Mental Space Research Articles

Fashioning the “Inner” (Bāṭin) in Baḥya ibn Paqūda’s Duties of the Hearts

AbstractIn the seminal work, Direction to the Duties of the Hearts, Baḥya ibn Paqūda (flourished 11th century) aimed to reconstruct Jewish existence on the basis of a fundamental distinction between the “duties of the members” and the “duties of the hearts.” Baḥya’s intent was to instigate a transition towards the internalization of Jewish religious life. This paradigm shift was to take place not only by the shaping of an ideational formation and a new set of distinctions that Baḥya aimed at integrating in Jewish life, but also through a reflective consideration of the state of the Jewish tradition, its transmission mechanisms, historical trajectory, and contemporaneous challenges. As I will demonstrate in this article, in order to realize this transformation, Baḥya utilized a distinction that cross-cuts his work: the distinction between ẓāhir (“external” or “manifest”) and bāṭin (“inner” or “hidden”), that mostly indicates the relation between the manifest sphere of one’s actions and the activity that takes place only in one’s mental space. However, as I argue, this distinction is also applied by Baḥya to the expanse of Jewish “tradition,” pertaining to what was disclosed in it and what was left unimparted, what was communicated and what was kept unsaid, what was remembered and what was neglected.

A cognitive analysis of animal imagery in digital discourse: a case study of Bengali tweets

Abstract As explored in relevant literature, both ecolinguistics and cognitive linguistics emphasize metaphors as conceptual devices to frame the reality around us. Animal metaphor forms an interesting domain to comprehend human-animal relationship at the interface of ecolinguistics and cognitive linguistics. Deriving from this, the research questions the suitability of the animalized language through Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) and Conceptual Blending Theory (CBT). Data from Twitter has been analyzed to understand how the animals on social media impacts the human mind in establishing speciesism among Bengali speakers. Hence, to supplement the research with an ecological perspective, a mixed-method approach has been employed using three studies: (1) to understand the general public opinion on using animal metaphor; (2) to present the cognitive operations of the imaginative mind in using animal metaphor; and (3) to check the reflection of human attitude in real-time practices. The research findings highlight the harmful frames that social media can trigger in the mental spaces of the users – excluding animals qua animals. Additionally, the research also empirically verifies that animalized language use is one of the significant factors behind the speciesist attitudes among Bengali speakers. The research also seeks to sensitize humans towards the hateful nature of the animalized tweets.

In case you haven't heard…

One Mind, a leading mental health nonprofit that helps to heal lives by directly supporting neuropsychiatric brain research, is celebrating its 29th Music Festival for Brain Health on Sept. 9, in Napa, California, a company news release stated. One Mind has made a difference in the lives of almost 70 million people in the U.S. who suffer from a mental health illness. The annual music festivals and related fundraising have enabled One Mind to raise a historic $546 million to support research funding for the country's brightest minds and most innovative solutions to help those living with and impacted by brain disorders, according to the news release. This year's event is scheduled to include a performance by Martina McBride and will open with the Science & Innovation Symposium, featuring innovators and scientists leading the mental health space. The symposium will spotlight the 2023 One Mind Rising Star Award winners as they present their cutting‐edge research projects to accelerate cures for neuropsychiatric illnesses, (see “Science and technology startups win initial funds for SMI innovation, MHW, March 17; https://doi.org/10.1002/mhw.33576). “The research we have funded over the years is now rolling out solutions to transform lives,” Brandon Staglin, president of One Mind, stated in the news release. “We're accelerating a future where everyone facing mental health challenges has the chance to thrive!”

From physical space to mental space: feelings of being physically constrained increase consumer preference for mind-expanding products

This research examines whether and how feelings of physical constraints can increase consumers’ preference for mind-expanding products, such as products that broaden perspectives and viewpoints. Three studies show that feelings of physical constraints (such as when consumers commute and buckle their seatbelts, which restricts their movement) motivate them to increase mental space and break free from mental limitations as an alternative way to compensate for the physical restrictions they experience. As a result, consumers prefer mind-expanding products more because the content of these products helps them expand their mental space. Together, the current research integrates and extends theories of fluid compensatory consumption and offers actionable managerial implications for marketers.

