Mental Stance Research Articles

Refugia: islands of social awareness in disrupted earth systems

An organisational leader's evolving mindset at times of significant systemic disruption frequently determines the quality and efficacy of the organisation's response to dramatic change. This article describes patterns of conscious and unconscious thinking, emotion, and containment in a group of business leaders during a disruptive earth system trauma. The context is the Christchurch, New Zealand earthquakes of 2010 through 2014 and the critical incident narratives that inform the mental stance leaders assumed with their organisations. There has been little research on leaders' evolving mental stance or how they "show up" in traumatic times, in terms of the practices and behaviours they exhibit, and how these in turn manifest as containing environments within disrupted systems. I call these environments "islands of social awareness". Within these refugia, the organisation, with its collective sense-making potential and action optionality, cooperates on the critical tasks of survival, human connection, and activation of resilience. I propose that turbulent social unconscious processes and the leader response to consequent emotional arousal ultimately underlie leaders' motivation and behaviour in times of disruption. These same perspectives may be applied to other complex earth mega-system crises, informing organisational preparedness for extraordinary events.

Subjectivity of Discourse from the Philosophic Perspective


 
 
 Language not only objectively expresses the thought of a proposition but also indicates the speaker’s emotion, attitude, and viewpoints toward a proposition, which is called subjectivity in the study. Subjectivity is one of the main topics in philosophy. However, the phenomenon of subjectivity is mainly discussed at the word, construction, or syntactic level from the perspective of linguistics. To better the characteristics of speakers as subjects in social practice activities and cognitive activities, an analytical framework of subjectivity in discourse from the perspective of philosophy was constructed to investigate subjectivity at the discourse level. Three aspects, that is, experience, mental and communicative models, were explored. The results show that (1) the constructed analytical framework clearly shows the social characteristics of subjectivity in discourse; (2) the experience model is divided into the speaker’s social and cultural experience; (3) the mental model is construed as the speaker’s mental cognition, reflected by the speaker’s mental stance and emotion; (4) the communicative model is represented by the speaker’s communicative intention and communicative practice, including appeal, command and announcement. The study provides an analytical framework to dig up the subjective nature of language and the relationship among speakers, society and discourse. This study also enriches the research on subjectivity and discourse analysis.
 
 

'Do You Believe in God, Doctor?' The Atheism of Fiction and the Fiction of Atheism.

This paper is an enquiry into some commonalities between fiction and atheism. It suggests that ‘disbelief’ may be a state of mind shared by both and asks how a meaningful semantics might be derived from the mental stance of disbelief. Albert Camus’ The Plague, published in 1947 post the trauma of two successive world wars, is a key ‘existentialist’ text that focuses on this dilemma. Not only is this work of fiction especially relevant to our current times of natural, political, economic and psychological distress gone ‘viral’, it is also one in which a blunt question is posed to the atheist hero of the novel, Doctor Rieux, in Oran, a small French Algerian town fighting a terrible pandemic: ‘Do you believe in God, doctor?’. Rieux’s answer is telling: ‘No, but what does that really mean? I’m fumbling in the dark, struggling to make something out.’ It is this human ‘struggle’ to discern the contours of the invisible ‘in the dark’ that could animate the thought worlds of fiction as well as of atheism. The paper seeks to draw out some of these putative similarities through the lens of ‘ordinary language philosophy’ and J.L, Austin and John Searle’s classification of basic speech-acts. It also considers the evolutionary, affective and cross-cultural appeal of the parallel narratives of science and religion. Oran’s most remarkable aspect, Camus insists, is its ‘ordinariness’; yet, it is here that the ‘extraordinariness’ of the plague strikes. Quotidian local circumstances thus paradoxically set in motion the sorts of ‘universal’ inquiries into ‘what it means to be human’ that, my paper argues, alike motivate the fiction of atheism and the atheism of fiction.

Beyond physical entrainment: competitive and cooperative mental stances during identical joint-action tasks differently affect inter-subjective neural synchrony and judgments of agency

ABSTRACT Little work has examined how mental stance alone, apart from physical entrainment, affects between-participant neural synchrony during joint social interaction. We report the first findings on how cooperative and competitive mental stances, even during identical visuomotor joint-action tasks, result in distinct neural oscillatory signatures in low beta and theta band between-participant phase synchrony. Two participants jointly controlled a cursor and were instructed to either compete or cooperate to move it to one of three targets. The visuomotor output was identical for both the compete and cooperate conditions because participants were privately given the same target for experimental trials. Cooperation enhanced theta band between-participant phase-locking value (PLV) midtrial at 1-2 seconds, reflecting activation of systems for social coordination to move the cursor in a shared direction. Competition enhanced low beta between-participant PLV, shifting from temporal to frontal regions, indicating that participants focused only on their target and later evaluated self-agency as winner or loser. This interpretation of the neural signature was corroborated by participants’ greater post-trial ratings of the degree of control over the cursor during competition. Top-down cooperative and competitive mental stances shape perceptions of social context and affect interpersonal neural synchrony important for representation of self and others’ actions.

