Joel Krueger

Affordances and the musically extended mind.

I defend a model of the musically extended mind. I consider how acts of “musicking” grant access to novel emotional experiences otherwise inaccessible. First, I discuss the idea of “musical affordances” and specify both what musical affordances are and how they invite different forms of entrainment. Next, I argue that musical affordances – via soliciting different forms of entrainment – enhance the functionality of various endogenous, emotion-granting regulative processes, drawing novel experiences out of us with an expanded complexity and phenomenal character. I argue that music therefore ought to be thought of as part of the vehicle needed to realize these emotional experiences. I appeal to different sources of empirical work to develop this idea.

Interdisciplinary Approaches to the Phenomenology of Auditory Verbal Hallucinations

Despite the recent proliferation of scientific, clinical, and narrative accounts of auditory verbal hallucinations (AVHs), the phenomenology of voice hearing remains opaque and undertheorized. In this article, we outline an interdisciplinary approach to understanding hallucinatory experiences which seeks to demonstrate the value of the humanities and social sciences to advancing knowledge in clinical research and practice. We argue that an interdisciplinary approach to the phenomenology of AVH utilizes rigorous and context-appropriate methodologies to analyze a wider range of first-person accounts of AVH at 3 contextual levels: (1) cultural, social, and historical; (2) experiential; and (3) biographical. We go on to show that there are significant potential benefits for voice hearers, clinicians, and researchers. These include (1) informing the development and refinement of subtypes of hallucinations within and across diagnostic categories; (2) “front-loading” research in cognitive neuroscience; and (3) suggesting new possibilities for therapeutic intervention. In conclusion, we argue that an interdisciplinary approach to the phenomenology of AVH can nourish the ethical core of scientific enquiry by challenging its interpretive paradigms, and offer voice hearers richer, potentially more empowering ways to make sense of their experiences.

Scaffoldings of the affective mind

In this paper we adopt Sterelnys (2010) framework of the scaffolded mind, and his related dimensional approach, to highlight the many ways in which human affectivity (and not just cognition) is environmentally supported. After discussing the relationship between the scaffolded-mind view and related frameworks, such as the extended-mind view, we illustrate the many ways in which our affective states are environmentally supported by items of material culture, other people, and their interplay. To do so, we draw on empirical evidence from various disciplines (sociology, ethnography, and developmental psychology), and develop phenomenological considerations to distinguish different ways in which we experience the world affectively.

Gestural coupling and social cognition: Möbius Syndrome as a case study

Social cognition researchers have become increasingly interested in the ways that behavioral, physiological, and neural coupling facilitate social interaction and interpersonal understanding. We distinguish two ways of conceptualizing the role of such coupling processes in social cognition: strong and moderate interactionism. According to strong interactionism (SI), low-level coupling processes are alternatives to higher-level individual cognitive processes; the former at least sometimes render the latter superfluous. Moderate interactionism (MI) on the other hand, is an integrative approach. Its guiding assumption is that higher-level cognitive processes are likely to have been shaped by the need to coordinate, modulate, and extract information from low-level coupling processes. In this paper, we present a case study on Möbius Syndrome (MS) in order to contrast SI and MI. We show how MS—a form of congenital bilateral facial paralysis—can be a fruitful source of insight for research exploring the relation between high-level cognition and low-level coupling. Lacking a capacity for facial expression, individuals with MS are deprived of a primary channel for gestural coupling. According to SI, they lack an essential enabling feature for social interaction and interpersonal understanding more generally and thus ought to exhibit severe deficits in these areas. We challenge SIs prediction and show how MS cases offer compelling reasons for instead adopting MIs pluralistic model of social interaction and interpersonal understanding. We conclude that investigations of coupling processes within social interaction should inform rather than marginalize or eliminate investigation of higher-level individual cognition.

Phenomenology of the social self in the prodrome of psychosis: From perceived negative attitude of others to heightened interpersonal sensitivity

European Psychiatry - In Press.Proof corrected by the author Available online since mercredi 18 mai 2011

Levinasian Reflections on Somaticity and the Ethical Self

In this article, I attempt to bring some conceptual clarity to several key terms and foundational claims that make up Levinass body‐based conception of ethics. Additionally, I explore ways that Levinass arguments about the somatic basis of subjectivity and ethical relatedness receive support from recent empirical research. The paper proceeds in this way: First, I clarify Levinass use of the terms “sensibility”, “subjectivity”, and “proximity” in Otherwise than Being: or Beyond Essence. Next, I argue for an interpretation of Levinass thought that I suggest is buttressed by recent experimental work in both developmental psychology and neuroscience. I provide examples of research that I suggest opens up Levinass phenomenological analysis in new and interesting ways. I also urge the importance of Levinass phenomenological analysis in contextualizing the ethical significance of these empirical findings.

