Saturday, July 14, 2012

The Cool Sites/Blogs Page Has Been Updated

It's been about a year since I have updated the Cool Sites/Blogs page on the navigation bar atop this blog. There is still more to do, but I have added several blogs in multiple categories, added categories, and deleted some dead or inactive blogs.

Here are a few of the new listings:

Integral Blogs:

Buddhism:

Psychology:

Neuroscience (new category)

Men's Sites

Video Feeds (new category)

Fun, News, and Stuff

David Berreby - Altrusim Linked to Empathy Circuitry in the Brain

Writing in the Mind Matters column at Big Think, David Berreby offers a brief overview of the findings in a new study suggesting altruism is linked to the same brain circuitry (the right temporoparietal junction) as moral decision making and empathy.

[For more on the link to empathy, see Jean Decety's work in this area, including this 2007 article (Neuroscientist; 13; 580) that outlines the role of the right temporoparietal junction in social interactions - he examines how lower-level computational functions are essential to the meta-cognitive processes of self/other distinction, agency, and empathy.]

The study is pay-walled, so here is that material available at Neuron's site. Berreby has not read the full paper yet either, but his knowledge of the neuroscience allows him to comment on the study in general.

Highlights

Econometric evidence reveals large individual differences in behavioral altruism

Gray matter volume in the right TPJ predicts subjects' behavioral altruism

GM in right TPJ predicts functional activity profile in TPJ during altruistic choice

Individual differences in altruism relate to both structure and function of right TPJ

Summary
Human altruism shaped our evolutionary history and pervades social and political life. There are, however, enormous individual differences in altruism. Some people are almost completely selfish, while others display strong altruism, and the factors behind this heterogeneity are only poorly understood. We examine the neuroanatomical basis of these differences with voxel-based morphometry and show that gray matter (GM) volume in the right temporoparietal junction (TPJ) is strongly associated with both individuals' altruism and the individual-specific conditions under which this brain region is recruited during altruistic decision making. Thus, individual differences in GM volume in TPJ not only translate into individual differences in the general propensity to behave altruistically, but they also create a link between brain structure and brain function by indicating the conditions under which individuals are likely to recruit this region when they face a conflict between altruistic and selfish acts.

As Berreby points out, "None of this means that Morishima et al. have proved that some people are born selfish while others are destined by their brains for sainthood." Based on what we know about how brain circuitry develops, the likelier explanation is that the more altruistic people have learned that behavior from infancy forward, thus re-enforcing those behaviors.

Study: The More Altruistic You Are, The Bigger Will Be This Part of Your Brain

David Berreby on July 12, 2012

In pursuit of the biological basis of morality, researchers are interested in an area of the brain at the boundary of the right temporal lobe and the right parietal lobe (very roughly, it's located maybe 2 inches above the midpoint of a line between your right eyebrow and your right ear, not that I recommend digging around for it). This right temporoparietal junction has been linked in various ways to moral judgments about the self and others. Now this paper, out today in the journal Neuron, supplies some striking new evidence for this area's importance. In lab experiments, people with more brain cells in this region were more altruistic than people with fewer.

Yosuke Morishima and his co-authors ran a functional MRI scan of their volunteers at the University of Zurich as they allocated a sum of money between themselves and an anonymous second person. (By the way, "Yosuke," for an altruism researcher, is an aptonym. It's a name that means "to give help" or "great support.") Some of the participants were quite selfish, while others were much more altruistic, giving up a meaningful amount of cash for another person whom they did not know. And it turned out the volunteer's degree of altruism correlated with the amount of gray matter they possessed at the right temporoparietal junction ("gray matter" consists of neurons (the cells whose activity makes brains brains) as well as the glial cells that support them and their blood supply).

I haven't yet read the paper (it's paywalled and I can't get to the library today to obtain it). So I can't report how many subjects were involved, nor whether the correlation was a statistical average or an absolutely reliable predictor for each individual ("more gray matter equals more altruism"). I'll come back to this post to clarify after I get the paper itself.

Still, I think I'm safe in saying this is an exciting result, because no one has yet shown such a strong link between a physical brain measurement and the complex behavior of giving someone a lift at cost to one's self. Maybe this isn't the biological basis of morality (you can argue, for example, that deciding to give money to a stranger is a way of building up your prestige, or promoting an "one-for-all" ethos that will protect you). But it is, strictly speaking, altruism (I take less than I could so you can get more).

None of this means that Morishima et al. have proved that some people are born selfish while others are destined by their brains for sainthood. As they've said themselves, the authors can't say whether anatomy causes behavior, or behavior causes anatomy. Maybe people born with bigger right temporoparietal regions are more inclined to be unselfish. But it's equally possible that unselfishness makes people use the region more, so that it beefs up like the muscles of a gym rat.

What is significant, though, is the pinpointing of a specific connection between the anatomy of the brain and the complex decisions of the mind.

Follow me on Twitter: @davidberreby

Dan Siegel - The Emerging Mind: How Relationships and the Embodied Brain Shape Who We Are

Dan Siegel spoke recently at the Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, otherwise known as the RSA. As always, Siegel is entertaining and erudite, without being obscure - and in this talk he explores a working definition for the mind.

Here are the most relevant of his many books for this discussion:

Siegel's books have done more to bring contemporary, relational psychoanalytic theory, based in attachment theory and interpersonal neurobiology, into the mainstream of modern psychology than any other author.

The Emerging Mind: How relationships and the embodied brain shape who we are

11th July 2012

Listen to the audio

(full recording including audience Q&A)
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RSA Keynote: Dan Siegel
What is the mind? From where and what does the mind emerge? Can our minds be made more resilient? What is ‘interpersonal neurobiology’?

Astonishingly, over ninety-five percent of mental health professionals from around the world have never received even a single lecture defining what the mind is. Bestselling author of both academic textbooks and works of popular science, and currently the clinical professor of psychiatry at UCLA, Daniel Siegel visits the RSA to explore a working definition of the mind.

Join Daniel Siegel as he outlines how the mind can be defined as an emergent, self-organizing process that arises from, and also regulates energy and information flow within the brain and within relationships with others. The mind’s functions in body and relationships will be described and then steps to strengthening this regulatory process of mind will be outlined as a surprising principle of mental health is revealed.

Underlying both the neural and the relational pillars of a healthy mind is the process of integration — the linkage of differentiated aspects of a system. Cultivating integration within relationships and the nervous system means we can create the flexible, adaptive, coherent, and stable states of a resilient emerging mind.

Chair: Dr Jonathan Rowson, the RSA Social Brain project.

See what people said on Twitter: #RSAmind

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Friday, July 13, 2012

Wolf Singer - Consciousness: Unity in Time Rather Than Space?

In this talk from the recent Evolution and Function of Consciousness Summer School ("Turing Consciousness 2012"), Wolf Singer looks at the neuronal correlates of consciousness - Consciousness: Unity in Time Rather Than Space? Wolf's talk offers support for the Baars' Global Workspace Theory, as well as suggesting that consciousness results from coherence in time (temporal convergence, phase coherence).

Here is the abstract for his talk:

Wolf Singer - Consciousness: Unity in Time Rather Than Space?

Abstract: The search for neuronal correlates of consciousness (NCC) often relies on comparisons between neuronal activation patterns associated with conscious and non-conscious processing, respectively, of physically identical stimuli. This strategy is known as the subtraction method and thought to isolate neuronal processes specific for conscious experience. However, this approach does not allow one to clearly separate the NCC proper from processes that just permit access to consciousness such as fluctuations in excitability at early stages or from processes that follow conscious experience such as storage of perceived items in working memory and response preparation. This problem can be reduced but not eliminated by considering the precise temporal sequence of events, using methods that capture brain activity with high temporal resolution such as time frequency analysis and event related potentials extracted from EEG or MEG signals.



Applying these methods we find as an early NCC a brief burst of oscillatory activity in the beta/gamma frequency range that occurs about 180 ms after stimulus presentation and is synchronized across a widely distributed network of cortical areas. This suggests as NCC not the activation of a particular, higher order cortical area but a dynamic state that is characterized by the coherent activation of a widely distributed network. This agrees with Baars and Dehaene's hypothesis of a work space and also with Sherrington's view that the unity of conscious experience does not require convergence in space (anatomical convergence) but results from coherence in time (temporal convergence, phase coherence). Indications for a special role of precisely synchronized oscillatory responses in the high frequency range have been obtained previously in animal experiments, using the paradigm of binocular rivalry.