International marketing agility: conceptualization and research agenda

PurposeThe aim of this paper is to conceptualize the notion of international marketing agility.Design/methodology/approachThe approach adopted is to review and create a synopsis of the existing body of research on strategic agility and develop a conceptualization on how international marketing agility (IMA) should be analyzed.FindingsInternational marketing agility is an emerging concept driven largely by rapid changes in global markets. There is a growing need for exporting SMEs and multinational enterprises to consider IMA as a means of building competitive advantage in foreign markets.Research implications/limitationsWhile the conceptual development presented in this paper is not exhaustive, our model highlights important research avenues in IMA that need exploring.Originality/valueThis article examines an emerging concept in international marketing that serves as a platform to cope with the changes taking place in this fast-changing global environment. A framework is proposed where we conceptualize IMA as a process triggered by agile logic (a nonconformist and open mental stance) and facilitated by agile learning (being able to search and interpret data), to cause agile actions (being able to commit, co-ordinate and respond quickly with flexibility to ever-changing conditions).

On the Philosophical Definition of Human Play Using the Tools of Qualitative Content Analysis

ABSTRACT Formulating a metaphysical definition of human play faces three main difficulties. First, for many years the very possibility, or need, for such a definition has been questioned. Second, very often attempts to metaphysically understand play ‘slide off’ to one of two incompatible poles: comprehension of play as a mental stance or mode of action vs. its interpretation as real action and a type of cultural activity. Third, metaphysical views of play have not yet decided through which main philosophical category it is possible to combine these polar points of view into a single whole. This article is based on the definiteness of human play in principle. It is dedicated to the philosophical categorization of play using the tools of qualitative content analysis and encompasses the widely cited views of leading scholars. The use of this methodology allowed me to distinguish between nine main philosophical themes through which play can be differentiated from all other forms of human existence. They are: ‘partial escape from routine reality’, ‘freedom’, ‘autotelicity’, ‘play as a kind of being’, ‘imagination’, ‘exaggeration’, ‘temporality’, ‘discovery’ and ‘relocation’. Through an in-depth study of these themes by reviewing current philosophical discussions about play it was possible: (1) to strengthen Fink’s (1960a,b) thesis of play as a kind of existing and to focus comprehension of human play on the notion of ‘escape to another being’ as the desired ‘single whole’ joining play as state and play as action (this thesis is part of the main focus of the proposed study); and (2) to clarify and add to the themes found in the course of the research and formulate an overall philosophic definition of human play.

How Playfulness Motivates - Putative Looping Effects of Autonomy and Surprise Revealed by Micro-Phenomenological Investigations.

Play and playfulness have repeatedly been suggested to promote learning and performance, also in environments traditionally not connotated with play. However, finding empirical evidence for these claims has been aggravated by the lack of a definition of play and playfulness fitting to this description. This paper proposes to consider playfulness as an attitude, mode or mental stance, that can be modulated independent of the activity pursued and of the general character of the person. It furthermore introduces the micro-phenomenological method to assess the process and outcome of such modulation. To explore this, we devised a simple building task in a controlled within-subject design, interviewing each participant on how they accomplished the task when asked to perform it so that it either felt playful or not playful. The outcomes of this data driven approach supported this notion of playfulness as a stance, and allowed for specific hypotheses about the temporal course and mechanisms of becoming playful. They suggest that an experience of autonomy and self-expression may be key to the success of the modulation. They furthermore indicate that the resulting playful state may allow for an exploratory engagement with materials that can lead to surprising results. Such unexpected results seem to enhance participants’ feeling of competence which, in turn, may increase the motivation for the task. We discuss these results within the framework of Deci and Ryan’s motivational theory and in relation to current research on gamification and learning.

