Disinterestedness is often treated as the hallmark of aesthetic experience, but this paper argues for a narrower claim: disinterestedness, understood as indifference to existence, individuates an important kind of aesthetic experience rather than the genus. Building on a Waltonian taxonomy of representational arts, I argue that the familiar fiction/nonfiction divide is incomplete. Nonfictions prescribe belief and thereby implicate interest in actual existence; fictions prescribe imagining and implicate interest in fictional existence. A third category is needed, that of disfictions, which prescribe the attitude of entertaining a representational content without any commitment to the question of which world, if any, contains what is represented. Their distinctive mode of engagement releases audiences from questions about actuality versus fictionality and foregrounds the work's appearance, configuration, and history of making. I then argue that the disinterested attitude characteristic of disfictions modulates affect in a distinctive way: emotions such as fear can be savored without being tethered to welfare-directed appraisal in any determinate world. Finally, I sketch how this attitude can be extended beyond representational art via “disfictionalisation”: the deliberate detachment of perceptual content from belief in nonrepresentational arts and even in ordinary objects and nature.
In their essay, Tying Down Loose Space, Franck and Stevens (2007) explore the logics of tight and loose in urban settings. The former are spaces that predetermine activity through clearly demarcated socio-material features; the latter, those that support activity in ways yet-to-be determined. It is the (exploratory) activity that unfolds within these respective spaces that distinguishes these logics. While interdependent, the increasing sanitization of urban space threatens the logics of looseness, (un)wittingly tightening opportunities for people to meaningfully encounter the respective environs. What could be done to loosen such logics, encouraging meaningful exploratory activity in tightened urban settings? Here, we respond to this question by first thinking with Gibson's concept of affordance. Through its relational grounding, it frames ‘meaning’, not as a mentally constructed affection attached to an environment ‘out there’ but as an interwoven part of the person-environment system. This holds that ‘meaning’ is discovered amid exploratory activity. To support this meaningful exploration in tightened urban settings, we then turn to the affordance-based design principle of spontaneity. Through a case example, we show how this principle could open room for looseness, supporting person-environment relations that unfold in unintended, yet meaningful ways.
This study explores the multidimensional nature of classroom teaching creativity in the AI era, proposing a framework to enhance teacher professional development with particular relevance to diverse educational contexts. Through in-depth interviews with 23 teachers (17 pre-service and 6 in-service) and subsequent content analysis, we identify three fundamental dimensions of teaching creativity: Knowledge (encompassing both theoretical grounding and practical pedagogical expertise), Flexibility (reflecting adaptability, interdisciplinary thinking, and emotional engagement strategies), and Skill (emphasizing digital competence and collaborative approaches). These dimensions form the basis of Pavilion Model, which conceptualizes teaching creativity as an interconnected system. Using an ecosystem lens, we further examine factors influencing creativity across micro (individual traits, professional identity), meso (school culture, peer/mentor support), and macro (policy, cultural values) levels, while also considering the temporal evolution of creativity throughout a teacher's career. The study highlights the importance of contextually responsive strategies, such as integrating AI tools while preserving human-centered pedagogy, fostering adaptable teaching practices in resource-constrained settings, and strengthening mentorship systems, to nurture creativity in varying educational landscapes. By bridging theoretical innovation with practical application, this research may offer actionable insights for educators and policymakers, particularly in Global South regions where balancing technological advancement with equitable, culturally relevant teaching remains a pressing challenge.
Why can contact with nature be psychologically restorative? For more than four decades, research on nature's restorative effects has sought to answer this question through two influential theoretical frameworks: Attention Restoration Theory (ART) and Stress Reduction Theory (SRT). These theories have been central in shaping the field, yet they have also attracted criticism. Although their limitations may appear resolvable through theoretical refinement or additional empirical work, we adopt a meta-theoretical perspective and argue that ART and SRT fall short of basic standards of theory construction. First, key constructs thought to predict restorative experiences are often vague, circular, or insufficiently specified. Second, both theories exhibit explanatory fragility: ART's resource-based account does not clarify how attentional depletion and recovery are meant to operate, whereas SRT's evolutionary explanation relies on adaptationist claims whose added explanatory value remains unclear. Third, the weak specification of their predictors and mechanisms makes both theories conceptually elastic and at risk of being insulated from disconfirmation. We conclude by calling for greater epistemic restraint when constructing explanatory frameworks in this research domain.
