectives are only able to achieve partial description or cross-sections of space. The general approach of physical planning is concentrated only on physical dimension of space. Most city planners deal with essentially static concepts with land use maps and plans they prepare. They tend to view the city as a static arrangement of physical objects which lacks in mental space. Again, mind is spatially oriented. Hence, there is a gap between the ways our cities have been built and the way people perceive them. Above all, neither the plan nor their underlying studies have successfully depicted the city as a social process operating in space. In the course of time, every section and part of the city takes on something of the character and qualities of its inhabitants. In current (urban) planning process, space is dealt to offer on facilities and services people require to have a better life. It is ignored to explore how they perceive their surrounding and every day’s space domain. This paper explores ‘social space’ as a planning tool and examines its potential application in the physical planning process.

Mental healthcare spaces, ambivalence of caregiving, and Indian memoirs of psychiatric patients

Mental healthcare spaces, ambivalence of caregiving, and Indian memoirs of psychiatric patients

RUN: A COGNITIVE ACCOUNT OF ITS MEANING TRANSFERENCE IN THE LIGHT OF AN IMAGE-SCHEMA BASED MODEL

This article aims at providing a more comprehensive picture of how meanings of “run” are transferred from spatial to non-spatial meanings by using the combined framework of Multimodal Image Theory and Extended Conceptual Metaphor. To be specific, 368 concordances of “run” extracted from the corpus of Contemporary American English in 2017, Genre Spoken were systematically analyzed to first identify the word’s meanings in its contexts of use and then account for its meaning transference. In other words, the prototypical meaning of “run” and its image complexes in three spaces namely Visual space, Maneuver space, and Kinetic space were analyzed in the light of Multimodal Image Theory, which provides concrete image-schemas mapped onto the word’s non-spatial meanings found in its Mental space in association with a range of conceptual metaphors. It has been shown that mapping together with image-schema transformations are the mechanisms of the word meaning transference.

Poetic Metaphors Related to Birds: A Conceptual Blending in Puisi-Puisi Cinta, WS. Rendra

Metaphors are commonly used to vividly convey deeply abstract human emotions. This is because human emotions are indeed an abstract – conceptual. In the poem of Puisi-Puisi Cinta, the poet employs a great deal of emotional poetic metaphors relating to birds in order to communicate the variety of feelings that are experienced by the characters, such as features, roles, and visual aspects. This paper aims to study the emotional poetic metaphors related to birds in Puisi-Puisi Cinta using conceptual blending theory. The research data in the study consists the poetic metaphors related to Birds in Puisi – Pusi Cinta by WS Rendra. The data are conducted qualitatively using the blending theory. The blending theory’s G.Fauconnier and M.Turner (2002) came to the conclusion that metaphorizing is not limited by the projection from “the source domain” to “the target domain”, but includes complex dynamic integration processes, creating new blended mental spaces, which are able to create the meaning structure. The findings reveal that these vivid poetic metaphors in Puisi-Puisi Cinta by W.S Rendra are substantial through the use of imagery depicting aspects of the birds' appearances and its features to human beings. The metaphorical process, which projects from the birds to human beings, can be seen as a process of conceptual blending. In addition, each and every poetic metaphor related to birds of the poem has its characteristics in a certain cognitive model.

Conceptosphere of the basic concept “winter” in Yu. Shestalov’s lyrical poetry

The article presents a description of the conceptual sphere with the basic concept of “winter”, based on the lyrical poetry of the famous Mansi poet Yuvan Shestalov. The article develops philological regionalism as a current trend in literary criticism. Based on a conceptual analysis of two volumes of the poet’s poems from his complete works, the article suggests this conceptual sphere, proving the objective choice of the nearest periphery concepts by providing examples from the texts. The immediate periphery includes such concepts and their variants as “snow” (ice, blizzard, snowstorm, snow squall); “sleep”; “night” (stars, moon); “road” (skis, sleds, deer, movement, path); “fire” (bonfire, flame, hearth heat, hot tea, ray of sunshine, northern lights). The key conclusion is that winter for the lyrical hero is a time of discovery, a time of learning new things, moving forward, a time of love and creativity. This perception of winter and Ugra as a whole is at odds with the generally accepted perception of the northern region. We believe the presented analysis will help visualize the mental space of the peoples from the North and the “winter” concept functions in the poet’s lyrical poetry to better understand his individual works, at the same time evaluating his work as an integral, mobile and developing system.

Cultural Heritage of Europeism in Georgian Publicist and Artistic Texts

Due to historical ill-fate, Georgia found itself cut off from European civilization and culture for a long time. The catastrophe caused by the fall of Constantinople in the 15th century placed Georgia under an aggressive Islamic siege, posing a mortal threat to the existence of its nation-state and at the same time cutting the spiritual and cultural arteries that historically connected Georgia with Europe. The process of “re-Europeanization” (Siradze, 2008, p. 213) was first systematically revealed in the Georgian writing of the so-called “transitional century” (the turn of the 18th-19th centuries) and spread in all spheres of life throughout the 19th century. It should be emphasized that for our leaders, Europeanism was essentially not a matter of social-cultural orientation or vector, but the return of Georgian culture to its native bosom, native living and mental space, the restoration of the natural path of development. The 19th century saw great interest in Europe and its literature. The term "Europeanism" has been established since the 1850s. As for the content of the term itself, when defining the essence of Europeanism, we rely mainly on the point of view of Friedrich Nietzsche that Europe, as a term denoting culture, refers to those peoples who have a common past with the Greek and Roman civilizations, in the form of the Bible and Christianity. If we take into account Nietzsche’s definition and compare it with the history of Georgia, it is easy to see that we really have reason to call ourselves Europeans. First of all. The present work is aimed at studying and fully presenting the history of European-Georgian relations; the role and significance of translation, journalism and fiction in bringing Georgia closer to Europe; the turning of the viewpoint of Georgian society towards European ideals and the struggle for the establishment of the cultural traditions of Europeanism.