Stimulus Preference and Mental Imagery: Influencing the Way Sexual Stimuli are Viewed and the Intensity of Subjective Sexual Arousal

Background: The connection between mental imagery and feelings of presence within a film has not yet been investigated in sex research in relation to observational stance (imagining oneself as either a spectator or participant while viewing a film). Several studies have shown that people who take a participant stance when viewing a sexual film are more likely to report greater subjective sexual arousal (SSA). Research on observational stance has also found that viewing a preferred stimulus is predictive of taking a participant stance. Despite this, very few studies have allowed participants to select their own stimuli.
 Methodology: Sexual films that were researcher-selected or participant-selected will be presented to women and men, while continuously measuring their SSA. Information will be collected about observational stance and vividness of mental imagery via questionnaires.
 Expected Results:
 1. Greater mental imagery ability will be associated with adopting a participant stance.
 2. The relationship between mental imagery ability and taking a participant stance will be stronger for participant-selected sexual stimuli than for researcher-selected sexual stimuli.
 3. Taking a participant stance will be associated with greater SSA.
 4. The relationship between taking a participant stance and SSA will be stronger for participant-selected sexual stimuli than for researcher-selected stimuli.
 Conclusions: This project is the first to examine the relationship between mental imagery and observational stance for sexual stimuli, and is among the first to allow participants to self-select stimuli. Results of this project will encourage the development of standardized procedures for providing participants with optimal sexual stimulation.

Neurologisch onderzoek bij paarden in de praktijk

Een grondig neurologisch onderzoek is aangewezen wanneer een paard tekenen vertoont van zenuwstoornissen maar ook in gevallen waarbij het belangrijk is te bevestigen dat een paard neurologisch normaal is. Het voornaamste doel van het neurologisch onderzoek is uitmaken of er neurologische afwijkingen zijn en in tweede instantie wordt getracht de primaire oorzaak en lokalisatie hiervan te achterhalen. Een gestandaardiseerde van-kop-tot-staartbenadering vermijdt dat er afwijkingen over het hoofd gezien worden. Daarom start het onderzoek steeds met het afnemen van een goede anamnese, observatie van het paard met aandacht voor het bewustzijn, gedrag, houding en stand en met een klinisch onderzoek. Vervolgens worden de kopzenuwen getest door middel van onder andere dreig-, pupil- en ooglidreflex. De hals, romp, ledematen en staart worden onderzocht om asymmetrieën of toegenomen of verminderde sensatie aan het licht te brengen. Daarna wordt het paard in beweging bekeken waarbij vooral de overgangen en het stappen in kleine cirkels en zigzaglijnen, gebreken in de coördinatie kunnen aantonen. Het onderscheid met orthopedische problemen is echter niet altijd eenvoudig te maken. Vooral paarden in laterale decubitus vormen een extra uitdaging voor de onderzoeker aangezien het neerliggen op zich reeds een afwijking in responsen kan veroorzaken. Bijkomend onderzoek is daarom vaak gewenst om een neurologisch probleem te bevestigen of om een letsel in beeld te brengen. Bloedonderzoek (algemeen, serologie, virusisolatie), lever- of spierbiopten, onderzoek van cerebrospinaal vocht en radiografieën kunnen in de praktijk uitgevoerd worden. In gespecialiseerde centra zijn elektrodiagnostische testen beschikbaar en uitgebreide beeldvormingsmogelijkheden (CT, MRI, scintigrafie). Door deze technieken te combineren met het klinisch neurologisch onderzoek kan een (differentiaal)diagnose (op)gesteld worden.

Effects of the Perspectives that Influenced on the Human Mental Stance in the Multiple-to-Multiple Human-Agent Interaction

Virtual agents are useful for simulations of real-world events or processes designed for solving a problem, such as serious games and gamifications. In several types of the virtual world simulations, multiple-to-multiple interaction is needed because our social interaction is multiple-to-multiple in many cases. In this study, we extended the agent behavior model that induces intentional stance in one-to-one human-agent interaction, which was proposed in our previous works, to the multiple-to-multiple human-agent interaction. By using the agent group, we investigated effects of the perspectives that influenced the human mental stance in the multiple-to-multiple human-agent interaction. To investigate the effects of the perspectives, we changed the viewpoints (subjective or objective) in different perspectives (physical or mental) when people interacted with a team of agents in the virtual futsal game. As a result, we can find that there is a different effect between the physical perspective and the mental perspective. The subjective viewpoint of the physical perspective enhanced the feeling of the agent team’s intelligence, but the objective viewpoint of the mental perspective enhanced the feeling of the agent team’s intelligence.

