George Lakoff: How Brains Think: The Embodiment Hypothesis

Published on Apr 7, 2015

Keynote address recorded March 14, 2015 at the inaugural International Convention of Psychological Science in Amsterdam.

Saturday, 14 March 2015


George Lakoff
Departments of Linguistics and Cognitive Science, University of California, Berkeley, USA

How do we answer the question, “How are thought and language constituted by the brain’s neural circuitry?” Neuroscience alone cannot answer this question. The field that studies the details of embodied conceptual systems and their expression in language is cognitive linguistics. In a book (in preparation with Srini Narayanan) we propose a neural computational “bridging model” as a way to answer the question. The talk gives illustrative details.

George Lakoff is a world-renowned cognitive linguist whose work reaches beyond the area of linguistics to provide groundbreaking insights into the realms of neuroscience and cognitive psychology as well. He is a pioneer in the multidisciplinary theory of the embodied mind, the idea that higher-order aspects of cognition are rooted in and constrained by bodily features such as the motor and perceptual systems. Additionally, his metaphor theory and insight into morally based framing, in which ideas are conveyed using very specific language that is tied to a larger conceptual framework such as freedom or equality, have made him a go-to strategist for politicians.

Read more about George Lakoff.

Books by George Lakoff that might be of interest.


Metaphors We Live By (2003, updated reissue)
Where Mathematics Comes From: How The Embodied Mind Brings Mathematics Into Being (2000)
Philosophy in the Flesh: the Embodied Mind & its Challenge to Western Thought (1999)

A TRULY Integral Model of Psychological Development

Here is a TRULY integral perspective on psychological development that comes from Willis F. Overton, Thaddeus L. Bolton Professor of Psychology, Emeritus, at Temple University. A great number of his papers are available on Research Gate.

The quotations below come from a paper by three other authors, but they are heavily influenced by Overton's Relational Developmental Systems model of development (see here and here for papers by Overton describing his model).

From "Emergence, Self-Organization and Developmental Science"
By Gary Greenberg, Kristina Schmid Callina, & Megan Kiely Mueller

Advances in Child Development and Behavior, 44
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-397947-6.00004-0

"With respect to embodiment, Overton (2008) states, “embodiment [is not] about a set of genes causing behavior, or a split-off brain causing or being the mind …. Embodiment is a concept of synthesis, a bridge that joins broad areas of inquiry into a unified whole (e.g., the biological, the phenomenological, the sociocultural and environmental) as relative standpoints that together constitute the whole” (p. 3, emphasis added)." (p. 118)

Incorporating "the biological, the phenomenological, the sociocultural, and environmental" in his model, Overton has covered each of the AQAL quadrants (biological = it; phenomenological = I; sociocultural = we; and environmental = its). He does this within an embodied and embedded framework, and it is also enactive - but he uses the terms relational, or relationism instead.

This model is focused on development, but is also is applied to all other realms of inquiry, including mind and consciousness. Importantly, Overton puts a special emphasis on the embodied nature of all of these processes.

"Consistent with our definition of psychology as a biopsychosocial science, development is an embodied phenomenon (Overton, 2006, 2007). Among the implications of embodiment is that at any point in time, development cannot be understood in reference to a single variable or a single dimension, either internal or external. As we have pointed out, the study of cognitive development, brain development, personality development, or any psychological phenomenon must recognize the fusion of these processes with other internal and external dimensions of change in which they are fused. Of course, embodiment with all levels of the ecology necessarily includes the individual’s embeddedness with temporality (history) that involves at the very least ontogenetic and phylogenetic time (Elder, 1998). Furthermore, embodiment is not static; that is, due to epigenesis, developmental scientists should expect qualitative discontinuities in the nature of the embodied developing individual across time and place, both ontogenetically and phylogenetically." (p. 119)

Here, the authors adds something I have not seen explicitly stated in the AQAL model - temporality, or history. We are always embedded not just in space, but also in our unique time. The author cited here is Elder, but I have seen this same distinction made in Overton's work as well. 

Here is one last quote from Overton and Lerner, from a 2014 article that served as an introduction to a special issue of Research in Human Development.

"It will come as no surprise to the readers of this issue that we seriously embrace the relational scientific paradigm, which we have referred to as relationism and relational developmental systems (e.g., Lerner & Benson, 2013; Lerner & Overton, 2008; Overton 2010, 2013; Overton & Lerner, 2012). Briefly, the primary ontological and epistemological categories of this paradigm are (1) process (vs. Cartesian substance), (2) becoming/being (vs. Cartesian being), (3) holism (vs. Cartesian atomism), (4) relational analysis (vs. Cartesian either/or split analysis), (5) multiple perspectives (vs. Cartesian dualistic split objectivism– subjectivism), (6) coaction (vs. Cartesian split interaction), and (7) multiple forms of determination (vs. Cartesian-Newtonian efficient/material causality).