      Fries, P., Roelfsema, P.R., Engel, A.K., Koenig, P., and Singer, W. (1997) Synchronization of oscillatory responses in visual cortex correlates with perception in interocular rivalry. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of America. 94(23), 12699-12704 http://www.pnas.org/content/94/23/12699.full.pdf+html

      Singer, W. (1998) Consciousness and the structure of neuronal representations. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. Lond. B 353: 1829-1840 http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1692413/pdf/9854255.pdf

      Engel, A.K., P. Fries, P.Koenig, M. Brecht, and W. Singer (1999) Temporal binding, binocular rivalry, and consciousness. Consciousness and Cognition 8: 128-151 http://www.ini.ethz.ch/~peterk/OwnPapers/engel.cc.99.pdf

      Engel, A.K., P. Fries, P. Koenig, M. Brecht, and W. Singer (1999) Concluding Commentary. Does time help to understand consciousness? Consciousness and Cognition 8: 260-268

      Melloni, L., C. Molina, M. Pena, D. Torres, W. Singer, and E. Rodriguez (2007) Synchronization of neural activity across cortical areas correlates with conscious perception. The Journal of Neuroscience 27(11): 2858-2865 http://www.jneurosci.org/content/27/11/2858.full.pdf+html

      Melloni, L. and W. Singer (2010) Distinct characteristics of conscious experience are met by large-scale neuronal synchronization. In: E. Perry, D. Collerton, F. LeBeau and H. Ashton (Eds.). New Horizons in the Neuroscience of Consciousness. Advances in Consciousness Research 79. John Benjamins, B.V., Amsterdam 2010, 17-28
      Aru, J., T. Bachmann, W. Singer and L. Melloni (2012) Distilling the neural correlates of consciousness. Neuroscience and Biobehavioral Reviews 36(2): 737-746

Open Culture - Watch Metropolis, Restored: Fritz Lang’s Masterpiece

Open Culture posted a link and some background on the newly restored version of Fritz Lang’s masterpiece, Metropolis (1927). Lang is reported to have thought the film silly, but it remains incredibly influential on generation after generation of sci-fi film makers.

Metropolis Restored: Watch a New Version of Fritz Lang’s Masterpiece

July 12th, 2012

Today we bring you the recently restored version of one of the most influential films of all time: Fritz Lang’s 1927 fable of good and evil fighting it out in a futuristic urban dystopia, Metropolis.

The story takes place in 2026. Metropolis is a beautiful high-tech city, but underneath the surface, masses of workers toil in slavery. To keep the machinery running efficiently, the workers have become virtual machines themselves. The city is ruled by a heartless mastermind named Johann Fredersen, whose idealistic son, Freder, rebels against him when he discovers the cruel conditions imposed on the workers. Freder falls in love with Maria, a messianic figure preaching love and reconciliation, but his father hatches an evil plot to turn the workers against Maria. He hires the mad scientist Rotwang to make a robotic version of Maria to wreak havoc among the workers, discrediting her and discouraging rebellion. An epic struggle ensues.

Lang said he got the idea for Metropolis while visiting New York in 1924. Standing on the deck of his ship in New York Harbor at night, the filmmaker was amazed at the spectacle:

I saw a street lit as if in full daylight by neon lights and, topping them, over-sized luminous advertisements moving, turning, flashing on and off, spiraling…something that was completely new and nearly fairy tale-like for a European in those days….The buildings seemed to be a vertical veil, shimmering, almost weightless, a luxurious cloth hung from the sky to dazzle, distract, and hypnotize. At night the city did not give the impression of being alive; it lived as illusions lived. I knew then that I had to make a film about all of these sensations.

The story was written mostly by Lang’s wife, Thea Von Harbou. Despite the popularity of the film, Lang detested the story. He told Peter Bogdanovich that he thought Metropolis was “silly and stupid.” From a purely visual standpoint, though, the film has had an enormous influence on science fiction and popular culture.

The iconic image above is from an extremely rare program from the March 21, 1927 London premiere of Metropolis. You can look through the entire 32-page program at the Web site of bookseller Peter Harrington (the page will open in a new window) and then watch the restored 2010 version of the film below. The restoration, supervised by the F.W. Murnau Foundation, incorporates footage from an early print discovered in Buenos Aires, bringing the film much closer to Lang’s original vision. You can purchase your very own copy online here, or watch it in parts on YouTube.

Metropolis, part one:

Metropolis, part two:

Margarita Tartakovsky, M.S. - 5 Strategies for Self-Compassion

Here is a brief article from the World of Psychology blog at Psych Central offering five quick tips for self-compassion. The material in this article is based on the cutting edge research of Kristen Neff, the leader (along with Christopher Germer) in the field of self-compassion.

5 Strategies for Self-Compassion
By Margarita Tartakovsky, M.S.
Associate Editor

Many of us are all too used to bashing ourselves. And it’s not surprising. In our society, we’re taught that being hard on ourselves and ashamed of everything from our actions to our looks gets results.

Self-criticism is the preferred path to success. We rarely think about showing ourselves kindness. Or even if we do, we worry that doing so is selfish, complacent or arrogant.

But research has found that self-criticism only sabotages us and produces a variety of negative consequences. For instance, according to Kristin Neff, Ph.D., associate professor in human development at the University of Texas at Austin, studies have shown that self-criticism can lead to lowered self-esteem, anxiety and depression.

Neff is the author of Self-Compassion: Stop Beating Yourself Up and Leave Insecurity Behind. Self-compassion is what you’d show a loved one struggling with a similar situation. Self-compassion has been linked to greater well-being, including diminished anxiety and depression, better emotional coping skills and compassion for others.¹

Specifically, according to Neff, self-compassion consists of three components:

Self-kindness: Being kind, gentle and understanding with yourself when you’re suffering.

Common humanity: Realizing that you’re not alone in your struggles. When we’re struggling, we tend to feel especially isolated. We think we’re the only ones to experience loss, make mistakes, feel rejected or fail. But it’s these very struggles that are part of our shared experience as humans.

Mindfulness: Observing life as it is, without being judgmental or suppressing your thoughts and feelings.

Myths about Self-Compassion
Because beating ourselves up is so entrenched in our society, you still might be suspicious of self-compassion. Below, Neff dispels common myths that may stand in the way of people being kinder to themselves.

Myth: Self-compassion is self-pitying or egocentric.
Fact: Self-pity is being immersed in your own problems and forgetting that others struggle, too, Neff said. However, being self-compassionate is seeing things exactly as they are — no more and no less, she said. It means acknowledging that you’re suffering, while acknowledging that others have similar problems or are suffering even more. It’s putting your problems into perspective.

Myth: Self-compassion is self-indulgent.
Fact: Being self-compassionate doesn’t mean solely seeking pleasure, Neff said. It’s not shirking responsibilities or being slothful. Rather, self-compassion focuses on alleviating suffering. From this perspective, you consider whether something will hurt you in the long run, she said.

Myth: Self-criticism is an effective motivator.
Fact: There’s actually nothing motivating about criticizing yourself, Neff said, because it makes you fear failure and lose faith in yourself. Even if you do achieve great things, you’re often miserable, anyway.

It’s interesting that in other areas of our lives we understand that being harsh doesn’t work. Take the example of parenting. Decades ago, we thought that harsh punishment and criticism were effective in keeping kids in line and helping them do well, Neff said.

However, today, we know that being a supportive and encouraging parent is more beneficial. (When you’re told you’re a failure, the last thing you think you’re capable of is succeeding, or even trying.)

Self-compassion acts like a nurturing parent, she said. So even when you don’t do well, you’re still supportive and accepting of yourself. Like a kind parent, your support and love are unconditional, and you realize that it’s perfectly OK to be imperfect.

This doesn’t mean being complacent. Self-criticism tears us down; it presumes that “I am bad.” Self-compassion, however, focuses on changing the behavior that’s making you unhealthy or unhappy, Neff said.

Strategies for Self-Compassion
Being self-compassionate might seem unnatural at first. These strategies can help. This may be harder for some individuals, Neff said, particularly if you’ve experienced trauma, so it’s important to work with a therapist.

1. Consider how you’d treat someone else. The simplest thing you can do, according to Neff, is to imagine what you’d do if someone you cared about came to you after failing or getting rejected. What would you say to that person? How would you treat them?

2. Watch your language. You may be so used to criticizing yourself that you don’t even realize that you’re doing it. So it helps to pay particular attention to the words you use to speak to yourself. If you wouldn’t say the same statements to someone you care about, then you’re being self-critical, Neff said.

3. Comfort yourself with a physical gesture. Kind physical gestures have an immediate effect on our bodies, activating the soothing parasympathetic system, Neff said. Specifically, physical gestures “get you out of your head and drop you into your body,” she said, which is important since “the head loves to run away with storylines.” For instance, she suggested putting your hands over your heart or simply holding your arm. Any gesture will do.

4. Memorize a set of compassionate phrases. Whenever you find yourself saying, “I’m horrible,” it helps to have a few phrases at the ready. Pick statements that really resonate with you. Combining that with a physical gesture — like hands over your heart — is especially powerful, Neff said. She uses the following phrases:

This is a moment of suffering.
Suffering is part of life.
May I be kind to myself in this moment?
May I give myself the compassion I need?
5. Practice guided meditation. Meditation helps to retrain the brain, Neff said. This way, self-compassionate gestures and self-soothing become more natural. Neff includes several self-compassion meditations on her website.

For more on this research, check out Neff’s comprehensive list of articles and chapters on self-compassion.

