Introduction

The sublime is a concept that has never ceased to attract and to fascinate scholars. In its classical formulation, it dates back to the eighteenth century, but some of the issues that characterize its origin – such as the border between representation and the unrepresentable, or between form and formless, pleasure and terror – return strongly in contemporary thinking. In this regard, opinions are divided. Is the sublime an already outdated notion that can only be discussed from a historical point of view? Or does it also contain important elements for the current philosophical debate? Moreover, have the transformations that the sublime has undergone in the contemporary world substantially distorted it, or have they instead brought to light some new possible implications of this concept? This issue of "Itinera" is dedicated to these and other similar questions, starting from the traditional definitions of the sublime between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, until its most recent interpretations.The sublime is a concept that has never ceased to attract and to fascinate scholars. In its classical formulation, it dates back to the eighteenth century, but some of the issues that characterize its origin – such as the border between representation and the unrepresentable, or between form and formless, pleasure and terror – return strongly in contemporary thinking. In this regard, opinions are divided. Is the sublime an already outdated notion that can only be discussed from a historical point of view? Or does it also contain important elements for the current philosophical debate? Moreover, have the transformations that the sublime has undergone in the contemporary world substantially distorted it, or have they instead brought to light some new possible implications of this concept? This issue of "Itinera" is dedicated to these and other similar questions, starting from the traditional definitions of the sublime between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, until its most recent interpretations

Introduction

The sublime is a concept that has never ceased to attract and to fascinate scholars. In its classical formulation, it dates back to the eighteenth century, but some of the issues that characterize its origin – such as the border between representation and the unrepresentable, or between form and formless, pleasure and terror – return strongly in contemporary thinking. In this regard, opinions are divided. Is the sublime an already outdated notion that can only be discussed from a historical point of view? Or does it also contain important elements for the current philosophical debate? Moreover, have the transformations that the sublime has undergone in the contemporary world substantially distorted it, or have they instead brought to light some new possible implications of this concept? This issue of "Itinera" is dedicated to these and other similar questions, starting from the traditional definitions of the sublime between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, until its most recent interpretations.The sublime is a concept that has never ceased to attract and to fascinate scholars. In its classical formulation, it dates back to the eighteenth century, but some of the issues that characterize its origin – such as the border between representation and the unrepresentable, or between form and formless, pleasure and terror – return strongly in contemporary thinking. In this regard, opinions are divided. Is the sublime an already outdated notion that can only be discussed from a historical point of view? Or does it also contain important elements for the current philosophical debate? Moreover, have the transformations that the sublime has undergone in the contemporary world substantially distorted it, or have they instead brought to light some new possible implications of this concept? This issue of "Itinera" is dedicated to these and other similar questions, starting from the traditional definitions of the sublime between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, until its most recent interpretations

Emotional Expression of #body on Instagram

Our aim was to explore emotions in Instagram images marked with hashtags referring to body image–related components using an artificial intelligence–based discrete emotional analysis. A total of 500 Instagram photos marked by specific hashtags related to body image components were analyzed and specific discrete emotions expressed in each picture were detected using the Emotion application program interface API from Microsoft Azure Cognitive Service. Results showed that happiness and neutrality were the most intense and recognizable emotions expressed in all images. Happiness intensity was significantly higher in images with #bodyimage and #bodyconfidence and higher levels of neutral emotion were found in images tagged with #body, #bodyfitness, and #thininspirational. This study integrated a discrete emotional model with the conventional dimensional one, and offered a higher degree of granularity in the analysis of emotions–body link on Instagram through an artificial intelligence technology. Future research should deepen the use of discrete emotions on Instagram and the role of neutrality in body image representation

Designing Awe in Virtual Reality: An Experimental Study

Awe is a little-studied emotion with a great transformative potential. Therefore, the interest towards the study of awe’s underlying mechanisms has been increased. Specifically, researchers have been interested in how to reproduce intense feelings of awe within laboratory conditions. It has been proposed that the use of Virtual Reality (VR) could be an effective way to induce awe in controlled experimental settings, thanks to its ability of providing participants with a sense of “presence”, that is, the subjective feeling of being displaced in another physical or imaginary place. However, the potential of VR as awe-inducing medium has not been fully tested yet. In the present study, we provided an evidence-based design and a validation of four immersive virtual environments (VEs) involving 36 participants in a within-subject design. Of these, three VEs were designed to induce awe, whereas the fourth VE was targeted as an emotionally-neutral stimulus. Participants self-reported the extent to which they felt awe, general affect and sense of presence related to each environment. As expected, results showed that awe-VEs could induce significantly higher levels of awe and presence as compared to the neutral VE. Furthermore, these VEs induced significantly more positive than negative affect. These findings supported the potential of immersive VR for inducing awe and provide useful indications for the design of awe-inspiring virtual environments

Increasing crisis hostage negotiator effectiveness: Embracing awe and other resilience practices

Crisis and hostage negotiators are conflict resolution professionals who work toward peacefully resolving tense and possible volatile incidents. These law enforcement negotiators must possess comprehensive knowledge of the required skills and strategically deploy them to accomplish their goals. This exploratory Article examines the skills that make law enforcement negotiators effective and proposes how experiencing awe and a variety of other resilience practices can potentially enhance their abilities. The Article concludes by advocating that awe and other resilience practices can also benefit the greater conflict resolution community, including other types of negotiators and mediators