Observații filosofice despre arhitectura religioasă și arta sacră

This article tackles the aesthetic implications of religious architecture, somehow outshined by dominant metaphysical undertakings of the sacred space. The first part of this study deals with the interpretation of the principles of religious architecture explained by Vitruvius and their impact on the German and Scottish Enlightenment. The second part sheds light on the Kantian approach of the religious space through the aesthetic category of the sublime in its two paradigms – mathematical and dynamical – closely observing to what extent they support Kant’s intention to project religion within the limits of reason. From here, the research tracks the inheritance of these traditions reflected by Hegel’s Lectures of Aesthetics, for whom the architecture is embedded in the so-called symbolic art, one of the three major components of the system of arts. In the end, we will see how modern philosophy leaves a last trace of interest on religious architecture and the phenomenon of living in some Heideggerian writings, but without any aesthetic intention. We will check what the possibility of a theological program of religious architecture still means at the end of modernity, relying on some notes of Le Corbusier, and how we can recover a traditional model of religious architecture, which can explain the aesthetic experience beyond the metaphysical one, in the Eastern Orthodox Romanian mental space.

PRESERVATION OF THE LINGUOCULTURAL CODE IN TRANSLATION OF MEMOIRS

This article explores linguistic and cultural codes as comprising symbolic meanings and procedural schemes that shape understanding and expression. These codes include fixed and variable linguistic units, forming structural and semantic patterns reflecting personal thinking. They underpin artistic and literary expressions, modeling cognitive, semiotic, and linguistic perspectives. The study discusses N. I. Zhinkina’s “subject-schematic” code, transforming thoughts into verbal expressions, and Ch. Fillmore’s frame theory, linking words to knowledge structures. It emphasizes the development of conceptual and mental spaces through language and culture, highlighting their roles in organizing knowledge and facilitating communication.

Интеграция ментальных пространств на примере концепта культовой среды «снежный человек»

The aim of the study is to test the method of conceptual integration of mental spaces for the Cultic Milieu’s concept "bigfoot". The article focuses on the fact that the concept acts as a mental representation of the corresponding fragment of the surrounding reality as a dynamic structure of knowledge. A feature of the above example is cognitive fiction, which, nevertheless, has a stable vitality in the discourse of unconventional religiosity. The scientific novelty of the study is to identify the initial mental spaces, their integration and the isolation of new emergent properties that contribute to maintaining the concept in a homeostatic state. As a result of the study, it was determined that the method of conceptual integration could be effectively used in interpreting cult concepts from the field of unconventional religiosity.

Engendering Agency, Mindfulness, and Critical Thinking in Online Education

Challenges remain in the conduct of graduate education even when Philippine society has already begun its so-called post pandemic recovery. Such challenges include but are not limited to shifting work arrangements, perturbations in personal and family priorities, and everyday socio-economic realities such as the traffic problem and the rising cost of living. Given this backdrop of hard realities and increasing pressure on the individual’s mental space, in which learners attempt to negotiate the pursuit of graduate studies, I draw on my lived experience in teaching graduate students at the Asian Center, University of the Philippines Diliman and problematize the issues in engendering agency, mindfulness, and critical thinking as desired states of being in an empowered, student-centered learning setting. Utilizing phenomenography, the study probes the approaches that were effective in teaching and learning as well as their challenges and the attendant contexts. I hope to contribute to the academic discourse on rethinking graduate education pedagogy.

Approaches to Metaphor: Cognitive-linguistic and Philosophical Perspectives

Metaphor has been a significant topic of discussion in several academic fields besides being extensively used in daily life. This article explores the interdisciplinary study of metaphor, a complex and connotative concept that has been the primary concern across various disciplines, including linguistics, philosophy, literature, and other humanities. The article presents multiperspective theories and metaphor analysis from the said disciplines to provide a more holistic understanding of metaphor. This includes analyzing metaphors in analytic philosophy and cognitive science, primarily focusing on the conceptual metaphor theory (CMT) developed by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, complemented by analysis of the relevance theory, the blending theory, etc. While there are criticisms of CMT, it remains an influential theory in studying metaphor. The article also discusses the relevance theory, which suggests that using metaphors in speech can help achieve optimal relevancy, and the blending theory, which proposes that metaphors involve mapping elements from one mental space onto another to create a blended mental space that combines elements of both. This paper also addresses continental philosophers' usage or account of metaphor, from Kant to Derrida, in establishing their arguments. The essay then discusses and integrates ideas in metaphor studies from the perspectives of semantics and pragmatics. Finally, the article emphasizes the importance of bridging the gap between abstract conceptualizations and concrete linguistic expressions to gain a holistic understanding of metaphor.