Thursday, July 12, 2012

APA Monitor - Benefits of Mindfulness for Clients and Therapists

Mindfulness practices of various sorts have infiltrated psychotherapy en mass since Marsha Linehan's Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT) began showing positive outcomes in borderline personality disorder and a whole collection of other diagnoses. Mostly, people simply add a mindfulness component to an existing therapeutic model (much as Linehan did with DBT, based quite literally in cognitive behavioral techniques).

Some mindfulness approaches to therapy are better than others, obviously. For me, mindfulness (not in CBT or DBT or any of the other versions, but simple Buddhist mindfulness) is essential to developing self-compassion, affect regulation, and the ability to self-distance when necessary.

For the July CEU course (CEU Corner), the American Psychological Association offered a look at the benefits of mindfulness practice for both the client and the therapist. In case you need a CEU, here is the info for that.

Welcome to ‘CE Corner'
"CE Corner" is a quarterly continuing education article offered by the APA Office of CE in Psychology. This feature will provide you with updates on critical developments in psychology, drawn from peer-reviewed literature and written by leading psychology experts. "CE Corner" appears in the February 2012, April, July/August and November issues of the Monitor.

To earn CE credit, after you read this article, purchase the online exam.

Upon successful completion of the test (a score of 75 percent or higher), you can print your CE certificate immediately. APA will immediately send you a "Documentation of CE" certificate. The test fee is $25 for members; $35 for nonmembers. The APA Office of CE in Psychology retains responsibility for the program. For more information, call (800) 374-2721, ext. 5991.

What are the benefits of mindfulness

A wealth of new research has explored this age-old practice. Here's a look at its benefits for both clients and psychologists.

By Daphne M. Davis, PhD, and Jeffrey A. Hayes, PhD
July 2012, Vol 43, No. 7
Print version: page 64

Mindfulness has enjoyed a tremendous surge in popularity in the past decade, both in the popular press and in the psychotherapy literature. The practice has moved from a largely obscure Buddhist concept founded about 2,600 years ago to a mainstream psychotherapy construct today.

Advocates of mindfulness would have us believe that virtually every client and therapist would benefit from being more mindful. Among its theorized benefits are self-control, objectivity, affect tolerance, enhanced flexibility, equanimity, improved concentration and mental clarity, emotional intelligence and the ability to relate to others and one's self with kindness, acceptance and compassion.

But is mindfulness as good as advertised? This article offers an overview of the research on mindfulness and discusses its implications for practice, research and training.

Empirically supported benefits of mindfulness
The term "mindfulness" has been used to refer to a psychological state of awareness, the practices that promote this awareness, a mode of processing information and a character trait. To be consistent with most of the research reviewed in this article, we define mindfulness as a moment-to-moment awareness of one's experience without judgment. In this sense, mindfulness is a state and not a trait. While it might be promoted by certain practices or activities, such as meditation, it is not equivalent to or synonymous with them.

Several disciplines and practices can cultivate mindfulness, such as yoga, tai chi and qigong, but most of the literature has focused on mindfulness that is developed through mindfulness meditation — those self-regulation practices that focus on training attention and awareness in order to bring mental processes under greater voluntary control and thereby foster general mental well-being and development and/or specific capacities such as calmness, clarity and concentration (Walsh & Shapiro, 2006).

Researchers theorize that mindfulness meditation promotes metacognitive awareness, decreases rumination via disengagement from perseverative cognitive activities and enhances attentional capacities through gains in working memory. These cognitive gains, in turn, contribute to effective emotion-regulation strategies.

More specifically, research on mindfulness has identified these benefits:

Reduced rumination. Several studies have shown that mindfulness reduces rumination. In one study, for example, Chambers et al. (2008) asked 20 novice meditators to participate in a 10-day intensive mindfulness meditation retreat. After the retreat, the meditation group had significantly higher self-reported mindfulness and a decreased negative affect compared with a control group. They also experienced fewer depressive symptoms and less rumination. In addition, the meditators had significantly better working memory capacity and were better able to sustain attention during a performance task compared with the control group.

Stress reduction. Many studies show that practicing mindfulness reduces stress. In 2010, Hoffman et al. conducted a meta-analysis of 39 studies that explored the use of mindfulness-based stress reduction and mindfulness-based cognitive therapy. The researchers concluded that mindfulness-based therapy may be useful in altering affective and cognitive processes that underlie multiple clinical issues.

Those findings are consistent with evidence that mindfulness meditation increases positive affect and decreases anxiety and negative affect. In one study, participants randomly assigned to an eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction group were compared with controls on self-reported measures of depression, anxiety and psychopathology, and on neural reactivity as measured by fMRI after watching sad films (Farb et al., 2010). The researchers found that the participants who experienced mindfulness-based stress reduction had significantly less anxiety, depression and somatic distress compared with the control group. In addition, the fMRI data indicated that the mindfulness group had less neural reactivity when they were exposed to the films than the control group, and they displayed distinctly different neural responses while watching the films than they did before their mindfulness training. These findings suggest that mindfulness meditation shifts people's ability to use emotion regulation strategies in a way that enables them to experience emotion selectively, and that the emotions they experience may be processed differently in the brain (Farb et al., 2010; Williams, 2010).

Boosts to working memory. Improvements to working memory appear to be another benefit of mindfulness, research finds. A 2010 study by Jha et al., for example, documented the benefits of mindfulness meditation among a military group who participated in an eight-week mindfulness training, a nonmeditating military group and a group of nonmeditating civilians. Both military groups were in a highly stressful period before deployment. The researchers found that the nonmeditating military group had decreased working memory capacity over time, whereas working memory capacity among nonmeditating civilians was stable across time. Within the meditating military group, however, working memory capacity increased with meditation practice. In addition, meditation practice was directly related to self-reported positive affect and inversely related to self-reported negative affect.

Focus. Another study examined how mindfulness meditation affected participants' ability to focus attention and suppress distracting information. The researchers compared a group of experienced mindfulness meditators with a control group that had no meditation experience. They found that the meditation group had significantly better performance on all measures of attention and had higher self-reported mindfulness. Mindfulness meditation practice and self-reported mindfulness were correlated directly with cognitive flexibility and attentional functioning (Moore and Malinowski, 2009).

Less emotional reactivity. Research also supports the notion that mindfulness meditation decreases emotional reactivity. In a study of people who had anywhere from one month to 29 years of mindfulness meditation practice, researchers found that mindfulness meditation practice helped people disengage from emotionally upsetting pictures and enabled them to focus better on a cognitive task as compared with people who saw the pictures but did not meditate (Ortner et al., 2007).

More cognitive flexibility. Another line of research suggests that in addition to helping people become less reactive, mindfulness meditation may also give them greater cognitive flexibility. One study found that people who practice mindfulness meditation appear to develop the skill of self-observation, which neurologically disengages the automatic pathways that were created by prior learning and enables present-moment input to be integrated in a new way (Siegel, 2007a). Meditation also activates the brain region associated with more adaptive responses to stressful or negative situations (Cahn & Polich, 2006; Davidson et al., 2003). Activation of this region corresponds with faster recovery to baseline after being negatively provoked (Davidson, 2000; Davidson, Jackson, & Kalin, 2000).

Relationship satisfaction. Several studies find that a person's ability to be mindful can help predict relationship satisfaction — the ability to respond well to relationship stress and the skill in communicating one's emotions to a partner. Empirical evidence suggests that mindfulness protects against the emotionally stressful effects of relationship conflict (Barnes et al., 2007), is positively associated with the ability to express oneself in various social situations (Dekeyser el al., 2008) and predicts relationship satisfaction (Barnes et al., 2007; Wachs & Cordova, 2007).

Other benefits. Mindfulness has been shown to enhance self-insight, morality, intuition and fear modulation, all functions associated with the brain's middle prefrontal lobe area. Evidence also suggests that mindfulness meditation has numerous health benefits, including increased immune functioning (Davidson et al., 2003; see Grossman, Niemann, Schmidt, & Walach, 2004 for a review of physical health benefits), improvement to well-being (Carmody & Baer, 2008) and reduction in psychological distress (Coffey & Hartman, 2008; Ostafin et al., 2006). In addition, mindfulness meditation practice appears to increase information processing speed (Moore & Malinowski, 2009), as well as decrease task effort and having thoughts that are unrelated to the task at hand (Lutz et al., 2009).

The effects of meditation on therapists and therapist trainees
While many studies have been conducted on the benefits of applying mindfulness approaches to psychotherapy clients (for reviews, see Didonna, 2009 and Baer, 2006), research on the effects of mindfulness on psychotherapists is just beginning to emerge. Specifically, research has identified these benefits for psychotherapists who practice mindfulness meditation:

Empathy. Several studies suggest that mindfulness promotes empathy. One study, for example, looked at premedical and medical students who participated in an eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction training. It found that the mindfulness group had significantly higher self-reported empathy than a control group (Shapiro, Schwartz, & Bonner, 1998). In 2006, a qualitative study of therapists who were experienced meditators found that they believed that mindfulness meditation helped develop empathy toward clients (Aiken, 2006). Along similar lines, Wang (2007) found that therapists who were experienced mindfulness meditators scored higher on measures of self-reported empathy than therapists who did not meditate.