Steps Toward Evaluation as Decluttering: Learnings from Hawaiian Epistemology

This paper discusses one of the more contemporary challenges in development and in global health--lots of good ideas from well-meaning insiders and outsiders that end up cluttering both the physical and mental spaces of what can be loosely termed as “attempts” at development. Given the place-based nature of indigenous thought, we turn to Hawaiian epistemology at looking to insights for clarity on how one can negotiate interactions to declutter place and also confuse identity. We believe that evaluation as a field can help in bringing greater recognition of the need for models of development and learning that respect the importance of de-cluttering. Implications for a decolonized approach to evaluation are discussed

A mental spaces analysis of religious identity discourse

Abstract Religious identity is often viewed as a relatively stable construct, reflecting an individual’s personal worldview. However, individuals living within modern multi-cultural societies often must engage in extensive reflection to orient themselves to faith traditions in ways that are coherent and personally relevant. Although some work has examined the connection between narratives of religious experience, identity and cognition (cf. Richardson, 2012; Richardson & Nagashima, 2018; Richardson & Mueller, 2019), the relationship between thinking and speaking about this identity is still a developing area of enquiry, with important consequences for how religious faith and practice are understood. This article presents a detailed analysis of an interview with a UK-based Jewish woman based on the mental spaces (Fauconnier, 1994) and conceptual blending (Fauconnier & Turner, 2002) frameworks. The analysis shows how mental spaces and the relationship between elements within those spaces emerge over the course of a discourse event so as to constitute a personal account of religious identity. The concluding section furthermore discusses how within- and across-space contrast links are utilized, along with general processes of compression and decompression, to develop a blend that dynamically expresses the interviewee’s religious identity as an integrated and coherent position lying between competing attractor states.

The struggle for the social: rejecting the false separation of 'social' worlds in mental health spaces

How are we to best grapple with the notion of the Social in mental health landscapes? This piece of speculative work explores a series of tensions that emerge in our attempt to contemplate, engage with, and address the social in mental health spaces. First, I will explore the tensions created by disciplinary demands for specialisation, questioning the value of this with regard to treating social and emotional bodies which continually reject such fragmentation. This line of inquiry then leads to reflection on the value of a social topology—enabled through the application of intersectionality principles, Black Sociological analytical frameworks, including the worldview approach, and societal psychological perspectives on knowledge and action. I argue the possibilities in actioning these approaches emerge through the application of a social-political economy of mental health, that holds the complexity presented by the totality of social life as it potentially relates to mental health. The piece seeks to advance a space of thinking on how we transition global mental health projects to be more effectively situated in a needed commitment for social justice as a remedy and repair to broken social worlds.

Does Conceptual Integration Theory Work? A Case Study of the English Translation of Culture-Loaded Terms in Chinese Government Work Report

Currently, the emphasis of research on culture-loaded terminology in the Chinese Government Work Report lies in developing translation strategies, with limited analysis of the cognitive process that translators undergo during the translation process. However, Conceptual Integration Theory has gained significant attention in recent years for its effectiveness in analyzing cognitive activities. This paper employs the Conceptual Integration Theory as a theoretical framework to analyze culture-loaded terms in the Chinese Government Work Report. This analysis involves the use of the conceptual integration network, including generic space, cross-space mapping, selective projection, blending, and emergent structure, as well as the construction of mental spaces. It has been found: (1) Translators utilized four mental spaces, namely the original terms space, translator space, generic space, and translation space. Through cross-space mapping, the original terms space and translator space projected a shared, abstract structure and organization into the generic space. The elements of the original terms space and translator space were then projected into the translation space within the constraints of the generic space. (2) The simplex network is unsuitable for translating these terms, while the other three conceptual integration networks do. Translating these terms with a mirror network is deemed to be the simplest method, while the two-scope network is the most complex. This paper aims to illustrate the thinking process of translators and offer suggestions for translating these terms.