Learned helplessness is a foundational concept in psychology, originally developed to explain the effects of repeated exposure to uncontrollable aversive events on behavior and adaptation. Over the past sixty years, the theory has evolved through successive reformulations, accumulating both conceptual depth and ambiguity. In this critical review, we revisit the historical development of learned helplessness, outlining its core mechanisms while highlighting the tensions that have emerged across theoretical traditions. Particular attention is given to the past three decades, during which learned helplessness has been increasingly reinterpreted, expanded, and applied across diverse research areas and real-world contexts. It is timely to examine how these developments have transformed the scope and meaning of the concept, sometimes in ways that depart from its original foundations. While analyzing this trajectory, we identify key points of convergence and divergence in the field and consider how learned helplessness continues to inform contemporary models of motivation, resilience, and adaptation. Finally, we propose an integrative framework to clarify its current relevance and offer directions for future research, grounded in coherent theoretical principles and informed by empirical insights.
Giftedness remains conceptually imprecise in both scientific literature and educational practice, frequently conflated with talent and inconsistently operationalized. Whereas talent is inherently visible and validated by observable performance in culturally valued domains, giftedness may remain invisible throughout an individual's lifetime, precisely because of its latent nature. This article proposes a neuroscientific framework that reconceptualizes giftedness as a non-dysfunctional neurodevelopmental condition, characterized by a qualitatively different mode of neurological functioning. Drawing on recent advances in neuroscience, this framework establishes that gifted individuals exhibit not only high scores on intelligence tests, but also a distinct pattern of parieto-frontal connectivity, atypical cortical development trajectory, and enhanced structural-functional coupling. These neurobiological features are expressed in a recognizable combination of behavioral markers, including extreme curiosity, rapid and self-taught learning, early abstract and complex reasoning, expressive communication, excellent memory, and perfectionism. Reconceptualizing giftedness as a non-dysfunctional neurodevelopmental condition supports the development of individualized strategies in clinical and educational contexts. Without appropriate identification and support, gifted individuals remain at risk for underachievement, social-emotional difficulties, and misdiagnosis.
Metacognitive processes are typically conceptualized as mechanisms through which individuals monitor and regulate their own cognitive performance. However, during perception, internal states such as uncertainty and effort are often externally manifested through bodily and vocal signals. In this paper, I propose a theoretical framework in which such embodied expressions, termed embodied transparency, play a functional role in both self-directed and socially distributed metacognition.Building on dual-system accounts of metacognition proposed by Shea et al., (2014), I argue that embodied transparency might operate at two interconnected levels. At the individual level, bodily and vocal signals provide feedback that contributes to the monitoring and updating of one's own metacognitive representations. This feedback loop suggests that expression is not merely an output of internal states but also a source of information that re-enters the cognitive system and calibrate confidence judgments and performance evaluation. At the interpersonal level, embodied signals emitted by others may serve as informational inputs for constructing representations of their metacognitive states, thereby supporting perspective-taking and social coordination, while also contributing to the reshaping of one's own.Furthermore, I propose that embodied transparency might facilitate metacognitive learning through both rapid, implicit mechanisms and more explicit, reflective pathways. Such processes may operate independently of formal collaboration while still contributing to socially distributed cognition. The framework generates testable predictions concerning the mechanisms, boundary conditions, and developmental trajectories of embodied metacognition, and opens new avenues for investigating its implications.
The self is increasingly understood as comprising two interrelated dimensions: the embodied self, rooted in pre-reflective sensorimotor and affective processes, and the narrative self, constructed through autobiographical meaning-making. While the influence of embodied experience on narrative identity has received growing attention, the reverse direction, namely how narratives shape embodied behavior, has remained largely unexplored. In this prospective review, we define this process as narrative embodiment and propose a conceptual framework that introduces Paul Ricoeur's concept of character, the set of behavioral dispositions by which a person is identified, as an intermediary between the narrative and embodied selves. This intermediary role of character explains how the narrative and embodied selves recursively shape one another, as narratives reorganize embodied dispositions through processes of identification, while embodied actions and behavioral tendencies contribute to the constitution of self-narratives. Narrative embodiment also unfolds within social contexts, where others' narratives influence the formation and transformation of one's character. In rehabilitation, the framework illustrates how patients restore coherence between their narrative and embodied selves by reorganizing their character, leading to the emergence of new bodily capacities and new self-narratives. To enable empirical investigation of this process, we propose a set of objective indicators of narrative embodiment, including measures of identification, perceived self-efficacy, body image, and behavioral expression. These indices allow systematic assessment of how narrative change is reflected in embodied transformation. By integrating philosophical and psychological perspectives, the framework of narrative embodiment provides a foundation for interdisciplinary research and offers conceptual guidance for practical applications.