Compassion. Mindfulness-based stress reduction training has also been found to enhance self-compassion among health-care professionals (Shapiro, Astin, Bishop, & Cordova, 2005) and therapist trainees (Shapiro, Brown, & Biegel, 2007). In 2009, Kingsbury investigated the role of self-compassion in relation to mindfulness. Two components of mindfulness — nonjudging and nonreacting — were strongly correlated with self-compassion, as were two dimensions of empathy — taking on others' perspectives (i.e., perspective taking) and reacting to others' affective experiences with discomfort. Self-compassion fully mediated the relationship between perspective taking and mindfulness.

Counseling skills. Empirical literature demonstrates that including mindfulness interventions in psychotherapy training may help therapists develop skills that make them more effective. In a four-year qualitative study, for example, counseling students who took a 15-week course that included mindfulness meditation reported that mindfulness practice enabled them to be more attentive to the therapy process, more comfortable with silence, and more attuned with themselves and clients (Newsome, Christopher, Dahlen, & Christopher, 2006; Schure, Christopher, & Christopher, 2008). Counselors in training who have participated in similar mindfulness-based interventions have reported significant increases in self-awareness, insights about their professional identity (Birnbaum, 2008) and overall wellness (Rybak & Russell-Chapin, 1998).

Decreased stress and anxiety. Research found that premedical and medical students reported less anxiety and depressive symptoms after participating in an eight-week mindfulness-based stress reduction training compared with a waiting list control group (Shapiro et al., 1998). The control group evidenced similar gains after exposure to mindfulness-based stress reduction training. Similarly, following such training, therapist trainees have reported decreased stress, rumination and negative affect (Shapiro et al., 2007). In addition, when compared with a control group, mindfulness-based stress reduction training has been shown to decrease total mood disturbance, including stress, anxiety and fatigue in medical students (Rosenzweig, Reibel, Greeson, Brainard, & Hojat, 2003).

Better quality of life. Using qualitative and quantitative measures, nursing students reported better quality of life and a significant decrease in negative psychological symptoms following exposure to mindfulness-based stress reduction training (Bruce, Young, Turner, Vander Wal, & Linden, 2002). Evidence from a study of counselor trainees exposed to interpersonal mindfulness training suggests that such interventions can foster emotional intelligence and social connectedness, and reduce stress and anxiety (Cohen & Miller, 2009).

Similarly, in a study of Chinese college students, those students who were randomly assigned to participate in a mindfulness meditation intervention had lower depression and anxiety, as well as less fatigue, anger and stress-related cortisol compared to a control group (Tang et al., 2007). These same students had greater attention, self-regulation and immunoreactivity. Another study assessed changes in symptoms of depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder among New Orleans mental health workers following an eight-week meditation intervention that began 10 weeks after Hurricane Katrina. Although changes in depression symptoms were not found, PTSD and anxiety symptoms significantly decreased after the intervention (Waelde et al., 2008). The findings suggest that meditation may serve a buffering role for mental health workers in the wake of a disaster.

Other benefits for therapists. To date, only one study has investigated the relationship between mindfulness and counseling self-efficacy. Greason and Cashwell (2009) found that counseling self-efficacy was significantly predicted by self-reported mindfulness among masters-level interns and doctoral counseling students. In that study, attention mediated the relationship between mindfulness and self-efficacy, suggesting that mindfulness may contribute to the development of beneficial attentional processes that aid psychotherapists in training (Greason & Cashwell, 2009). Other potential benefits of mindfulness include increased patience, intentionality, gratitude and body awareness (Rothaupt & Morgan, 2007).

Outcomes of clients whose therapists meditate
While research points to the conclusion that mindfulness meditation offers numerous benefits to therapists and trainees, do these benefits translate to psychotherapy treatment outcomes?

So far, only one study suggests it does. In a study conducted in Germany, randomly assigned counselor trainees who practiced Zen meditation for nine weeks reported higher self-awareness compared with nonmeditating counselor trainees (Grepmair et al., 2007). But more important, after nine weeks of treatment, clients of trainees who meditated displayed greater reductions in overall symptoms, faster rates of change, scored higher on measures of well-being and perceived their treatment to be more effective than clients of nonmeditating trainees.

However, the results of three other studies were not as encouraging. Stanley et al. (2006) studied the relationship between trait mindfulness among 23 doctoral-level clinical psychology trainees in relation to treatment outcomes of 144 adult clients at a community clinic that used manualized, empirically supported treatments. Contrary to expectation, therapist mindfulness was inversely correlated with client outcome.

This is consistent with other findings that suggest an inverse relationship exists between therapists' mindfulness and client outcomes (Bruce, 2006; Vinca & Hayes, 2007). Other research suggests that no relationship exists between therapist mindfulness and therapy outcome (Stratton, 2006).

What might be behind these results? It could be that "more mindful" people are likely to score lower on self-reports of mindfulness because they are more accurately able to describe their "mindlessness." Conversely, people who are less mindful may not realize it and therefore may be inclined to rate themselves higher on such measures.

Overall, while the psychological and physical health benefits of mindfulness meditation are strongly supported by research, the ways in which therapists' mindfulness meditation practice and therapists' mindfulness translate to measureable outcomes in psychotherapy remain unclear. Future research is needed to examine the relations between therapists' mindfulness, therapists' regular mindfulness meditation practice and common factors known to contribute to successful treatment outcomes.

Important next steps in research
Future research holds tremendous potential for learning more about the neurophysiological processes of meditation and the benefits of long-term practice on the brain. Research on neuroplasticity may help explain the relationships among length and quality of meditation practice, developmental stages of meditators and psychotherapy outcomes. More research is needed to better understand how the benefits of meditation practice accumulate over time.

In addition, psychologists and others need to explore other ways to increase mindfulness in addition to meditation. Given that current research does not indicate that therapists' self-reported mindfulness enhances client outcomes, better measures of mindfulness may need to be developed or different research designs that do not rely on self-report measures need to be used. Garland and Gaylord (2009) have proposed that the next generation of mindfulness research encompass four domains:

1. performance-based measures of mindfulness, as opposed to self-reports of mindfulness;
2. scientific evaluation of notions espoused by Buddhist traditions;
3. neuroimaging technology to verify self-report data; and
4. changes in gene expression as a result of mindfulness. Research along these lines is likely to enhance our understanding of mindfulness and its potential benefits to psychotherapy.

Research is also needed on effective and practical means of teaching therapists mindfulness practices. Future research could investigate ways mindfulness practices and mindfulness meditation could be integrated into trainees' practicum and clinical supervision. Since mindfulness-based stress reduction has been successfully used with therapist trainees (e.g., Shapiro et al., 2007), the technique may be a simple way for therapists to integrate mindfulness practices into trainees' practicum class or group supervision. Future research questions could include: Does therapists' practice of mindfulness meditation in clinical supervision with their supervisees affect the supervisory alliance or relational skills of supervisees? Does practicing formal mindfulness meditation as a group in practicum or internship aid in group cohesion, self-care, relational skills or measurable common factors that contribute to successful psychotherapy?

Given the limited research thus far on empathy, compassion, decreased stress and reactivity, more research is needed on how mindfulness meditation practice affects these constructs and measurable counseling skills in both trainees and therapists. For example, how does mindfulness meditation practice affect empathy and compassion for mid-career or late-career therapists who are experienced at mindfulness?

Shapiro and Carlson (2009) have suggested that mindfulness meditation can also serve psychologists as a means of self-care to prevent burnout. Future research is needed on not only how the practice of mindfulness meditation helps facilitate trainee development and psychotherapy processes, but also how it can help therapists prevent burnout and other detrimental outcomes of work-related stress.

In addition, despite abundant theoretical work on ways to conceptually merge Buddhist and Western psychology to psychotherapy (e.g., Epstein, 2007, 1995), there is a lack of literature on what it looks like in session when a therapist uses mindfulness and Buddhist-oriented approaches to treat specific clinical issues.

In conclusion, mindfulness has the potential to facilitate trainee and therapists' development, as well as affect change mechanisms known to contribute to successful psychotherapy. The field of psychology could benefit from future research examining cause and effect relationships in addition to mediational models in order to better understand the benefits of mindfulness and mindfulness meditation practice.

Purchase the exam online.

Daphne M. Davis, PhD, is a postdoctoral fellow at the Trauma Center at Justice Resource Institute in Brookline, Mass.
Jeffrey A. Hayes, PhD, is a professor of counseling psychology at the Pennsylvania State University department of educational psychology, counseling and special education.

TEDxNewHaven - Charles Eisenstein: The Art and Science of Happiness

Charles Eisenstein recently gave a talk at TEDxNewHaven on The Art and Science of Happiness - here is the video of that presentation. Eisenstein is most recently the author of Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition, and previously of The Ascent of Humanity.