As a derivation from these relational categories, the relational developmental systems paradigm characterizes the living organism as a spontaneously active, self-creating (autopoetic, enactive), self-organizing, and self-regulating nonlinear complex adaptive system. The system’s development occurs through its own embodied activities and actions operating in a lived world of physical and sociocultural objects, according to the principle of probabilistic epigenesis. This development leads, through positive and negative feedback loops created by the system’s action, to increasing system differentiation, integration, and complexity, directed toward adaptive ends.

The categories and characterizations of relational developmental systems are abstract and form the frame within which the meanings of lower order concepts become defined. As Searle (1992) pointed out, categories and characterizations of the sort we describe lead to vocabularies, and these vocabularies ultimately affect the way we think about issues and investigate empirical questions."

Overtone and Lerner, "Fundamental Concepts and Methods in Developmental Science: A Relational Perspective." Research in Human Development, 11: 63–73, 2014.

Peter J. Marshall - Beyond Different Levels: Embodiment and the Developmental System

Last night I posted an introductory chapter on the Relational Developmental Systems model, developed (seemingly on his own) by Willis Overton. For lack of a better descriptor, it's an integral developmental model.

Below is the article that led me to this (new to me) relational model for all forms of developmental science. The applications of this approach are endless and can be used in every major field of study, from consciousness to epigenetics.

I'm not quite sure how all of this fits into Ken Wilber's AQAL model, but I sense that this is the emergence of a relational worldview, maybe the first real signs of an integral perspective (Teal/Yellow) in the sciences.

I will be posting more on this as I read more....


Full Citation: 
Marshall PJ. (2014, Aug 20). Beyond different levels: embodiment and the developmental system. Frontiers in Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology; 5:929. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00929

Beyond different levels: Embodiment and the developmental system

By Peter J. Marshall

• Department of Psychology, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA

The value of studying a phenomenon at multiple levels of analysis is often emphasized in psychology, but a lack of clarity about the nature of levels and the relations among them remains an impediment to progress. The suggestion here is that an approach combining the tenets of embodiment with the construct of the developmental system provides a way forward. Embodiment opposes the splitting off and elevation of a level of mechanisms that has characterized much of cognitive science. In contrast, a constructivist embodied approach places a level of mechanisms in the context of a formal or systems level of analysis, with developmental process framing the interpenetrating relations between levels. Such an approach stems from a relational worldview that opposes conceptual splits and posits that levels of structure and process comprise an indissociable complementarity. The combination of embodiment and developmental systems within a relational worldview is discussed and elaborated through outlining the integrative approach of relational developmental systems, which has been proposed as a scientific paradigm within which formulations of the interrelations among brain, body, and mind can be advanced.

The value of explanations spanning multiple levels of analysis has become an important emphasis in psychological science, yet a coherent framework for explicating such levels and the relations among them remains elusive. Within the field of cognitive science, one influential attempt to conceptualize different levels of analysis was put forward by the vision scientist David Marr (1982). In line with the computational emphasis that characterized cognitive science at the time he was writing, Marr's account concerned three levels “at which any machine carrying out an information processing task must be understood” (Marr, 1982, p. 25). The first level, which Marr called the computational level, concerns the general nature of the problem or task at hand. At the second level of representation and algorithm, a sequence of operations and a representational format is specified that would solve the problem specified at the first level. At the third level of implementation, the question is how that particular solution could be realized on a machine (i.e., a description of the physical hardware needed). There are similarities between Marr's account and other levels-based proposals from the same era (e.g., Simon, 1969; Dennett, 1971; Wimsatt, 1976), but his model has remained particularly influential. However, on closer examination, two particular issues constrain the utility of this basic framework (see also Marshall, 2013, in press).

First, psychological science has often been characterized by a tendency to emphasize the explanatory priority of one level over another. For example, it could be argued that cognitive science has historically been too concerned with Marr's second level of representation and algorithm, or the level of problem-solving in terms of what symbols are needed for a solution, and the rules under which those symbols can be manipulated. This emphasis can be partly traced to the influence of the idea that cognition consists of formal computational reasoning processes acting on the syntactic, but not the semantic, aspects of symbolic representations (Fodor, 1975). This cognitivist approach was associated with an alignment of cognitive psychology with the emerging discipline of artificial intelligence, which further contributed to the dominance of an information processing view of the mind (Newell et al., 1958). From this perspective, cognitive operations could be seen as manipulations of sub-personal representations to which meaning had been pre-assigned (for a recent critique, see Allen and Bickhard, 2013). It has been argued in various places that the move toward cognitivism, with its associated emphasis on Marr's second level, was fundamentally a wrong turn in that it prevented the emergence of more integrative accounts of mental life (see Bruner, 1990; Thompson, 2007; Rowlands, 2010).

