Subjective Mental Experience Research Articles

An examination of remote e-working and flow experience: The role of technostress and loneliness

Since early 2020, the Covid-19 pandemic has led to numerous businesses around the world making use of information and communication technologies (ICT) more frequently than ever to help transition operations to remote e-working. As a result, using multiple technologies on a daily basis has become the norm for many employees across the world. While it is evident that working remotely may trigger higher ICT demands and reduced face-to-face interaction, less is known about how this exposure may influence employees’ subjective mental experiences related to concentration and satisfaction at work (i.e., flow). The aim of this present study is to gain insights and to explore the relationship between remote e-working and employee flow experiences by introducing two key stressors; technostress and loneliness. Data were collected from a survey of 202 employees from the financial services sector in Turkey. The results revealed that remote e-working experience had a significant and positive effect on the flow levels of employees. Technostress and loneliness serially mediated the relationship between remote e-working and flow. The findings contribute to remote e-working research by exploring the consequences of such experiences and introducing two important key stressors, which result in lower levels of flow at work. Practical implications are provided for improving remote e-working conditions and employee well-being.

Ментальные механизмы регуляции психических состояний

The article presents the analytical review of theories and studies of the psychological state regulation through the “self-processes — self-regulation” aspect. The main objective of the article is the analysis of concepts, mechanisms and the role of consciousness structures in the regulatory process. The theories of mental states self-regulation are analyzed: system-activity, system-functional and structures-functional. The specificity of each approach to the regulatory process is shown. It was found that the less developed area in presented theoretical constructions is the mental component of regulation: the contribution of the consciousness structures to the regulation of states, their significance and functions in the regulatory process, the specificity of the influence of individual structures on regulation and their synergy during self-regulation, etc. Review of the concepts of the mental states regulation’s mechanisms points the key role of the consciousness structures in the regulatory process. The consciousness structures are an integral part of the individual’s mental subjective experience. Subjective mental experience integrates meanings with categorical structures of consciousness, goal features, semantic structures of consciousness (personal meaning, values, semantic attitudes, etc.), reflection and its types, experiences, mental representations (imaginative characteristics), the self-system. The relationship between the consciousness structures in the process of mental states regulation is considered. It is shown that the integration of the consciousness components is aimed at the goal achieving — the regulation of the subject’s mental stateThe operational side of the regulatory process is associated with the actions of the subject, aimed at changing the state, feedback and time characteristics.

Challenge to Unity: Relationship Between Hemispheric Asymmetry of the Default Mode Network and Mind Wandering.

The default mode network (DMN) is considered a unified core brain function for generating subjective mental experiences, such as mind wandering. We propose a novel cognitive framework for understanding the unity of the DMN from the perspective of hemispheric asymmetry. Using transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS), effective connectivity estimation, and machine learning, we show that the bilateral angular gyri (AG), which are core regions of the DMN, exhibit heterogeneity in both inherent network organization and mind wandering regulation. Inherent heterogeneities are present between the right and left AG regarding not only effective connectivity, but also mind wandering regulation; the right AG is related to mind-wandering reduction, whereas the left AG is related to mind-wandering generation. Further supporting this observation, we found that only anodal tDCS of the right AG induced machine learning-detectable changes in effective connectivity and regional amplitude, which could possibly be linked to reduced mind wandering. Our findings highlight the importance of hemispheric asymmetry to further understand the function of the DMN and contribute to the emerging neural model of mind wandering, which is necessary to understand the nature of the human mind.

Introduction: QUALIA

This special issue proposes that the semiotically theorized concept of ‘qualia’ is useful for anthropologists working on problems of the senses, materiality, embodiment, aesthetics, and affect. Qualia are experiences of sensuous qualities (such as colors, textures, sounds, and smells) and feelings (such as satiety, anxiety, proximity, and otherness). The papers in this issue, first presented in a conference in honor of Nancy Munn and her groundbreaking book, The Fame of Gawa: A Symbolic Study of Value Transformation in a Massim Society (1986) , offer ethnographic accounts of the discursive, historical, and political conditions under which sensations come to be understood as being sensations of qualities – the qualia of softness, lightness, clarity, pain, stink, etc. – and in which those qualia are endowed with cultural value, whether positive or negative. The papers in this issue demonstrate that qualia are not just subjective mental experiences but rather sociocultural events of ‘qualic’ – and qualitative – orientation and evaluation. These papers thus provide models for the analysis of experience by calling into question what counts for social groups as the senses, materiality or immateriality, interiority, embodiment, or exteriority.

Painting with Sound: The Kaleidoscopic World of Lance Sieveking, a British Radio Modernist

In the late 1920s, British Radio became briefly and creatively entwined with a broader modernist culture. Largely through a series of spectacular programmes such as The Kaleidoscope (1928), made by the producer Lance Sieveking, the BBC started to develop an ‘art’ of sound. This episode has generally been passed over in histories of modernism and broadcasting: at best, it has been seen as a brief and whimsical piece of formal experimentation. But through examining Sieveking’s private papers, this article shows that this new art of sound was rich in meanings and symbolism, and had a wider influence than has hitherto been assumed. Sieveking drew heavily on his own life, which encompassed imprisonment and flying during the First World War, and a glittering array of social acquaintances, which connected him with the most advanced artistic thinking. This led him to find ways of representing in sound the subjective mental experiences and jumble of memories that so fascinated modernist artists in an age influenced by popular Freudianism. Sieveking’s life and writing also shows how he drew boldly from the visual language of experimental silent cinema at a critical moment in its own development. In creating a complex montage style for radio, Sieveking also anticipated some of the aesthetic devices that would be deployed in the coming era of sound on film. Sieveking and his programmes therefore illustrate a particular moment of British cultural history when the creative boundaries between different media were especially porous, with highly creative results.