Invariance orientation: Identifying an object for translation studies

ABSTRACTIt is argued that a central object of translation studies should be the mental stance of translators who spend most of their time trying to produce wordings which they hope will be taken by readers to mean more or less whatever they think the source means. These translators are oriented toward sameness of meaning except in a few passages where they vary meaning to make their translations receivable. Adoption of this object of study will bring the field in line with most work in the global translation industry. It will avoid a situation where this approach to translation is shunted into the background of our field, in favour of “difference”.

In-Between: Shapes of Subjectivities in the Analytic Situation

Starting from concepts that Winnicott developed and that are unexpectedly near to postmodern concepts, I attempt to map some features of the complex territory that lies between analyst and patient from the viewpoint of the relationship that exists between subjectivity and objectivity. In the first section, I give a personal reading of Winnicottian model, emphasizing the idea that the subject’s unconscious acts upon and transforms the object’s (thereby putting in motion further unconscious processes within the object). Then I highlight the presence, in the transference, of various levels of communication and of a paradoxical multidimensionality that upsets the traditional space-time categories and also upsets the analyst’s mental stance. In the third section, I present a new form of countertransference (pervasive), through which the patient’s unconscious creates a sensory environment of proto-emotions and atmospheres, of states and rhythms, that have permeated it and that, due to their intensity and nature, arrived there without symbolization. Finally, I attempt to demonstrate how the patient can undergo psychic change only if the analyst has, himself, inhabited an analogous process of transformation in response to the disturbances arising within the analytical relationship. The clinical-theoretical stance emerging from these reflections sees the relation to the other, to oneself, and to the world as made possible by subjective creation always taking place in the unconscious.

Distinct Neural Systems Involved in Agency and Animacy Detection

We designed an fMRI experiment comparing perception of human faces and robotic faces producing emotional expressions. The purpose of our experiment was to investigate engagement of different parts of the social brain by viewing these animate and inanimate agents. Both human and robotic face expressions evoked activity in face-responsive regions in the fusiform gyrus and STS and in the putative human mirror neuron system. These results suggest that these areas mediate perception of agency, independently of whether the agents are living or not. By contrast, the human faces evoked stronger activity than did robotic faces in the medial pFC and the anterior temporal cortex--areas associated with the representation of others' mental states (theory of mind), whereas robotic faces evoked stronger activity in areas associated with perception of objects and mechanical movements. Our data demonstrate that the representation of the distinction between animate and inanimate agents involves areas that participate in attribution of mental stance.

The Allegorical Impulse

Allegory is a cognitive action in which people apply a metaphoric mode of understanding to situations and discourse that typically does not contain metaphorical language per se. My claim is that allegoresis is not a specialized mode of interpretation, but a fundamental human impulse to draw diverse connections between concrete and more abstract experience. I describe several empirical findings from psycholinguistics, anthropology, and literature that demonstrate people's facility to be allegorical, including individuals' consistent ability to see allegory in various texts and real-life situations. I conclude by arguing that allegory is cognitive, not as an abstract, purely mental stance or strategy, but because it relies on embodied simulations for its expression and understanding, much as do many other aspect of cognitive behavior.

A non-elaborative mental stance and decoupling of executive and pain-related cortices predicts low pain sensitivity in Zen meditators

Concepts originating from ancient Eastern texts are now being explored scientifically, leading to new insights into mind/brain function. Meditative practice, often viewed as an emotion regulation strategy, has been associated with pain reduction, low pain sensitivity, chronic pain improvement, and thickness of pain-related cortices. Zen meditation is unlike previously studied emotion regulation techniques; more akin to ‘no appraisal’ than ‘reappraisal’. This implies the cognitive evaluation of pain may be involved in the pain-related effects observed in meditators. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging and a thermal pain paradigm we show that practitioners of Zen, compared to controls, reduce activity in executive, evaluative and emotion areas during pain (prefrontal cortex, amygdala, hippocampus). Meditators with the most experience showed the largest activation reductions. Simultaneously, meditators more robustly activated primary pain processing regions (anterior cingulate cortex, thalamus, insula). Importantly, the lower pain sensitivity in meditators was strongly predicted by reductions in functional connectivity between executive and pain-related cortices. Results suggest a functional decoupling of the cognitive-evaluative and sensory-discriminative dimensions of pain, possibly allowing practitioners to view painful stimuli more neutrally. The activation pattern is remarkably consistent with the mindset described in Zen and the notion of mindfulness. Our findings contrast and challenge current concepts of pain and emotion regulation and cognitive control; commonly thought to manifest through increased activation of frontal executive areas. We suggest it is possible to self-regulate in a more ‘passive’ manner, by reducing higher-order evaluative processes, as demonstrated here by the disengagement of anterior brain systems in meditators.