Cognitive flexibility enables individuals to transition between different cognitive sets, update mental frameworks, and adapt strategies in response to changing demands. This perspective proposes the Modular Model of Cognitive Flexibility, which delineates cognitive flexibility as a hybrid modular–continuum architecture comprising three partially dissociable but dynamically interacting functional components: Crystallized Flexibility (Adaptor), Semi-Fluid Flexibility (Explorer), and Fluid Flexibility (Generator). These levels correspond to distinct mechanisms: Switching, Searching, and Shaping, respectively, reflecting structured rule-following, contextual adaptation, and generative thinking. By integrating behavioral, cognitive, and neural evidence, we demonstrate how different cognitive tasks and neuroanatomical correlates align with each level of flexibility. This model highlights the unique roles of the posterior parietal cortex (PPC), dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC), and inferior frontal gyrus (IFG) in perceptual, executive, and conceptual aspects of flexibility. This modular framework advances our understanding of cognitive flexibility by offering a structured approach to investigating its distinct components and interactions.
Amid growing concerns about employee psychological strain and declining workplace well-being, scholars have increasingly focused on the self-initiated approaches. Within this stream, playful work design (PWD) has gained importance as a promising strategy through which employees infuse their work with fun and challenge in ways that promote positive work-related states. Drawing on self-determination theory (SDT), this study examines the relationship between PWD and employee workplace well-being. Specifically, we propose that autonomous motivation and controlled motivation may mediate this relationship, and meaningfulness may moderate these pathways. Using three-wave data from full-time employees in Pakistan (N = 521), we find that PWD is positively associated with employee workplace well-being. Autonomous and controlled motivation mediated this relationship. Moreover, meaningfulness significantly moderates the relationships between PWD and both forms of motivation, while its indirect effect remains contingent upon the levels of meaningfulness. By uncovering the motivational processes and boundary conditions, this study contributes to advancing literature on both PWD and SDT. It also offers practical insights into how organizations can cultivate employee workplace well-being through self-initiated work behaviors.
The question of whether and in what sense aesthetic experience is disinterested is most often raised in relation to the experience of the beautiful. What about the experience of the sublime? How could it be disinterested when it arouses in us a strongly negative interest, whether it be fear, horror, or feelings of radical uncertainty and selfnegation (depending on the theories)? This question is particularly pressing for proponents of a strict conception of disinterestedness, according to which a disinterested experience of an object excludes, or is psychologically in tension with, any interested experience that the subject might also have of that object. An account of the experience of the sublime is offered that is compatible with the strict conception, but also with the highly plausible view that aesthetic experience is essentially situated and depends on our desiderative, agentive, and affective dispositions.
Critical scholarship on resilience often holds that discourses focusing on individual resilience reify neoliberal governance. Such critiques rightly address the socio-politics surrounding persons from whom resilience is socially expected. However, they also risk reducing resilience to simply another appendage of neoliberal ideology. This ideological reductionism contradicts itself, by implicitly acknowledging the role of individual agency in dealing with adversity, whilst simultaneously conceptualizing 'resilience' as unfolding exclusively in ideological discourse. In equating resilience with neoliberal governance, such critiques meaningfully favour community-based forms of resilience, but stop short of appreciating the mental toughness required by individuals facing adversity, for fear of implicitly endorsing neoliberalism. In this paper, I make the case for individual resilience, by appealing to examples related to chronic pelvic pain syndrome (CPPS). The private, pervasive, unpredictable nature of pelvic pain, alongside often contrasting modes of pain management, make individual aspects of resilience essential in dealing with such adversity. Individual endurance features as indispensable and as complementary to community-based resilience, contrary to ideologically reductionist views. Taking CPPS as an exemplar for understanding similar chronic pain experiences, I argue that documented instances of resilience in this domain ultimately reflect the life projects that sufferers pursue despite their affliction. I conclude that: (1) psychology requires a re-conceptualisation of resilience as embodied 'endurance for' life projects, re-orienting individuals' approach to their chronic pain; (2) a focus on individual resilience does not imply neoliberal ideation, but can actually be accompanied by other theoretical counterparts at the societal level, some of which actively resist neoliberalism.