Charles Eisenstein: The Art and Science of Happiness

Charles Eisenstein is the author of The Ascent of Humanity and Sacred Economics as well as numerous articles in print and online. A faculty member of Goddard College, he speaks and teaches worldwide on themes of transition, community, money, consciousness, and the evolution of culture. Charles has also been featured on the viral video by filmmaker Ian MacKenzie, "The Revolution is Love."

Before becoming a writer, he was a Chinese-English translator living in Taiwan. He graduated from Yale University in 1989 with a degree in mathematics and philosophy.

New Research Supports Diagnosis of Dissociative Identity Disorder in Some Survivors of Trauma

Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is still one of the most controversial diagnoses in psychology, with many professionals denying its existence. The primary objections are that the "disorder" is iatrogenic (created by the therapist) and that DID is a culture-bound syndrome not found in other cultures.

There is a considerable body of evidence in support of dissociative disorders, including DID. A couple of new studies are presented below - one refuting the iatrogenic model for DID and one supporting a sub-type of PTSD with strong dissociative tendencies.

Wikipedia offers a good summary of the current issues:

What the main debate today concerns is the question - can child abuse causes DID. Colin A. Ross points out the errors of logic and scholarship that the quite vocal disbelievers of trauma based disorders, Piper and Merskey, have made in their publications concerning DID, but even with the doubt raised by Ross there is still debate today. [33] Ross also disagrees with Piper and Merskey's conclusion that DID cannot be accurately diagnosed, pointing to internal consistency between different structured dissociative disorder interviews (including the Dissociative Experiences Scale, Dissociative Disorders Interview Schedule and Structured Clinical Interview for Dissociative Disorders) ^[73] that are in the internal validity range of widely accepted mental illnesses such as schizophrenia and major depressive disorder. In Ross's opinion, Piper and Merskey are setting the standard of proof higher than they are for other diagnoses. Ross also asserts that Piper and Merskey have cherry-picked data and not incorporated all relevant scientific literature available, such as independent corroborating evidence of trauma in some patients. ^[74]

Initially DID was infrequently diagnosed, numbering less than 100 by 1944, with only one further case added in the next two decades. In the late 1970s and 80s, the number of cases rose sharply. Accompanying this rise was an increase in the number of alters per case, rising from only the primary and one alter personality, in most cases, to an average of 13 in the mid-1980s. Proponents of the trauma model propose that the increase in incidence and prevalence of DID over time is that the condition was misdiagnosed as other such disorders in the past; another explanation is that an increase in awareness of DID and child sexual abuse has led to earlier, more accurate diagnosis. Those in the Sociocognitive camp explain the increase as a result of iatrogenic procedures and health care professionals past failure to recognize dissociation is now redressed by new training and knowledge and they claim that dissociative phenomena is actually increasing, but this rise only represents a new form of an old and protean entity: "hysteria". In a 2011 publication, V. Sar postulated other possible causes for the apparent differences in the prevalence of DID, including different preferences in diagnostic instruments, cultural differences in the interpretation of presenting symptoms, differences in mental health care systems and differences in the frequency of overall mental health treatment seeking behavior around the world. ^[75]

I have generally been highly skeptical of DID diagnoses, and I still believe there is a serious issue with iatrogenic causation. However, I have seen extreme dissociation in clients (fitting the structural dissociation model - more on this below) in which clients do not necessarily have a different personality, but regress to a much younger and wounded self-state that is totally isolated from the adult self.

A new piece of research recently examined a collection of the complaints against DID, that clients diagnosed with DID exhibit fantasy proneness, suggestibility, suggestion, and role-playing tendencies. One of the researchers, Ellert Nijenhuis, is a leader is in the understanding of structural dissociation. The research was published in the open access journal (freely available online), PLoS ONE:

Fact or Factitious? A Psychobiological Study of Authentic and Simulated Dissociative Identity States

A. A. T. Simone Reinders, Antoon T. M. Willemsen, Herry P. J. Vos, Johan A. den Boer, Ellert R. S. Nijenhuis.

Abstract

Background
Dissociative identity disorder (DID) is a disputed psychiatric disorder. Research findings and clinical observations suggest that DID involves an authentic mental disorder related to factors such as traumatization and disrupted attachment. A competing view indicates that DID is due to fantasy proneness, suggestibility, suggestion, and role-playing. Here we examine whether dissociative identity state-dependent psychobiological features in DID can be induced in high or low fantasy prone individuals by instructed and motivated role-playing, and suggestion.

Methodology/Principal Findings
DID patients, high fantasy prone and low fantasy prone controls were studied in two different types of identity states (neutral and trauma-related) in an autobiographical memory script-driven (neutral or trauma-related) imagery paradigm. The controls were instructed to enact the two DID identity states. Twenty-nine subjects participated in the study: 11 patients with DID, 10 high fantasy prone DID simulating controls, and 8 low fantasy prone DID simulating controls. Autonomic and subjective reactions were obtained. Differences in psychophysiological and neural activation patterns were found between the DID patients and both high and low fantasy prone controls. That is, the identity states in DID were not convincingly enacted by DID simulating controls. Thus, important differences regarding regional cerebral bloodflow and psychophysiological responses for different types of identity states in patients with DID were upheld after controlling for DID simulation.

Conclusions/Significance
The findings are at odds with the idea that differences among different types of dissociative identity states in DID can be explained by high fantasy proneness, motivated role-enactment, and suggestion. They indicate that DID does not have a sociocultural (e.g., iatrogenic) origin.

Full Citation:

Simone Reinders AAT, Willemsen ATM, Vos HPJ, den Boer JA, Nijenhuis ERS. (2012). Fact or Factitious? A Psychobiological Study of Authentic and Simulated Dissociative Identity States. PLoS ONE, 7(6): e39279. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0039279

The most recent studies suggest that DID is a form of structural dissociation, as defined by Steele, van der Hart, and Nijenhuis. Again, Wikipedia offers a brief and coherent overview of the structural model:

Structural Dissociation Model
Steele, K., van der Hart, O., Nijenhuis, E. suggest a distinction between "apparently normal parts" (ANP) and "emotional parts". ANP, the part in executive control and who is responsible for daily functioning is often exhausted and depressed. The part avoids trauma memory and often has amnesia for many if not all childhood traumatic events. If those events were grouped close together, entire blocks of early life will be absent from ANP's memory. ANP avoids the affect and information held by EP, including nightmares, dreams, somnambulism, intrusive thoughts, flashbacks and some somatoform symptoms. ANP is not only avoidant of the list above, but is actually phobic of trauma memory, related emotions, cognitions and sensory memory that goes with it. ANP actively or passively suppress triggers to the point that it can become automatic. ^[55]

"Emotional parts" (EP) are needed for survival situations involving Fight or Flight, total submission, reflexes, vivid traumatic memories and strong, painful emotions. EP remains fixated in traumatic experiences, which it often reenacts. It is focused on a narrow range of cues that were relevant to the trauma. “Action systems” direct EP. ^[56]

Summary of Categories of Structural Dissociation. Primary Structural Dissociation (PSD)

PSD - Involves one EP and one ANP such as found in simple acute stress disorder and PTSD. The ANP is detached and numb, characterized by partial or complete amnesia of the trauma. EP is usually limited in scope compared to ANP and is hyper-amnesic and re-experiences trauma.

Secondary Structural Dissociation. (SSD) - Includes trauma based DDNOS-1, complex PTSD and borderline personality disorder. This is characterized by dividedness of two or more defensive subsystems. For example, there may be different EP's who are devoted to flight, fight, freeze, total submission and so on.

Tertiary Structural Dissociation (TSD) - This is Dissociative Identity Disorder. Two or more ANP perform aspects of daily living, such as work, child-rearing. There must also be 2 or more EP.

This model fits the findings of the Internal Family Systems model of therapy (which is not exclusive to DID, but works with all forms of multiplicity). The ANP are termed managers in the IFS model, while the EP are called exiles. The IFS model also recognizes a third group of parts that fall between the ANP and EP distinctions - firefighters are parts that leap into action when the ANP fail to keep the EP suppressed, and they often take the form of addictive and numbing behaviors.

Colin Ross explains DID through his trauma model of dissociation (see Epidemiology of Multiple Personality Disorder and Dissociation, which is unfortunately behind a pay wall). A recent study, published in JAMA's Archive of General Psychiatry, was able to verify the existence of a dissociative subtype in PTSD survivors - the results seem to confirm the links between early trauma, PTSD, and dissociative disorders for some individuals (overwhelmingly, it seems, in those who suffered childhood abuse).

A Latent Class Analysis of Dissociation and Posttraumatic Stress DisorderEvidence for a Dissociative Subtype

Erika J. Wolf, PhD; Mark W. Miller, PhD; Annemarie F. Reardon, PhD; Karen A. Ryabchenko, PhD; Diane Castillo, PhD; Rachel Freund, PhD

Arch Gen Psychiatry. 2012;69(7):698-705. doi:10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2011.1574

Context The nature of the relationship of dissociation to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is controversial and of considerable clinical and nosologic importance.

Objectives To examine evidence for a dissociative subtype of PTSD and to examine its association with different types of trauma.