The problem of self-disclosure in psychoanalysis.

The problem of self-disclosure is explored in relation to currently shifting paradigms of the nature of the analytic relation and analytic interaction. Relational and intersubjective perspectives emphasize the role of self-disclosure as not merely allowable, but as an essential facilitating aspect of the analytic dialogue, in keeping with the role of the analyst as a contributing partner in the process. At the opposite extreme, advocates of classical anonymity stress the importance of neutrality and abstinence. The paper seeks to chart a course between unconstrained self-disclosure and absolute anonymity, both of which foster misalliances. Self-disclosure is seen as at times contributory to the analytic process, and at times deleterious. The decision whether to self-disclose, what to disclose, and when and how, should be guided by the analyst's perspective on neutrality, conceived as a mental stance in which the analyst assesses and decides what, at any given point, seems to contribute to the analytic process and the patient's therapeutic benefit. The major risk in self-disclosure is the tendency to draw the analytic interaction into the real relation between analyst and patient, thus diminishing or distorting the therapeutic alliance, mitigating transference expression, and compromising therapeutic effectiveness.

Perceiving the logical status of sentences

Two experiments confirmed Osherson and Markman's (1975) finding that children find it very difficult to perceive when the truth or falsity of sentences is self-evident (contradictions and tautologies) and when it is open to testing. The study also addressed two claims made by these authors: (a) that one source of difficulty is with taking an ‘objective’ mental stance towards the sentences, treating them as objects for assessment distinct from their referents; (b) that it is the nonempirical nature of the sentences which is responsible for much of the difficulty, not the ‘logical words’ (e.g., ‘and’, ‘not’, ‘or’) which the sentences contain. Claim (a) received some partial support: although manipulating the objectivity of the sentence presentation medium did not affect performance, removing the referents did. Hypothesis (b) received no support for the following reasons. First, the subjects also interpreted empirical sentences nonempirically, frequently justifying their decision. Second, the tautologies were far more difficult to assess than the contradictions, despite the fact that both kinds of sentence were equally nonempirical. The crucial difference between the tautologies and the contradictions was that the former contained disjunctions and the latter conjunctions. Subjects' responses on the empirical sentences suggested that they were interpreting ‘either … or’ constructions empirically. The possibility was discussed that the semantics of disjunction could explain this strategy. Finally, this semantic explanation of the problem with tautology was contrasted with a cognitive account of it.

Classroom Heuristics and Empiricism

WRITING TEACHER'S ADVICE to students searching for material has generally included two elements: an ascesis, to render the student well-disposed in his or her search, and a set of questions to generate information. Conventionally, both the ascesis and the set of questions have been primitive. The student was occasionally instructed to find a topic that was interesting to him or her (as if that weren't half the problem), look in his or her heart, and write, but more often, urged to compose a thesis sentence and make good use of the research tools in the university library. XVith the revival of the study of rhetoric, the concept of invention has been treated more systematically: associational exercises, rules of thumb for developing material, and systematic procedures of inquiry, under the topic of pre-writing, form a healthy chunk of most writing textbooks. Further, students are often taught a systematic procedure for uncovering new information, a procedure that encourages a certain attitude of inquiry in the student: Burke's pentad, Aristotelean topics-or some abbreviation of them-, or the discovery procedures of the Michigan tagmemicists. The purpose of this paper is to critically analyze some popular heuristic forms, with a view to establishing their continuity with the dominating tradition of Anglo-American empiricism and its associated mental stance of contemplativeness. Let us first survey the terrain. One striking feature of modern invention procedures is the separation and hypertrophy of the basic elements. Macrorie, for example, concentrates on ascesis: the student's search for his own voice is a sort of initiation to mature writing, attained through the disciplines of the journal, peer evaluation, and unrelenting honesty. This ascesis, of course, implies a set of questions: How did it feel? and How, exactly did it effect you, visually, sensually? These questions, in fact, appear in Telling Writing, where they constitute the forinstance, the realized image which is the mark of good writing.1 Conversely, the hypertrophied set of questions in the tagmemic matrix, which asks students to analyze events as waves, particles, and fields and in terms of contrast, variation, and distribution, is also an ascesis intended to encourage the formation of working hypotheses.2