In his Critique of Judgment, Immanuel Kant argues that aesthetic judgments of beauty and sublimity are pure insofar as they refer to an aesthetic pleasure that is disinterested with regards to the sensible and intellectual interests served by the presentation of a form. Yet, Kant reserves a role for emotions and affects in his exposition of the aesthetic judgment of the sublime insofar as he suggests that it refers to a specific kind of pleasure that is of a kind that moves and agitates us. Kant argues that aesthetic judgments of sublimity nevertheless refer to the feeling of a disinterested pleasure precisely insofar as this moving and agitative pleasure is grounded in disinterested feeling of respect with regards to the moral law. In this paper, I suggest instead that the disinterested aesthetic pleasure of the sublime is grounded in what Kant refers to as the affect of amazement aroused by an aesthetic idea of the imagination, and not in the feeling of respect aroused with regards to an idea of reason. Consequently, I suggest that an aesthetic judgment of the sublime in Kant's scheme, is disinterested precisely insofar as it refers to the affective pleasure of amazement.
The emergence of Artificial Intelligence (AI) art challenges established aesthetic frameworks, frequently resulting in a documented negative bias when non-human authorship is known. This exploratory study investigated the cognitive schemas activated by traditional visual art and AI art, and how these mental representations are shaped by individual attitudes towards AI. Using the free association technique, 560 participants provided three descriptive words for both art forms, which were subsequently quantified using word embeddings. Principal Component Analysis (PCA) revealed a significant semantic distinction between the vocabularies used for the two art types, with specific clusters emerging for both art forms. These clusters emphasize that traditional visual art is thought of in terms of emotionality and expressiveness, the creative process, aesthetic beauty, color, and art forms and styles which can express the aforementioned dimensions, while AI art is centered on technological innovation, novelty, artificiality, lack of emotion and authenticity, and themes related to fake and stolen content. Additionally, positive attitudes toward AI were associated with greater use of positive AI-related words and reduced use of negative terms. Alternatively, positive AI attitudes negatively predicted the use of traditional art words related to emotion and expressiveness and the creative process. These findings show that AI art activates a more ambivalent and technologically oriented schema compared to the predominantly positive, emotionally grounded schema of traditional art. We discuss these findings in terms of their implications for psychotherapy and how AI-generated imagery may differ from traditional creative expression in therapeutic contexts.
A continuing debate in the academic and clinical literature concerns whether hypnosis is best conceptualised as a special state, distinct from normal consciousness, or whether hypnosis and related phenomena are better construed in terms of more mundane, everyday psychological processes. As a possible move toward reconciling these positions, in this paper we argue that, if we introduce the notion of hypnosis as a set of fairly routine procedures designed to achieve a state of non-pathological dissociation, then there is no necessary contradiction between the idea that hypnosis may involve the induction of an altered state of consciousness and the proposal that this arises from and is influenced by the kinds of standard psychological processes encountered in everyday life. To this end, with particular reference to neurophysiological findings, we examine the possible processes involved in the application of standard hypnotic induction procedures and discuss their role in hypnotic responding. However, we also argue that the cultural meanings attached to hypnosis, and other contextual elements such as attitudes and expectancies, are fundamental components of the hypnotic induction process and the experiences we associate with the concept of hypnosis. With these considerations in mind, we propose a new working procedural definition of hypnosis and examine the possible significance of this analysis for therapeutic applications of hypnosis.
The notion of entropy has been applied to psychopathology to define the homeostatic fragility resulting from uncertainty. The term implies the notion of dynamics within a self-organizing system. The theory of active inference, derived from computational neuroscience, proposes a Bayesian conceptualization of the living being, in which it constantly seeks to preserve its equilibrium in its relations with the environment by minimizing free energy. In this article, we briefly rehearse the history of entropy and its application to psychopathology afforded by the free energy principle. We set out to demonstrate how this theory could provide a unified understanding of mental disorders by presenting the work undertaken in this direction. We also discuss the epistemological implications of this theory for mental health, highlighting the value of moving towards a unified conceptual framework.