The Anatomy of the Image: Toward an Applied Onto-Psychiatry

Abstract: Biomedical software ontologies provide a means for the representation of facts gathered through biomedical research and clinical observation. At the foundation of good software ontology design lays a sound philosophical realism that supplies the basic framework required to support the computable management of this information correctly and consistently. In numerous biomedical subdomains (such as anatomy, disease classification, or functional genomics), a good degree of success has been achieved through the realist approach. In the field of psychiatry, however, the analytic tools of ontological realism are challenged to account for subjective mental experiences that typically lay beyond their scope. Although psychiatric symptoms , such as delusions, hallucinations, or memory loss, may be too ethereal to account for in terms of a realist ontology, by focusing on some psychiatric signs , such as images of the human brain (which are in themselves subject to ontological analysis), we may be able to make some in-roads toward an application ontology of the psychiatric domain. In this paper, via the ontological framework of Polish phenomenologist Roman Ingarden, we discuss the differences between the ontology of the body and the ontology of the image, and apply the subsequent image-ontology framework to the domain of neuroimaging. We aim to demonstrate how such an ontology may lead to the perspicuous structuring of clinical information in psychiatry and the benefits application ontologies afford may subsequently be attained within a portion of this particularly difficult domain.

A psychiatric dialogue on the mind-body problem.

Of all the human professions, psychiatry is most centrally concerned with the relationship of mind and brain. In many clinical interactions, psychiatrists need to consider both subjective mental experiences and objective aspects of brain function. This article attempts to summarize, in the form of a dialogue between a philosophically informed attending psychiatrist and three residents, the major philosophical positions on the mind-body problem. The positions reviewed include the following: substance dualism, property dualism, type identity, token identity, functionalism, eliminative materialism, and explanatory dualism. This essay seeks to provide a brief user-friendly introduction, from a psychiatric perspective, to current thinking about the mind-body problem.

Reading Morgan's Canon: Reduction and Unification in the Forging of a Science of the Mind1

Lloyd Morgan's advisory “Canon” on ascribing mental phenomena had an historically unusual and deep impact. It became a dictum defining true psychological science, praised for providing the foundation of a mature, hard science. Seen as a corrective to naive methodology and excessive speculation, it appeared to demand removal of mental qualities in the name of parsimony and rigor. Thus it is also disparaged for illegitimately limiting inquiry. Viewing Morgan's method and reasoning as the reactions of a Darwinian to the problems of psychology provides insight for a science of animal mind. The Canon should be seen as methodological advice for a science caught in the tensions between materialism and subjective mental experience, having to place human mind within phylogenetic continuity. Faced with irresolvable difficulties, behavioral science has oscillated between reduction and unifying integration, typical of debates over broad conceptual issues in evolutionary biology. The reasoning behind Morgan's Canon provides a strategy for balancing these twin pulls of scientific practice.

Animal consciousness and scientific change

In 1872, Charles Darwin published his major work, The Expression of Emotions in Man and Animals. Ten years later, Darwin’s friend, George Romanes, Secretary of the Linnaean Society, making use, as he tells us, as one of his sources of “all of the notes and clippings on animal intelligence which [Darwin had] been collecting for the last forty years” (Romanes, 1898, p. xi), published an exhaustive five hundred page survey of animal mentation throughout the entire phylogenetic scale. Neither man experienced the slightest difficulty in imputing consciousness, emotion, reason, concepts, in short subjective mental experiences and awareness to animals. To Romanes, the sort of philosophical skepticism which would militate against imputing mental lives to animals can hardly be stopped at animals if we are serious about that, we cannot reasonably refrain from doubting that other humans have such experiences also. The only subjective experiences we have access to are our own; if we are willing to impute subjective experiences to other people it must be on the basis of analogy. But the analogies which license such inferences obtain regarding animals as well, so Romanes feels quite comfortable about dismissing this sort of skepticism as unproductive nihilism violating common sense and rendering all science impossible, and after a few additional pages of philosophical and methodological preliminaries turns directly to the study of the different sorts of mental life found in the animal kingdom. This belief in animal consciousness and its scientific knowability dominates psychology until Watson (1913) and figures prominently in the theoretical stances of a wide variety of psychological thinkers. Contrary to widespread belief, consciousness in animals is taken for granted in Lloyd Morgan (1894), whose famous canon was directed not against the imputation of consciousness to animals, but rather against overhasty ascription of reason to them (see Morgan, 1894, Chapter 111). Similarly, animal mentation is never denied by any of the thinkers usually described as immediate precursors of positivistic behaviorism, including Jacques Loeb, H. S. Jennings, and E. L. Thorndyke. This is not surprising. The evidence of common sense (and common language) militate strongly in favor of imputing consciousness to animals. When this prima f&-k belief is buttressed, as it was in the 19th century, by the theoretical requirements of Darwinian evolutionary continuity, it becomes a powerful and coherent edifice, which would appear difficult indeed to dislodge. It is rare, after all, that a revolutionary scientific theory accords with common sense very often they are inimical. But in the case of animal consciousness, it is clear that Darwinism