Emotions in the Mental and Linguistic Space of Lyric Poems

The article is based on a report given in course of the round table meeting 'Language as an art', dedicated to the 90th anniversary since the birth of the outstanding linguist L.A. Novikov, whose reknown works on the issues of linguistic meaning and the aesthetic aspects of language have attracted wide critical acclaim and become a valuable part of philology as a science. The choice of the topic is methodologically adjusted to L.A. Novikov’s conception of verbal arts, which is succinctly represented in the term 'poetheme'. Emotives (vocabulary that names, expresses and describes emotions) can be categorised as poethemes, since the verbalisation process of emotions in poetry is related to their aesthetic transformation. The description of emotions in the article is conducted in multiple directions, each of which is significant in order to understand the specifics of the verbalisation of emotions in poems. The author relates the new aspect of viewing the poetic semantics of emotives to the influence of the grammatical meaning of the verb mood on the illocutionary function of verbalised emotions that take part in the declaration of intent. Besides, the imperative mood and the infinitive accentuate the extravert semantics (emotions for others and for oneself), the subjunctive mood being introvert (emotions for oneself). Additional information regarding the contextual features of emotions could be acquired through the emphasis on the indefinite, demonstrative, negative and possessive pronouns, which accompany emotives. The article demonstrates that metaphorical rows of emotions organise the personal mental image of the poet’s world. Basic poetic emotions, established due to the fact of attractiveness (mutual attraction, approach), are related to Russian mentality as a whole. The range of problems dealt with in the article is significant to filling the forming term 'emotional picture of the world’ with content.

Revised Contemplative Landscape Model (CLM): A reliable and valid evaluation tool for mental health-promoting urban green spaces

Due to rapid urbanization and an increase in mental health issues in urban populations, urban green spaces (UGS) design needs to be optimized to meet mental health and well-being promotion goals. However, existing frameworks and tools that aim to address this pressing need are often not adequately validated against health measures. The Contemplative Landscape Model (CLM), developed in 2016, is the first instrument that measures the quality of UGS and informs landscape design with regard to the mental health and well-being of people passively exposed to them. Recent studies with this tool and developments in UGS literature prompted the development and validation of a revised version of CLM presented here. The reliability and validity of CLM were tested with a panel of independent experts and showed better reliability/internal consistency (ω = .893; α = .890) than the original CLM. This time, validity was tested in two ways: (1) against neuropsychological data (electroencephalogram, EEG, and self-reported valence and arousal ratings), acquired during passive exposure to UGS scenes and (2) through factor analysis of experts’ UGS assessments. Validity testing showed that (1) CLM predicts brain activity patterns associated with mindfulness, relaxation, and positive mood, and (2) contemplativeness of landscapes is a valid construct undergird by two parallel factors both predicting beneficial EEG responses. In conclusion, CLM is an effective and robust instrument for assessing the visual quality of UGS predictive of mental health and well-being benefits in urban residents.

Герой эпохи новой искренности: попытка культурологического, психологического и литературоведческого анализа монодрам Евгения Гришковца

The paper presents a study of the nature of the experiencing expression in monodramas by E. Grishkovets. This analysis is based on the idea of the human consciousness layering and the hierarchical principle of the organization of “mental spaces” in it, which was considered by F. E. Vasilyuk in relation to experiencing and its expression. The ideas about the work of experiencing as a movement between different life worlds, which are reflected in the monodramas by Grishkovets, are studied in the paper as a feature of the writer’s idiostyle. The narrator of the one-man theatrical shows is considered as a literary hero of the “New Sincerity” era, which replaced the period of postmodern literature. The article traces the features of the experiencing expression in the monodramas by Grishkovets, the associative nature of the author’s consciousness slipping into other life worlds, and the ways of creating (virtualizing) these life worlds.