Design A latent profile analysis of cross-sectional data from structured clinical interviews indexing DSM-IV symptoms of current PTSD and dissociation.

Settings The VA Boston Healthcare System and the New Mexico VA Health Care System.

Participants A total of 492 veterans and their intimate partners, all of whom had a history of trauma. Participants reported exposure to a variety of traumatic events, including combat, childhood physical and sexual abuse, partner abuse, motor vehicle accidents, and natural disasters, with most participants reporting exposure to multiple types of traumatic events. Forty-two percent of the sample met the criteria for a current diagnosis of PTSD.

Main Outcome Measures Item-level scores on the Clinician-Administered PTSD Scale.

Results A latent profile analysis suggested a 3-class solution: a low PTSD severity subgroup, a high PTSD severity subgroup characterized by elevations across the 17 core symptoms of the disorder, and a small but distinctly dissociative subgroup that composed 12% of individuals with a current diagnosis of PTSD. The latter group was characterized by severe PTSD symptoms combined with marked elevations on items assessing flashbacks, derealization, and depersonalization. Individuals in this subgroup also endorsed greater exposure to childhood and adult sexual trauma compared with the other 2 groups, suggesting a possible etiologic link with the experience of repeated sexual trauma.

Conclusions These results support the subtype hypothesis of the association between PTSD and dissociation and suggest that dissociation is a highly salient facet of posttraumatic psychopathology in a subset of individuals with the disorder.

Full Citation:

Wolf EJ, Miller MW, Reardon AF, Ryabchenko KA, Castillo D, Freund R. (2012). A Latent Class Analysis of Dissociation and Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Evidence for a Dissociative Subtype. Arch Gen Psychiatry, 69(7):698-705. doi:10.1001/archgenpsychiatry.2011.1574.

The continued collecting of data on this small subgroup of clients are so crucial in enabling clinicians to understand their experiences and design appropriate interventions.

Wednesday, July 11, 2012

John Searle - Consciousness and Causality

This is a talk by philosopher John Searle given at the Evolution and Function of Consciousness Summer School ("Turing Consciousness 2012") held at the University of Montreal as part of Alan Turing Year.

John Searle Consciousness and Causality

Abstract: How do neurobiological processes in the brain cause consciousness? I think this is the most important question in the biological sciences today. Two related questions: Where exactly is consciousness realized in the brain and how does it function causally in our behavior? We know consciousness happens and we know the brain does it. How does it work? How do we approach this problem scientifically? The standard way is to go through three steps. First, try to find the neurobiological correlate of consciousness. Second, try to test if the correlations are in fact causal. Do the neurobiological states cause consciousness? Third, try to formulate a theory. Why do these processes cause consciousness at all, and why do these specific processes cause these specific conscious states? One depressing feature of this entire research project is that it does not seem to be making much progress.

Books and papers:

Mystery of consciousness

The Problem of Consciousness

How to study consciousnessscientifically

Free Will as a Problem inNeurobiology

Freedom and Neurobiology: Reflections on Free Will, Language, and Political Power

P2P Foundation - Participatory and Relational Spirituality: Ending the Guru Age

The P2P Foundation has a wiki that offers a lot of useful material on the variations of participatory and relational spirituality that are emerging as an alternative to the traditional guru model of spiritual teaching.

If the ideas of P2P (peer-to-peer) are not familiar, check out the Manifesto: Peer to Peer and Human Evolution.

I've been following Michel Bauwens' work in the P2P realm for several years. More recently, as I have become familiar with Robert Stolorow's Intersubjective Systems Theory in psychoanalysis, a model he has developed in association with George Atwood, Donna Orange, and Bernard Brandchaft (among others) - see The Intersubjective Perspective for a nice collection of essays introducing the topic).

In Notes on Spiritual Leadership and Relational Spirituality, selections of text by John Heron, there is a good definition of the guru phenomenon and why its dominance is coming to an end. [See also an entry on Spiritual Authoritarianism.]

The guru phenomenon
The traditional oriental guru represents a form of spiritual leadership in which so-called advanced spiritual states of being are transmitted from guru to disciple. This requires the disciple to be present with the guru, physically or psychically, to project onto the guru the disciple’s latent divine nature, to be obedient and devoted to the guru, and to practise the disciplines he prescribes. There is a hierarchical, charismatic relationship to effect the disciple’s shift from an ordinary to an extraordinary state of being ‘enlightened’. A favourite candidate for ‘enlightenment’ is the so-called nondual state, in which spirit and any kind of form are known to be not two.

There seem to have been four phases of the guru phenomenon in the West.

(1) In the late decades of the nineteenth century and early decades of the twentieth century, there was just a small guru-invasion from the East with key players like Vivekananda and the spread of the Vedanta movement in the West.

(2) Then post-war from 1945 with the publication of Huxley's The Perennial Philosophy, there started a major guru-invasion from the East　including the dramatic spread through the 60s and the 70s of Zen and Tibetan Buddhism in the USA and Europe.

(3)　In the third phase, over the last thirty years or so, alongside the guru-invasion from the East there has been the growing phenomenon of home-grown Western gurus and spiritual teachers claiming the special status of 'enlightenment'.

(4) The fourth phase is just getting under way. It seems to be distinguished by four features.

(a) The erosion of guru status as a result of a continuous stream of sexual and financial abuse and bullying scandals among both Eastern and home-grown Western gurus and spiritual teachers.

(b) The erosion of 'enlightenment' claims by the proliferation of the number of people, especially in the West, making the claim: the more people who make the claim, the more its narcissistic inflation stands revealed. For the 'enlightenment' claim is also an　authority-claim to have　followers, a recruiting drive to gather in spiritual projections. The more claims that are made, the stronger the competition among claimants in the market-place for attention.

(c) A growing awareness that spiritual authority is within and that to project it outward onto teacher, tradition or text is an early, adolescent phase of spiritual development in the one projecting, and counter-spiritual manipulative abuse in　any guru/teacher who seeks to　elicit, to appropriate and to sustain the projection.

(d) The emergence of peer to peer spirituality, which democratizes charismatic, enlightened leadership, and realizes that it is a role which different persons assume at different times, either in the initiation of a peer group or in the continuous unfolding of its process.

In a section called The fallacy of nondual individualism, Heron dismantles Ken Wilber's version of nondual enlightenment that is based on individual development of lines (kinds of knowing, such as cognitive, psychosexuality, socio-emotional capacity, communicative competence, creativity, and many others) through stages (from pre-personal, through personal, to transpersonal). Heron concludes:

Wilber tries to argue that the basic categories for integrating all the lines in higher unfoldment have been uncovered on a single line that has no experience whatsoever of such multi-line integration. The way out of this tangle is gently and radically to propose that the contemplative line is not a spirituality line, that spirituality is not about states, however remarkable and extraordinary, that people get into by a lifetime of individual meditation.

As an alternative, Heron offers Relational Spirituality:

Relational spirituality
A more convincing account of spirituality is that it is about multi-line integral development explored by persons in relation. This is because many basic developmental lines - e.g. those to do with gender, psychosexuality, emotional and interpersonal skills, communicative competence, morality, to name but a few - unfold through engagement with other people. A person cannot develop these lines on their own, but through mutual co-inquiry. The spirituality that is the highest development of these lines can only be achieved through relational forms of practice that unveil the spirituality implicit in them (Heron 1998, 2005).

In short, the spirituality of persons is developed and revealed primarily in their relations with other persons. If you regard spirituality primarily as the fruit of individual meditative attainment, then you can have the gross anomaly of a "spiritual" person who is an interpersonal oppressor, and the possibility of "spiritual" traditions that are oppression-prone (Heron, 1998; Kramer and Alstad, 1993; Trimondi and Trimondi, 2003). If you regard spirituality as centrally about liberating relations between people, then a new era of participative religion opens up, and this calls for a radical restructuring and reappraisal of traditional spiritual maps and routes.

Certainly there are important individualistic developmental lines that do not necessarily directly involve engagement with other people, such as contemplative development, and physical fitness. But these are secondary and supportive of those that do, and are in turn enhanced by co-inquiry with others.

On this overall view, spirituality is located in the interpersonal heart of the human condition where people co-operate to explore meaning, build relationship and manifest creativity through collaborative action inquiry into multi-line integration and consummation. I propose one possible model of such collegial applied spirituality with at least eight distinguishing characteristics.

(1) It is developmentally holistic, involving diverse major lines of human development; and the holism is both within each line and as between the lines. Prime value is put on relational lines, such as gender, psychosexuality, emotional and interpersonal skills, communicative competence, peer communion, morality, human ecology, supported by the individualistic, such as contemplative competence, physical fitness.

(2) It is psychosomatically holistic, embracing a fully embodied and vitalized expression of spirit. Spirituality is found not just at the ‘top end’ of a developmental line, but in the ground, the living root of its embodied form, in the relational heart of its current level of unfolding, and in the transcendent awareness embracing it.