Second, psychology as a discipline has not arrived at a clear formulation of how to conceptualize the relations between levels. Indeed, it could be argued that the lack of a coherent explanatory framework for understanding the relations between different levels is one of the biggest obstacles to progress in the discipline. This problem can be partly traced to an emphasis within cognitive science on the relative autonomy of each of Marr's levels, which in turn stemmed from the proposal that a given task or problem could be solved in a myriad of ways, using different representational systems or forms of physical implementation (Fodor, 1975; Putnam, 1975; Pylyshyn, 1984). While this notion of multiple realization appears to avoid the problem of causal reductionism (Miller, 2010), it sidesteps the crucial question of how to conceptualize the relations among levels.

Given the lack of coherence concerning the nature of levels and the relations among them, how are we to move forward? The suggestion here is that a framework that recognizes the interpenetrating nature of the relations between levels, and in which considerations of development play a key role, is a way forward. More specifically, it is argued that a relational developmental systems approach (Overton, 2013), in which the interconnections among levels can be articulated within the context of embodiment, provides a route toward a truly integrative account.

Embodiment

Embodied approaches have become increasingly visible in psychology over the past three decades (e.g., Varela et al., 1991; Damasio, 1994; Glenberg, 1997; Clark, 1998; Anderson, 2003; Wheeler, 2005; Thompson, 2007; Barsalou, 2008; Beer, 2008; Overton, 2008; Semin and Smith, 2008; Menary, 2010). Although there are clearly different theoretical and empirical strands of embodied cognition (Wilson, 2002; Kiverstein, 2012), to a greater or lesser extent they all challenge the isolated computational mind of cognitivism, which lacks a brain, a body and a culture (Edelman, 1992).

By locating the brain in the body of an active, agentive organism, embodiment threatens the clear distinctions between perception (input), cognition (information processing) and action (the execution of instructions or output) that underpin the cognitivist account. One key tenet of embodied approaches is that cognition can no longer be packaged into an isolated level of information processing, or Marr's second level of representation and algorithm. As noted by Clark (2000), “our notions of what top-level task needs to be performed, and what kinds of algorithms are adequate to perform it, are deeply informed by reflection of details of bodily implementation, current needs, and action-taking potential” (p. 96). As such, embodiment puts pressure on a tidy separation of levels (or the isolation of any one level), and the need to understand the relational ties among levels moves to the fore.

Embodiment places the organism as an active agent that is tightly interconnected with its environment, with the actions of the individual constantly modifying these interconnections, a process that in turn influences subsequent actions. In one particular theoretical approach to embodiment, this feedback loop is the foundation of a dynamic system in which the boundaries between individual and environment cannot be clearly determined (Stewart et al., 2010). In turn, this proposal brings with it some far-reaching suggestions. Specifically, advocates of what Chemero (2009) terms radical embodied cognitive science suggest that the dynamic coupling of organism and environment has two related implications for framing the study of mental life (see also Hutto and Myin, 2012). First, that cognitive processes are distributed across the dynamic system that results from the non-linear coupling of individual and environment. Second, that the formulation of the wider cognitive system as a dynamic system challenges the need to invoke the concept of representation in accounts of mental life (Silberstein and Chemero, 2012). This challenge is partly founded in the work of Gibson (1979), who proposed that preexisting environmental structure largely negates the need for the concept of mental representation as it is usually understood.

In line with these points, empirical work from the radical embodied perspective often draws on dynamical systems theory as a basis for modeling the coupling of an agent's behavior over time with the changing state of the environment. However, it would be misleading and potentially damaging if an embodied approach was equated with one particular flavor of dynamic systems models. Among others, David Witherington has argued that a full understanding of living things entails seeing levels of organization and process as being complementary and indissociable (e.g., Witherington, 2011; Witherington and Heying, 2013). He makes the point that this stipulation pushes against the Gibsonian emphasis that is apparent in certain flavors of dynamic systems theory, for instance that of Thelen and Smith (1994). According to Witherington (in press), embodiment could be productively aligned with an approach more resembling Piagetian constructivism (see also Witherington and Margett, 2011), a sentiment that would be endorsed by those dynamical systems practitioners who see constructivism as being fundamentally consistent with systems approaches (e.g., van Geert, 2011).