Power and Space Production: A Bourdieusian Approach to Environmental Law and Inspection in China

Abstract The most important tool or institution that the Chinese state has used since 2002 to address environmental pollution, relying on its power to force compliance by local polluters and cadres, is environmental inspection. This article proposes a Bourdieusian approach for analyzing environmental inspection by considering the symbolic power of the state and the local effects of inspections at different levels of government, which have seldom been explored in the literature. We use this approach to examine four propositions with a sample comprising ninety-nine inspections in city H. First, inspectors use both the objective and symbolic power of the state in inspections. Second, inspectors at lower levels in the bureaucratic hierarchy have less objective and symbolic power in confronting local cadres and polluters. Third, local environmental protection changes physical space (e.g., landscape), social space (e.g., relations between cadres and polluters), and mental space (e.g., environmental perceptions). Fourth, inspectors with more power produce larger spaces for environmental protection. Through using this approach, we offer insights into how the Chinese state uses inspection to mobilize local societies to address social or governance crises.

Fragments of Diary

The newly developing video environment offers various types of approaches to self-writing or self-making, including digital montage with less expensive and complex software, social media platforms, and personal archives as an ongoing development of self. However, the craft and process of making moving image have been less discussed in terms of their artistic value because, most of the time, the process is considered a draft that will be removed from the finished work. My Diary Project (2022-ongoing) focuses on the new meaning of diaristic practice and diagrammatic mental space in the process of making influenced by Jonas Mekas’ 365 Day Project (2007), Walden (1969), and short videos on his website, exploring the ways in which the conception of “diaristic” can be practised as an art form.
 The various diaristic practices create unique ways of crafting and making that cannot be defined in a specific structure, form, or purpose that can be called a genre. The concept of the diary started from the formal documentation of events, functions, and statistics for tribal and national archives and expanded to both the private and public spheres in the twenty-first century. Now, its meaning continues to both romantic and positivist sense, personal archive or recording memories, which requires an expanded understanding as an intimate artistic practice. This quasi-public and quasi-private practice contains the expression of inner thought, the regular record of daily life, the archive of memories, and commentary on self.
 Jonas Mekas saw his practice through the lens of late Romanticism and poetic expression through the on-camera-editing and recording of daily life, widening the moving image field into craftsmanship and its performative qualities beyond the filmic machine. Using fragmentary elements from the personal archive, he creates intimate sensations in a set of frame spaces. Gilles Deleuze claims that the image we see on the screen is delimited from the rest of the world, spatially and temporally, in terms of the "whole of relations" but to which each set is open. Thus, the frame generates the whole of inner relations and bursts to the outside of the frame to the viewer as a new diagram.
 Bringing Mekas and Deleuze together, my project explores poetic subjectivity through my personal video archive and multi-frame experiments with a handheld camera, diaristic expression, and representation of the whole. This method attempts to create a new diagrammatic relation between fragments of times, places, and self in daily life, questioning what new types of relational inner space those diaristic practices can make and what the relationship between the fragmentation of continuous and discontinuous time and space in the cinematic frame can be recontextualised in the concept of the diagram. In doing so, it not only traces the new meaning of the diaristic practice but also challenges ways of collecting and using the videos in cinematic practice both online and in the experiment, Diary Project (2022-ongoing). Finally, it expands the notion of the personal diary to the “fragmentations in diagram” in terms of expanding video frames in diaristic moving image practice.

Female genealogy

The exposition uncovers my journey as an artist opening up to an ambiguous autobiographical space produced by narrative means. The space can be conceived both as mental and spatial. The mental space is an autobiographical state where identity is constructed through the stories we tell ourselves about our lives; the spatial space is a concrete exhibition, which is produced out of the mental one. During the journey I ask: How did the exhibition Mirrorplay come about, and especially, how did the creation process, resulting in the exhibition, progress? What were the means I used for creating this space, and what did it mean to me to work in this autobiographically flavoured space?