Gulliver’s virtual travels: active embodiment in extreme body sizes for modulating our body representations

It is noted that the perceptual experience of body and space can be modulated by changing the action capabilities or by manipulating the perceived body dimensions through a multisensory stimulation. This study adds to pre-existing literature by investigating the alterations in bodily experience following embodiment to both enlarged and shrunked bodies, while participants actively navigated in a virtual environment. A normal-sized body served as a reference condition. After each embodied navigation, participants estimated the height and width of three different body parts. Results revealed that the embodiment over shrunked body induced a significant reduction in participants’ body image, while no changes were reported after the embodiment over the enlarged body. Findings were discussed in terms of previous literature exploring the constraints implicated in the ownership over different bodies

Multilevel behavioral synchronization in a joint tower-building task

Human to Human sensorimotor interaction can only be fully understood by modeling the patterns of bodily synchronization and reconstructing the underlying mechanisms of optimal cooperation. We designed a tower-building task to address such a goal. We recorded upper body kinematics of dyads and focused on the velocity profiles of the head and wrist. We applied Recurrence Quantification Analysis to examine the dynamics of synchronization within, and across the experimental trials, to compare the roles of leader and follower. Our results show that the leader was more auto-recurrent than the follower to make his/her behavior more predictable. When looking at the cross-recurrence of the dyad, we find different patterns of synchronization for head and wrist motion. On the wrist, dyads synchronized at short lags, and such pattern was weakly modulated within trials, and invariant across them. Head motion instead, synchronized at longer lags and increased both within and between trials: a phenomenon mostly driven by the leader. Our findings point at a multilevel nature of human to human sensorimotor synchronization, and may provide an experimentally solid benchmark to identify the basic primitives of motion, which maximize behavioral coupling between humans and artificial agents

When music “flows”. State and trait in musical performance, composition and listening: a systematic review

It is not unusual to experience a sense of total absorption, concentration, action- awareness, distortion of time and intrinsic enjoyment during an activity that involves music. Indeed, it is noted that there is a special relationship between these two aspects (i.e., music and flow experience). In order to deeply explore flow in the musical domain, it is crucial to consider the complexity of the flow experience—both as a “state” and as a “trait.” Secondly, since music is a multifaceted domain, it is necessary to concentrate on specific music settings, such as (i) musical composition; (ii) listening; and (iii) musical performance. To address these issues, the current review aims to outline flow experience as a “trait” and as a “state” in the three above- mentioned musical domains. Clear and useful guidelines to distinguish between flow as a “state” and as a “trait” are provided by literature concerning flow assessment. For this purpose, three aspects of the selected studies are discussed and analyzed: (i) the characteristics of the flow assessments used; (ii) the experimental design; (iii) the results; and (iv) the interrelations between the three domains. Results showed that the dispositional approach is predominant in the above-mentioned settings, mainly regarding music performance. Several aspects concerning musical contexts still need to be deeply analyzed. Future challenges could include the role of a group level of analysis, overcoming a frequency approach toward dispositional flow, and integrating both state and dispositional flow perspectives in order to deepen comprehension of how flow takes place in musical contexts. Finally, to explain the complex relationship between these two phenomena, we suggest that music and flow could be seen as an emergent embodied system

Bridging Minds: A Mixed Methodology to Assess Networked Flow

The main goal of this contribution is to present a methodological framework to study Networked Flow, a bio-psycho-social theory of collective creativity applying it on creative processes occurring via a computer network. First, we draw on the definition of Networked Flow to identify the key methodological requirements of this model. Next, we present the rationale of a mixed methodology, which aims at combining qualitative, quantitative and structural analysis of group dynamics to obtain a rich longitudinal dataset. We argue that this integrated strategy holds potential for describing the complex dynamics of creative collaboration, by linking the experiential features of collaborative experience (flow, social presence), with the structural features of collaboration dynamics (network indexes) and the collaboration outcome (the creative product). Finally, we report on our experience with using this methodology in blended collaboration settings (including both face-to-face and virtual meetings), to identify open issues and provide future research directions

The sensorimotor Dimension of the Networked Flow: an Exploratory Study Using an Interactive Collaborative Platform

The ability to cooperate with another individual in order to achieve a shared goal is crucial for human survival and it is called joint action. It is noted that this process can originate when actors are synchronized at a sensorimotor level. However, experiential correlates of sensorimotor synchronization are nearly unexplored. The aim of this study was to investigate the relationship between the experience of flow and social presence in a sensorimotor collaborative task. 12 female couples (mean age = 22.33; S.D. = .815) and 12 male couples (mean age = 22.88; S.D. = .789) were involved in a tower-building task across 10 consecutive trials using the COLLEGO platform. Couple members alternated their leader/follower role. Platform recorded time stamp (ms) and position of each selected object when it was picked/released, providing a measure of performance. Thereafter, participants’ level of flow (Flow State Scale) and social presence (Networked Minds Social Presence Inventory) were assessed. Flow and Social presence correlated positively at a global level. Having clear goals and perceiving a balance between challenges and skills were associated with a higher performance. The autotelic dimension of flow was negatively related with global performance. At the same time, task duration correlated negatively with cognitive and behavioral dimensions of social presence, but positively with emotional dimensions. Results are discussed in light of the Networked Flow model that assumes a strong positive link between social presence and flow at the base of the highest levels of collaborative performance