Training in compensatory strategies enhances rapport in interactions involving people with Möbius Syndrome

In the exploratory study reported here, we tested the efficacy of an intervention designed to train teenagers with Möbius syndrome (MS) to increase the use of alternative communication strategies (e.g., gestures) to compensate for their lack of facial expressivity. Specifically, we expected the intervention to increase the level of rapport experienced in social interactions by our participants. In addition, we aimed to identify the mechanisms responsible for any such increase in rapport. In the study, five teenagers with MS interacted with three naïve participants without MS before the intervention, and with three different naïve participants without MS after the intervention. Rapport was assessed by self-report and by behavioral coders who rated videos of the interactions. Individual non-verbal behavior was assessed via behavioral coders, whereas verbal behavior was automatically extracted from the sound files. Alignment was assessed using cross recurrence quantification analysis and mixed-effects models. The results showed that observer-coded rapport was greater after the intervention, whereas self-reported rapport did not change significantly. Observer-coded gesture and expressivity increased in participants with and without MS, whereas overall linguistic alignment decreased. Fidgeting and repetitiveness of verbal behavior also decreased in both groups. In sum, the intervention may impact non-verbal and verbal behavior in participants with and without MS, increasing rapport as well as overall gesturing, while decreasing alignment.

Embodiment and Affectivity in Moebius Syndrome and Schizophrenia: A Phenomenological Analysis

In this comparative study, Joel Kreuger and Mads Gram Henriksen examine experiential disruptions of embodiment and affectivity in Moebius Syndrome and schizophrenia. They suggest that using phenomenological resources to explore these experiences may provide a better understanding of what it’s like to live with these conditions, and that such an understanding may have significant therapeutic value. Additionally, they suggest that this sort of phenomenologically informed comparative analysis can shed light on the importance of embodiment and affectivity for the constitution of a sense of self and interpersonal relatedness in normal conditions.

Rethinking Social Agent Representation in the Light of Phenomenology

Bell, Mills, Modinos, and Wilkinson (2017) present social agent representation (SAR) as a useful heuristic framework for understanding social cognition in psychosis. SAR involves the ability to create and maintain internal representations of social actors that may break down in psychosis. Indeed, at least in terms of explicit content, psychotic symptoms often thematize a misrepresentation of social agents. For example, hallucinatory “voices” might be attributed to more or less identified entities or individuals, and certain delusional themes (e.g., paranoid delusions) may involve single or multiple persecutors. Bell and colleagues argue that current cognitive models of psychosis poorly address its social nature, and future research should therefore move from errors in self-other attributions to a consideration of how the experience of illusory others comes to dominate social cognition in psychosis. SAR is an inspiring model with considerable pragmatic potential. But additional refinements are needed before it will be ready for application. First, Bell et al. focus primarily on positive symptoms (delusions, auditory/verbal hallucinations, etc.), but distortions of intersubjectivity can extend (often in subtle ways) beyond delusions and hallucinations. Therefore it remains unclear if SAR offers resources for better understanding or capturing these additional distortions, which are crucial components of the psychopathological vulnerability to psychosis (e.g., introversive withdrawal, social hypohedonia and reduced intersubjective resonance, propensity to desocializing and solipsistic modes of experience; Raballo & Krueger, 2011). Second, considering psychotic symptoms as misinterpretations of (illusory) social agents could perpetuate the cognitivist tendency to conceive of hallucinations and delusions at a surface content level—that is, as products of an altered cognitive processing (in this case, the processing of illusory social agents) that would expand transdiagnostically from schizophrenia to mood disorders, despite substantial clinical differences. Third, cognitive models cannot provide a heuristic step forward in mapping the process of psychotic symptom development if they do not attempt a robust integration with findings from phenomenological psychopathology (Sass & Byrom, 2015). In phenomenological terms, hallucinations and delusions represent psychotic end phenomena arising from a global, step-wise transformation of subjective experience (Raballo, 2017). Although such transformations involve profound and developmentally conspicuous distortions of intersubjectivity, these transformations cannot be reduced to cognitive-perceptual misapprehensions of illusory social agents. According to phenomenology, the core vulnerability to schizophrenia resides in the distortion of a basic dimension of intersubjective attunement: the normally tacit feeling that one inhabits a shared lifeworld with others, the meaning of which is created and maintained by everyday forms of “participatory sense-making” that include coordinating activities, sharing emotions, negotiating intentions, and bringing distinct perspectives into alignment and mutual understanding (Fuchs, 2015). For phenomenological psychopathology, this disruption of intersubjective attunement confers liability to the development of positive, negative, and disorganized symptoms. In conclusion, we argue that cognitive models of psychosis such as SAR can benefit from an integration with phenomenologically oriented research in 706085 CPXXXX10.1177/2167702617706085Poletti et al.Rethinking Social Agent Representation research-article2017

Introspection, isolation, and construction: mentality as activity. Commentary on Hurlburt, Heavey & Kelsey (2013). "Toward a phenomenology of inner speaking".

The authors are supported by a Wellcome Trust Strategic Award, ‘‘Hearing the Voice’’, WT098455.