Carto(graphie)s of disquiet: A geometric dis/assemble and re-assemble of mental space

In his incomplete masterpiece, The Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin advanced a spatial mapping technique that disassembled metaphors of narration to reassemble them as metaphors of the gaze. The work, which is a composition of unfinished and changeable fragments, highlights two aspects that captivate me. Firstly, the importance of a tangible medium to support ideas, such as a book, an image or an atlas. Secondly, the physical spaces that inspire and manifest these ideas, such as the library, the passage and the city. This article visualizes a dynamic structure for the organization of thought and imagination through assembled visual constructs. A spatial configuration, a scaffold observed at different scales forming a porous machinic arrangement altogether. Geometry works as a skeleton for our mental space, readying to be fleshed by imagination, it lays foundations, and sets up the grid. It charts a design trajectory at an a-scalar dimension. Zooming in across said scales, which can be read in no particular order, one can inhabit five moments in the construction of the design process. It visits the depths of our mental space, surveys its structure for imagination; enters musée imaginaires; dissects concepts; materializes, frame-by-frame, in an in situ diagram, ending at the threshold of a line. It proposes a conceptual charter to articulate a taxonomy of possibilities and modes of design immersion. One scaffold, multiple views. This article is accompanied by drawings from my Speculative Assemblies folio. Work that addresses issues of construction, translation and the transformation of meaning through assembled visual constructs. Such translation aims not at a reproduction but a reincarnation of the original, taking on a life of its own in a new language, a mode of expression, a new construct. The action of drawing an architecture that is materialized rather than represented within the drawing, where it can be pursued, found and experienced.

Optimized experimental designs to best detect spatial positional association of response codes in working memory.

The SPoARC (Spatial Positional Association of Response Codes) effect refers to spatialization of information in working memory. Among the potential factors that could influence how order is mapped onto a mental space during the recognition process, we selected the following two factors: i) the type of stimuli, in particular their verbal vs. visual aspects and ii) the number of probes. In this study, 137 participants memorized sequences of either words or pictures and subsequently performed a recognition test for which they responded using lateralized keys. For half of the participants, only one probe was presented after each sequence, whereas the other half was administered several probes. A significantly greater number of participants presented a SPoARC using a single probe. We discuss that spatialization is best detected when the sequence is scanned only once. Results also showed no difference between the two types of stimuli (i.e., verbal vs. visual). This finding raises the question of the respective roles of verbalization and visualization in the SPoARC.

Семантический дифференциал как метод исследования образа «солнце» в языковом сознании китайской и русской молодежи

The article is dedicated to the study of the image of the Sun in Russian and Chinese linguistic consciousness using Ch. Osgood’s semantic differential method. The aim of the research is to identify the ethnocultural peculiarities of perception and interpretation of the image of the Sun as a fragment of the mental models of Chinese and Russian youth. The scientific novelty of the research lies in the empirical confirmation of the associative semantics of the image of the Sun and the identification of the national and cultural peculiarities of the structure and content of the semantic space of the Sun in the consciousness of the young generation of the two nations. As a result, it has been established that both groups of respondents demonstrate a positive attitude towards the image, but overall, in comparison with Russians, Chinese respondents show higher ratings above the threshold value, which brings them closer to the positive pole of the scale. The correlation between the results of the psychosemantic experiment and the linguocognitive classification of consciousness components provides a more complete understanding of the content of the image of the Sun in the mental space of the youth in the two cultures.