(3) It is epistemologically holistic, embracing many ways of knowing: knowing by presence with, by intuiting significant form and process, by conceptualizing, by practising. Such holistic knowing is intrinsically dialogic, action- and inquiry-oriented. It is fulfilled in peer-to-peer participative inquiry, and the participation is both epistemic and political.

(4) It is ontologically holistic, open to the manifest as nature, culture and the subtle, and to spirit as immanent life, the situational present, and transcendent mind. It sees our relational, social process in this present situation as the immediate locus of the unfolding integration of immanent and transcendent spirit (Heron, 1998, 2004, 2005).

(5) It is focused on worthwhile practical purposes that promote a flourishing humanity-cum-ecosystem; that is, it is rooted in an extended doctrine of rights with regard to social and ecological liberation.

(6) It embraces peer-to-peer relations and participatory forms of decision-making. The latter in particular can be seen as a radical discipline in relational spirituality, burning up a lot of the privatized ego.

(7) It honours the gradual emergence and development of peer-to-peer forms of association and practice.

(8) It affirms the role of both initiating hierarchy, and spontaneously surfacing and rotating hierarchy among the peers, in such emergence.

In a separate P2P Wiki entry on Relational Spirituality, there are two additional definitions of this topic offered by John Heron in his various writings.

Relational spirituality as primary in dipolar spiritual development By John Heron: (Adapted from pp. 99-101 of Heron, J. Sacred Science: Person-centred Inquiry into the Spiritual and the Subtle, Ross-on-Wye: PCCS Books, 1998.)

“My own view of spiritual development is:

(1) That it is dipolar, to do (a) with moral life committed to the empowerment of ourselves and other people in relationship, to the full flowering of our immanent life, in community embracing diversity in free unity, and (b) with the inner transformation of consciousness.

(2) That (a) is primary and the consummation of (b).

The tendency of the eastern mystic has been to reduce his involvement with other people to directing the vertical transformation of their consciousness. His commitment to his own transformation as an end-in-itself overflows into guiding other people to do the same. His moral goal has been to enable the unenlightened to become enlightened and so attain moksha, release from the treadmill of reincarnation in the phenomenal world, regarded for the most part as an illusion grounded on ignorance, want of discrimination. However, I regard the phenomenal world as an innovative process of divine becoming, within which we humans are co-creators of global transformation, a planetary civilization.

On this view, my spiritual development has these two interdependent aspects, primary and secondary. The secondary and supportive aspect is that it works to foster and facilitate, with others, the inner transformation of human consciousness, so that we may celebrate the integrated fullness of creation in its physical, subtle and spiritual dimensions (not so that we can get release from it all).

The primary aspect is that it works to release the life-potential of persons-in-relation, to facilitate social empowerment and social justice in every sphere of human activity. For persons to become full co-creators of a planetary civilization, each one has an all-pervasive right to participate in any decision that affects the fulfilment of their needs and interests, the expression of their preferences and values. This universal right has a claim not only within political institutions, but in every sphere of human association where decisions are being taken: in industry, education, ecology, medicine, the family, and, of course, in research and in religion . The fulfilment of this claim throughout our planet in all these spheres has hardly begun. Moreover, the fact that there is so much spiritual authoritarianism in the world, in creeds and cults both old and new, creates a deep attitudinal warp in people which makes them susceptible to oppression by many other kinds of external authority. In reviewing criticisms of the traditional hierarchical model of spiritual reality, promoted by current adherents of the perennial philosophy, Donald Rothberg writes:

Hierarchical ontologies are commonly ideological expressions of social and psychological relations involving domination and exploitation - of most humans (especially women, workers, and tribal people), of nature, and of certain parts of the self. Such domination limits drastically the autonomy and potential of most of the inhabitants of the human and natural worlds, justifying material inequalities and preventing that free and open discourse which is the end of a free society. It distorts psychological life by repressing, albeit in the name of wisdom and sanctity, aspects of ourselves whose full expression is necessary to full psychological health and well-being (Journal of Transpersonal Psychology, 1986, 18(1): 1-34).
My spiritual development, then, cannot be measured simply in terms of hours of meditation or number of extended retreats or stabilized attainment of some inner, transcendent state of mind, as I ascend the hierarchical spiritual ladder. On its own, this is vertical flight from full spiritual development, which I believe finds its primary consummation in the unfolding of my immanent spiritual life. And this, fully followed through, involves attention to social change and social justice through promoting participative forms of decision-making in every kind of human association with which I am involved, including the religious.

To summarize and restate the above: spiritual transformation of human beings has two complementary forms. The first form is about how persons realize in their exterior daily lives their immanent spiritual life and its potential. I believe this means developing the fulness of relational living, of expressive personal autonomy-in-connectedness, in terms of:

· Emotional and interpersonal competence: empowering self, the other and the relationship.
· The exercise of self-determination and co-operation in every situation of decision-making.
· The external expression of imaginative, creative skills .
· Commitment to social and planetary transformation.
· The grounding of life-style management in a co-creating relation with immanent spiritual life.

The second form is about how people open to a progressive interior transfiguration by a transcendent spiritual consciousness interdependent with immanent spiritual life. I believe this is secondary to, supportive of, and consummated in, the first form.

The following extract from my keynote talk at an international conference on “Living Spirit – New Dimensions in Work and Learning" at the University of Surrey, UK, in 2002, elaborates further the immanent relational pole of dipolar spiritual development.

Living spirit in the dawn of the age of immanence What I believe all this really shows is the newly emerging power of the human spirit, the dawning age of divine immanence, of the indwelling spirit that is the ground of human motivation. I think that living spirit is active within us, the very deep source of all human aspiration, both the will to live as a distinct individual, and the will to live as a universal participant – the will to be one of the creative Many and to be engaged with the creative One. These profound impulses have for the past 3,000 years been predominantly subordinate to the authoritative control of religious traditions, teachers and texts which have promoted spirit as primarily transcendent. And where these impulses have been emancipated from such control they have been reduced to secular status. Secular modernity has delivered huge gains in terms of relatively autonomous ethics, politics, science, knowledge generally, and art.

Yet it has championed the autonomy of the isolated Cartesian ego, separated off from the world it seeks to categorize, codify and manage. I do think this is the century of the spirit that is living deep within: the self-actualizing tendency of Rogers (1959, 1980), Maslow (1970), Gendlin (1981), embedded within the body-mind; the bio-spiritual experience of grace in the body of McMahon and Campbell (1991); Jean Houston’s entelechy self, the ground of one’s being, the root self whence all our possibilities emerge (Houston, 1987); Washburn’s dynamic ground of libido, psychic energy, numinous power or spirit (Washburn, 1995); Wilber’s ground unconscious, Eros, spirit-in-action (Wilber, 2000a).

Instead of appealing to the spiritual authority of teacher, tradition and text, an increasing number of people respond co-creatively with this divine dynamic moving within. Spiritual authority is found in the exercise of a deep kind of inner discrimination, where human autonomy and divine animation marry.

Nikolai Berdyaev (1874-1948), in the great tradition of European personalism, with which I align myself, was on to it with his affirmation of human personhood as manifesting the creative process of spirit. For he defined spirit as self-determining human subjectivity engaged in the realization of value and achieved in true community. He used the excellent Russian word sobornost to name such a community: it means diversity in free unity. Berdyaev also had a wonderful vision of the impending era, which he called the third epoch. The third epoch is the epoch of divine-human co-creation of a transformed planet, transformed persons, transformed social relationships (Berdyaev, 1937). Translated into my conceptual system, Berdyaev’s account means that living spirit manifests as a dynamic interplay between autonomy, hierarchy and co-operation. It emerges through autonomous people each of whom who can identify their own idiosyncratic true needs and interests; each of whom can also think hierarchically in terms of what values promote the true needs and interests of the whole community; and each of whom can co-operate with – that is, listen to, engage with, and negotiate agreed decisions with - their peers, celebrating diversity and difference as integral to genuine unity. Hierarchy here is the creative leadership which seeks to promote the values of autonomy and co-operation in a peer to peer association. Such leadership, as in the free software movement mentioned earlier, is exercised in two ways. First, by the one or more people who take initiatives to set up such an association. And second, once the association is up and running, as spontaneous rotating leadership among the peers, when anyone takes initiatives that further enhance the autonomy and co-operation of other participating members. The autonomy of participants is not that of the old Cartesian ego, isolated and cut off from the world. Descartes sat inside a big stove to get at his cogito, ergo sum - I think, therefore I am – and while his exclusively subjective self provided a necessary leverage against traditional dogmatisms to help found the modern worldview, it left the modern self alienated from the separated world it commands. The autonomy of those who flourish within sobornost, by contrast, is an autonomy that is rounded and enriched by a profound kind of inner animation, that develops and flourishes only in felt interconnectedness, participative engagement, with other persons, and with the biodiversity and integral ecology of our planet (Spretnak, 1995). This is the participatory worldview, expressed also in the extended epistemology I mentioned earlier on: our conceptual knowing of the world is grounded in our experiential knowing – a felt resonance with the world and imaginal participation in it. This epistemic participation is the ground for political participation in social processes that integrate autonomy, hierarchy and co-operation. What we are now about is a whole collaborative regeneration of our world through co-creative engagement with the spirit that animates it and us.

