Mind needs body! Practicing positive psychology in English language teaching

Positive emotions are recognised as important for successful foreign language learning. Learners develop a positive attitude towards a language, are motivated to learn, and experience enjoyment through regular, meaningful, and positive engagement. Little attention, however, has so far been paid to the links between Positive Psychology, one of the reasons for the growth of interest in emotions, and embodied cognition which advocates the importance of the body and positive sensations for successful learning. While methods such as Total Physical Response (TPR) can help to get learners moving in class, learning through drama seems to be particularly apt to facilitate embodied learning. Students physically engage with situations, characters, and feelings as they inhabit different spaces, often collaboratively. This paper first introduces embodied cognition. It then discusses the links between embodiment and Positive Psychology, taking Seligman's PERMA MODEL as a point of reference. Following this, it shows how embodied learning can be integrated in the English as a foreign language classroom by using techniques from improvisational theatre

A Higher-Order Theory of Emotional Consciousness

Emotional states of consciousness, or what are typically called emotional feelings, are traditionally viewed as being innately programed in subcortical areas of the brain, and are often treated as different from cognitive states of consciousness, such as those related to the perception of external stimuli. We argue that conscious experiences, regardless of their content, arise from one system in the brain. On this view, what differs in emotional and non-emotional states is the kind of inputs that are processed by a general cortical network of cognition, a network essential for conscious experiences. Although subcortical circuits are not directly responsible for conscious feelings, they provide non-conscious inputs that coalesce with other kinds of neural signals in the cognitive assembly of conscious emotional experiences. In building the case for this proposal, we defend a modified version of what is known as the higher-order theory of consciousness

Being-in-the-world-with: Presence Meets Social And Cognitive Neuroscience

In this chapter we will discuss the concepts of “presence” (Inner Presence) and “social presence” (Co-presence) within a cognitive and ecological perspective. Specifically, we claim that the concepts of “presence” and “social presence” are the possible links between self, action, communication and culture. In the first section we will provide a capsule view of Heidegger’s work by examining the two main features of the Heideggerian concept of “being”: spatiality and “being with”. We argue that different visions from social and cognitive sciences – Situated Cognition, Embodied Cognition, Enactive Approach, Situated Simulation, Covert Imitation - and discoveries from neuroscience – Mirror and Canonical Neurons - have many contact points with this view. In particular, these data suggest that our conceptual system dynamically produces contextualized representations (simulations) that support grounded action in different situations. This is allowed by a common coding – the motor code – shared by perception, action and concepts. This common coding also allows the subject for natively recognizing actions done by other selves within the phenomenological contents. In this picture we argue that the role of presence and social presence is to allow the process of self-identification through the separation between “self” and “other,” and between “internal” and “external”. Finally, implications of this position for communication and media studies are discussed by way of conclusion

Perception and Cognition Are Largely Independent, but Still Affect Each Other in Systematic Ways: Arguments from Evolution and the Consciousness-Attention Dissociation

The main thesis of this paper is that two prevailing theories about cognitive penetration are too extreme, namely, the view that cognitive penetration is pervasive and the view that there is a sharp and fundamental distinction between cognition and perception, which precludes any type of cognitive penetration. These opposite views have clear merits and empirical support. To eliminate this puzzling situation, we present an alternative theoretical approach that incorporates the merits of these views into a broader and more nuanced explanatory framework. A key argument we present in favor of this framework concerns the evolution of intentionality and perceptual capacities. An implication of this argument is that cases of cognitive penetration must have evolved more recently and that this is compatible with the cognitive impenetrability of early perceptual stages of processing information. A theoretical approach that explains why this should be the case is the consciousness and attention dissociation framework. The paper discusses why concepts, particularly issues concerning concept acquisition, play an important role in the interaction between perception and cognition

Affective Sustainability. Is this what timelessness really means?

Sustainability is always about regard to the environment: an intelligent use of resources and not returning to nature what it cannot degrade without long-term damage. Politics, business and thus research have been predominantly concerned with the direct impact on the environment of the diverse human activities in our society. There is of course awareness about all the indirect effects caused by these activities but as these effects are more complicated to identify and calculate, it could reasonably be suggested that these have not got the same attention and hence have not been thoroughly explored. Important resources are required for the production of objects, which subsequently turn out neither to meet humans’ needs nor to fulfil their desires. This issue involves not just the misuse of resources but also the addition to waste problems. Needs and desires are not unrelated to material and function but reach mostly beyond the physicality of the object as argued by Krippendorf (2006), among others. Timelessness is unrelated to physicality and is most likely the ultimate example of sustaining. However, this phenomenon does not easily allow interpretation as it is basically philosophical, which also would complicate its transition into other domains. The deconstruction of timelessness in an earlier work (Borjesson, 2006) resulted in the phenomenon being conceptualised as affective sustainability. Four notions were identified as mainly informing timelessness: time, tradition, aesthetics and perception. When subsequently studied in several disciplines, these notions produced indicators on how to understand better what makes objects retain their significance in a changing human context. These indicators are not to be categorised as a set of tools or even less as a model to be applied in the design process: they are directional rather than normative. Moreover, they are best understood as support and inspiration to develop design thinking and have been the subject for further analysis as part of continued research. This has increased the clarity of the directions not only in relation to design thinking but also where to continue research. Keywords: Sustainability, Human ways of living, Human ways of being, Lived and Learned experience, Emotion, Affect, Feeling, Cognition.</p

The ecology of suffering: developmental disorders of structured stress, emotion, and chronic inflammation

'Punctuated equilibrium' models of cognitive process, adapted from the Large Deviations Program of probability theory, are applied to the interaction between immune function and emotion in the context of culturally structured psychosocial stress. The analysis suggests: (1) Chronic inflammatory diseases should be comorbid and synergistic with characteristic emotional dysfunction, and may form a collection of joint disorders most effectively treated at the individual level using multifactorial 'mind/body' strategies. (2) Culturally constructed psychosocial stress can literally write an image of itself onto the punctuated etiology and progression of such composite disorders, beginning a trajectory to disease in utero or early childhood, and continuing throughout the life course, suggesting that, when moderated by 'social exposures', these are developmental disorders. (3) At the community level of organization, strategies for prevention and control of the spectrum of emotional/inflammatory developmental disorders must include redress of cross-sectional and logitudinal (i.e. historical) patterns of inequality and injustice which generate structured psychosocial stress. Evidence further suggests that within 'Westernized' or 'market economy' societies, such stress will inevitably entrain high as well as lower stutus subopulations into a unified ecology of suffering