Intercultural approach to foreign language learning as a factor of studentsʼ personal development in the process of foreign culture studying

Positive intercultural interaction and positive changes aggravate cross-cultural communication problems in modern society, caused by contradictions between the values and lifestyles of different peoples. In this regard, the search for ways to transform cultural diversity as a factor hindering intercultural dialogue into a means of mutual understanding and enrichment, into a tool for the development of a socially active and independent personality, capable of being a full-fledged participant in the dialogue of cultures, is becoming more relevant in education. The purpose of the article is to compare the functions of speech activity and culture and show their close relationship; to demonstrate that the methodological meaning of this unity is that speech acts cannot be learned in isolation from culture, and intercultural learning is not just interaction with another culture, but the cultural development of the learner; to consider the intercultural approach peculiarity in learning a foreign language through cognition, evaluation, and comparison of the native culture with the culture of the nation whose language is studied. The research methodology consists of theoretical analysis and generalization of scientific and methodological literature, which considers the basic principles, concepts, approaches to culture, and universal and cultural features in teaching foreign languages; synthesis of modern theoristsʼ views, to demonstrate the importance of the intercultural approach in language learning and personality development. The authors consider the process of joint learning of language and culture, which involves not only the formation of intercultural competence as one of the results of language learning but also the acquisition of a linguistic and cultural picture of the world as the content of this process, as well as the formation of other competencies, abilities, and qualities of a multilingual, multicultural personality. The process of learning a foreign language can be seen as a unique potential for personal development. It is not only about the development of intellectual qualities that allow one to penetrate the mental space of people of a foreign culture and overcome their cultural isolation, but also about the rooting of value and semantic orientations that contribute to the successful self-realization of modern youth as cultural subjects in a multicultural space.

What makes a space safe? Consumers' perspectives on a mental health safe space.

The provision of community-based space for people experiencing a mental health crisis is regarded as a favourable alternative to the emergency department. However, the only non-emergency department safe spaces in Western Australia are located within hospitals or hospital grounds. This qualitative study asked mental health consumers in Western Australia with experience of presentation at the emergency department during a mental health crisis to describe what a safe space would look and feel like. Data were collected through focus groups and thematically analysed. The findings present the voices of mental health consumers through the framework of health geography and the therapeutic landscape. These participants articulated important physical and social features of a therapeutic safe space and their symbolism as inclusive, accessible places where they would experience a sense of agency and belonging. Participants also expressed a need for trained peer support within the space to complement the skilled professional mental health team. Participants' experiences of the emergency department during mental health crises were described as contrary to their recovery needs. The research reinforces the need for an alternative to the emergency department for adults who experience mental health crises and provides consumer-led evidence to inform the design and development of a recovery-focused safe space.

Концепт (не)возвращения в поэзии Г. Иванова и Г. Адамовича (к 100-летию эмиграции)

The article deals with the reconstruction of the concept of (non)return in the lyrical poetry of G. Adamovich and G. Ivanov. The concept is considered in two ways: as an image in the space of culture and as a methodological formula for the analysis of images of the artistic consciousness. The main lexical means of representing the concept are cognate verb forms, the most frequent of which is the verb “return”. It is assumed that the core of the concept of (non)return is the topological scheme of movement, including the subject of movement, the route, the environment, the means of movement, and the assessment of the result of movement. It is shown how the basic scheme varies in the texts of the two poets. The adaptations of the basic scheme of movement differ in the conceptualization of the method and environment of movement in the texts of G. Adamovich, in manifold figurative interpretation of the starting and ending points of the path in the poetry of G. Ivanov. In the poetry of G. Ivanov, the valency of the locative with the verb to return is filled with three lexemes: to Russia, to St. Petersburg, home. The images of Russia and the home are internally antinomic. Russia unites three mental spaces of the artistic world: Russia-empire, Soviet Russia and an imaginary homeland. Figurative representations of home range from ideas of an abandoned homeland to the last refuge in eternity. For the St. Petersburg poets G. Ivanov and G. Adamovich, the idea of returning to Russia was invariably associated with the image of St. Petersburg, causing the appearance of elements of the St. Petersburg text. The space of return is the space of their shared memory. The antinomic nature of the concept is confirmed both by its lexical representations and by the ambivalence of the assessment of the idea itself and of the possibility of returning home.