For just a few of the many contributors to the participatory worldview see: Abram (1996); Bateson, 1979; Berman, 1981; Ferrer (2001); Heron, 1992, 1996a, 1998; Merleau-Ponty, 1962; Skolimowski (1994); Spretnak, 1991; Reason, 1994; Reason and Rowan, 1981; Tarnas (1991); Varela, Thompson and Rosch, (1991).

See the original entry for a list of references.

There is another excellent entry at the P2P Wiki on Participatory Spirituality, which opens with an excellent definition from Jorge Ferrer, author of Revisioning Transpersonal Theory : A Participatory Vision of Human Spirituality and co-editor of The Participatory Turn: Spirituality, Mysticism, Religious Studies.

As defined by Jorge Ferrer: Spiritual knowing is a participatory process. What do I mean by "participatory"? First, "participatory" alludes to the fact that spiritual knowing is not objective, neutral, or merely cognitive. On the contrary, spiritual knowing engages us in a connected, often passionate, activity that can involve not only the opening of the mind, but also of the body, the heart, and the soul. Although particular spiritual events may involve only certain dimensions of our nature, all of them can potentially come into play in the act of spiritual knowing, from somatic transfiguration to the awakening of the heart, from erotic communion to visionary co-creation, and from contemplative knowing to moral insight, to mention only a few (see also Ferrer, 2000a, 2002).

Second, the participatory nature of spiritual knowing refers to the role that our individual consciousness plays during most spiritual and transpersonal events. This relation is not one of appropriation, possession, or passive representation of knowledge, but of communion and co-creative participation.

Finally, "participatory" also refers to the fundamental ontological predicament of human beings in relation to spiritual energies and realities. Human beings are - whether we know it or not - always participating in the self-disclosure of Spirit. This participatory predicament is not only the ontological foundation of the other forms of participation, but also the epistemic anchor of spiritual knowledge claims and the moral source of responsible action.

Spiritual phenomena involve participatory ways of knowing that are presential, enactive, and transformative:

1. Spiritual knowing is presential: Spiritual knowing is knowing by presence or by identity. In other words, in most spiritual events, knowing occurs by virtue of being. Spiritual knowing can be lived as the emergence of an embodied presence pregnant with meaning that transforms both self and world. Subject and object, knowing and being, epistemology and ontology are brought together in the very act of spiritual knowing.

2. Spiritual knowing is enactive: Following the groundbreaking work of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch (1991), my understanding of spiritual knowing embraces an enactive paradigm of cognition: Spiritual knowing is not a mental representation of pregiven, independent spiritual objects, but an enaction, the bringing forth of a world or domain of distinctions co-created by the different elements involved in the participatory event. Some central elements of spiritual participatory events include individual intentions and dispositions; cultural, religious, and historical horizons; archetypal and subtle energies; and, most importantly, a dynamic and indeterminate spiritual power of inexhaustible creativity.

3. Spiritual knowing is transformative: Participatory knowing is transformative at least in the following two senses. First, the participation in a spiritual event brings forth the transformation of self and world. Second, a transformation of self is usually necessary to be able to participate in spiritual knowing, and this knowing, in turn, draws forth the self through its transformative process in order to make possible this participation. (http://www.datadiwan.de/SciMedNet/library/articlesN81+/N83Ferrer_part.htm)

There is also a definition from John Heron:

"The parties involved in a co-creative, enactive, transformative relation reciprocally and dynamically shape and reshape - in and through the process of meeting – how they understand each other, the regard they have for each other, and how they act and interact in relation with each other.

This definition is framed to apply to the central person-to-person relations. It can, with appropriate modifications, be applied to relations between ways of knowing, to relations between persons and their worlds, and, including and transcending all these, to the relation between persons and the divine.

Person-to-person relations are central because they are a precondition for setting the scene for divine self-disclosure and for persons to participate in it. In previous epochs this precondition was met by teacher-disciple hierarchical relations. Today divine self-disclosure can manifest through person-to-person peer relations, serviced from time to time by temporary hierarchical initiatives rotating among the peers.

Person-to-person peer relations are central, in my view, because of the intimate relation between epistemic participation and political participation. Epistemic participation is about the participative relation between the knower and the known. Political participation in this context is to do with participative decision-making among those involved about how we know and what we know. If participative knowing between persons is consummated in fully reciprocal encounter, then co-operative decision-making, both about how to engage in such reciprocal knowing and about what it reveals, is necessary for authentic interpersonal knowing - the realm of the between where divine self-disclosure can manifest."

Spiritual practice: A primary ground for the practice of participatory-relational spirituality can be cultivated by collaborative peer-to-peer relations between persons engaged in fully embodied, multidimensional, transformative flourishing in and with their worlds. See [1]

Finally, here is a Discussion section that presents a brief summary of exchanges between Heron and Ferrer on their slightly differing definitions:

John Heron's critique on the relation between participatory and Relational Spirituality
Ferrer's account of participatory spirituality - in the passage quoted above – fails, from my point of view, to bring out the centrality of co-creative/collaborative relations between persons as central to the meaning and the practice of participatory spirituality. If you read the whole passage very carefully you will find that this is indeed the case. Thus, and crucially, person-to-person collaboration is absent from his account of "some central elements of spiritual participatory events". Elsewhere he refers to "self and world", and nowhere to self and other selves. I think he would argue that person-to-person co-operation is implicit in phrases like "other forms of participation" and "responsible action", but, if so, this buries it in unstated implications and makes it appear very subsidiary - instead of central. A few pages earlier in his book he writes of transpersonal events as multilocal, including the interpersonal and the communal, yet makes no explicit reference to any of this when he comes on to the passage quoted above."

The Relational Dimension of Participatory Spirituality: Reflections by Jorge Ferrer on John Heron’s Critique
1. Although my theorizing has always been grounded in collaborative interpersonal spiritual practice (plus my own personal spiritual inquiry, extensive reading, and dialogue with others), John is correct stating that the relational or interpersonal dimension of participation is not emphasized in Revisioning Transpersonal Theory (RTT, 2002). I see RTT and Sacred Science very complementary in this respect.

2. I stress the importance of relational spiritual work in later writings that deal with more practical, less philosophical issues than RTT. See, for example, my essay on "Integral Transformative Practice: A Participatory Perspective," published in The Journal of Transpersonal Psychology (2003), my co-authored essay on "Integral Tranformative Education: A Participatory Proposal,‿ published in The Journal of Transformative Education (2005), and, to a lesser extent, my recent essay on “Embodied Spirituality: Now and Then,‿ published in Tikkun. Of related interest, I wrote another essay on spirituality and intimate relationships, whose shorter version will be published in the next issue of Tricycle: The Buddhist Review, and the complete one in Tikkun a few months later.

3. In my talks and conferences, I have found very helpful to introduce the notion of participatory spirituality in terms of three forms of co-creation: (1) intrapersonal co-creation, i.e., of the various human dimensions working together creatively as a team; (2) interpersonal co-creation, i.e., of human beings working together as peers in solidarity and mutual respect; and (3) transpersonal co-creation, i.e., of both human dimensions and collaborative human beings interacting with the Mystery in the co-creation of spiritual insights, practices, expanded forms of liberation, and spiritual worlds.

4. On a practical level, many of my courses at the California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, and the integral transformative work I facilitate, are deeply relational and stress the centrality of interactive embodied meditations, interpersonal and group dynamics, collaborative spiritual inquiry, among other dimensions.

In sum, though I don't see the contrast between my participatory approach and relational approaches to spirituality as sharp as John paints it, it is accurate to say that the presentation of participatory spirituality in RTT did not stress the practical, and strongly relational, dimension of my participatory perspective.

John Heron's account of the relation between participatory spirituality and relational spirituality
The simplest provisional account I can give of this relation is as follows:

Participatory spirituality is inherently relational in four ways:

1. It involves a co-creative, enactive, transformative relation between persons and the divine.

2. This relation transcends and includes the relations between multiple ways of knowing within the person.

3. And centrally the relations between persons and other persons.

4. And the relations between persons and their worlds.

In one sentence:

Participatory spirituality involves a co-creative, enactive, transformative relation between persons and the divine, a relation which transcends and includes: the relations between multiple ways of knowing within the person, centrally the relations between persons and other persons, and the relations between persons and their worlds.

Again, there are links and references at the post.

A full list of John Heron's publications can be found here - many of them are available online.
A list of Jorge Ferrer's publications, without any links.

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Saturday, July 14, 2012

Summary

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Friday, July 13, 2012

Wolf Singer - Consciousness: Unity in Time Rather Than Space?

Myths about Self-Compassion

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Thursday, July 12, 2012

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Wednesday, July 11, 2012

Relational spirituality

John Heron's critique on the relation between participatory and Relational Spirituality

The Relational Dimension of Participatory Spirituality: Reflections by Jorge Ferrer on John Heron’s Critique

John Heron's account of the relation between participatory spirituality and relational spirituality