According to a widespread view, self-control is a top-down cognitive process that downregulates bottom-up processes, where those bottom-up processes, unless downregulated, are detrimental to self-control. In this paper, I argue that thinking of self-control solely in terms of top-down cognitive control is misleading. Instead, self-control has a necessary bottom-up component in conflict detection, realized by the interplay of the ventral attention circuit and the anterior cingulate cortex. This mechanism generalizes across different forms of self-control. I describe a model of the roles of top-down and bottom-up processing in self-control where bottom-up conflict detection allows the emergence of top-down control. On this model, some cases of self-control failure that are standardly thought to indicate impaired top-down control may often instead reflect maladaptive conflict detection. This insight also carries clinical relevance, such as for understanding ADHD. Intriguingly, this makes self-control begin nonvolitionally. Yet, while agents cannot exert synchronic control over whether conflict detection occurs, they can attempt to facilitate it through diachronic self-regulation, such as by shaping their circumstances to better enable adaptive conflict detection.
The growing autonomy and intelligence of generative artificial intelligence (AI) models, such as ChatGPT, highlight their potential in navigating complex moral decisions. However, the understanding of the moral judgment capabilities of these AI models remains limited. This study conducted two experiments to explore ChatGPT's ability to function as an artificial moral agent (AMA). Experiment 1 explored ChatGPT's comprehension and moral response as an AMA across four moral dilemmas: Trolley, Bridge, Whistleblower, and Helen's dilemma. Experiment 2 employed a quantitative approach to gauge ChatGPT's moral stances across diverse moral roles, utilizing Georg Lind's Moral Judgment Test. The findings indicate that ChatGPT can produce morally relevant outputs aligned with different ethical roles, showing variations across scenarios that reflect the input conditions. The majority of ChatGPT C-index values (the metric assessing moral judgment capability) fell within the medium-to-high range, indicating that its responses generally display moderately strong ethical inclinations. However, its moral outputs showed variability, and even when prompted to simulate morally deviant behaviors, responses often remained oriented toward ethically acceptable choices. Moreover, this study offers practical suggestions for enhancing AI moral decision-making, emphasizing the need for contextually aware AI systems, diverse training datasets, and robust ethical auditing mechanisms.
Can perception be described as a probabilistic process? The answer to that is clearly yes. But thornier questions involve whether perception is inherently probabilistic: whether perceptual decisions are probabilistic, and whether the sensory information available for decision making is probabilistic. In a recent review, Kristjansson (2023) proposed that the brain represents probability distributions of environmental stimuli, and uses them to guide attention, according to the most probable feature values. More specifically, attentional priming in visual search tasks can best be described as involving primed probabilistic attentional templates. That review was focused on the behavioral evidence regarding this, but here, we review the available evidence from neuroscience (neuroimaging, neuropsychology and neurophysiology) with regard to attentional priming, highlighting the light that this evidence casts upon this probabilistic view, while also considering the broader implications of this evidence. While the evidence from neuroscience can be described in probabilistic terms and this may be the most straightforward account of this evidence, how conclusive this is depends on some assumptions. Neuroimaging studies have consistently revealed strong repetition suppression as priming builds up. We argue that repetition suppression reflects increased certainty about the target identity, in other words, increased certainty about predictions regarding the future. Priming can, in this sense, be seen as a way of dealing with uncertainty about the future as long as the visual system assumes that past visual input is a good predictor of future input. We conclude that the most parsimonious account of the neural evidence regarding attentional priming is that it operates by progressively sharpening probabilistic representations, a view broadly compatible with Bayesian and predictive coding frameworks. We acknowledge, however, that there is yet little that can be considered definitive proof.
In this article, we aim to advance the dialogue between the deviance and the oppression paradigms of disability with the aim of rethinking the processes of adjustment to disabled embodiment in men with acquired impairments from an intersectional perspective. Our analysis is based on ethnographic research conducted at CityLiving (pseudonym), a private clinical-residential complex linked to a prestigious neurorehabilitation hospital, which offers adapted apartments for disabled people who need occasional assistance throughout the day. The results are structured around three vignettes on the negotiation of masculinity: (1) From fuckboys to walking tragedies. This vignette explores the intersections between symbolic feminization and the internalization of the personal tragedy theory of disability. (2) From not quite men to rehabilitated enwheelments. This vignette explores the intersection between ageism, ableism, and sexism in rehabilitation contexts. (3) From educated men to mama's boys. This vignette explores the intersection between dis/ableism, classism, and infantilization in users with cognitive and speech disabilities. We conclude that embodiment is always contextual and relational. Consequently, the processes of disablement and re-enablement always occur in relation to their social, family, and care environment, marked by the dynamics of the post-institution in which they are immersed.