Relational Developmental Systems

Here I wish to highlight the suggestion that a particular constructivist approach to embodiment, informed by specific lines of systems thinking in developmental science and the philosophy of biology, has a great deal of potential for informing the understanding of different levels of analysis. This approach is termed relational developmental systems (RDS), as put forward by Willis Overton and Richard Lerner, who have suggested that it has key implications for understanding the nature of levels and the relations between them (Overton and Lerner, 2012; Overton, 2013). As the term suggests, RDS combines two broader metatheoretical streams: relationism and developmental systems. The worldview of relationism rejects any simple notion of separable causes, and can be contrasted with what Overton (2006) terms a Cartesian worldview that encourages dichotomies, elevates the explanatory value of proximate mechanisms, and precludes integration. Working under the umbrella of relationism allows these constraints to be jettisoned and enables a move toward a more integrative, developmentally oriented account of brain, body, and mind.

At a finer grain of theory, RDS is further informed by the developmental systems approach that emerged from a particular strand of psychobiological research in the 20th century (Lehrman, 1953; Schneirla, 1959; Gottlieb, 1970) and which brings together related viewpoints from developmental and evolutionary biology (Oyama, 1985; Griffiths and Gray, 1994). While this strand consists of various threads with different emphases (Johnston, 2010; Griffiths and Tabery, 2013), at its core are the notion of the developmental system, the necessity of multiple modes of explanation, and the stipulation that no single aspect of the system can be elevated in terms of its causal role (Shea, 2011). In turn, the developmental systems approach has its roots in principles derived by embryologists in the mid-20th century (e.g., Spemann, 1938; Kuo, 1939) who documented how organismic development proceeds through a process of differentiation and integration. This foundational notion went on to influence developmentalists such as Werner (1948) and Piaget (1952) who laid the foundations for a biologically-informed developmental science of life and mind.

Drawing on the construct of the developmental system, RDS embraces several forms of explanation and brings them together in a relational framework. One key emphasis is on the importance of what can be called pattern explanation, or what Overton (1991) labeled competence. In turn, the notion of competence is similar to Aristotle's notion of the formal cause, which is interrelated with, but different from, other types of explanation such as efficient or material causes (Caston, 2006). It is important here to emphasize the necessarily abstract quality of pattern explanation, which transcends the framing of temporally related antecedents and consequences that is usually associated with the notion of causation. As such, pattern explanation refers to the structure or organization of the endogenously active system. This abstraction reflects the view that organization is not something that exists over and above the parts of a system, yet at the same time allowing organization more than a descriptive role. In this sense, the notion of organization as constraint (Thompson, 2007; Deacon, 2012) is helpful. As framed by Witherington (in press):

“the explanatory causality of a system's organization rests in its top-down constraint. Constraint involves a lessening of variability, a narrowing of degrees of freedom, and as such plays a critical role in causal explanation by virtue of establishing limitations for what kinds of bottom-up processes… are available to a given system; thus, the nature of local interactions cannot be fully understood divorced from the organizational whole in which these interactions are embedded” (p. 90).

The necessity of relating multiple modes of explanation is central to the RDS approach, in which pattern explanation provides the meaning context for a different and complementary level of processes, or what Overton (1991) labeled procedures. In referring to distinct, observable factors having a casual action that precedes a specific effect, processes (or what in Aristotelian terms would be efficient causes) are quite close to everyday notions of causation. However, as discussed by Witherington (2011, in press), this can too easily lead to a diminished role for structure and a denial of the explanatory import of the formal patterns. According to accounts that discount a causal role for pattern explanation, the appearance of structure arises from the operation of complex positive and negative feedback processes, but does not causally influence the subsequent operation of those processes. However, this neglects the fact that complex processes must be organized in some way, and it is this issue that necessitates the formal level of explanation, which becomes the system of a systems approach. Simply put, it is a mistake to believe that pattern explanations are rendered unnecessary if enough processes are described. Adopting such a position would present a conundrum that stretches far back in the history of philosophical and scientific thought, which is that every efficient cause or mechanism cannot be caused by another efficient cause or mechanism. In contrast, from a relational viewpoint, form and process can be seen as inextricably linked through the notion of circular causality (Witherington, 2011). Any living system acts according to its particular organization, and that organization changes through its activity.

Perhaps the most problematic manifestation of the neglect of pattern explanation comes through a situation in which processes—as properties of parts of a system—are conflated with the properties of the whole system. In their critique of cognitive neuroscience, Bennett and Hacker (2003) termed this the mereological fallacy, such that an accumulation of neural mechanisms cannot stand in as a full explanation of the properties of the individual person. Related instances of conflating subpersonal processes with personal-level properties of the individual are a widespread problem in many areas of contemporary psychology, including developmental science (for discussion of one example, see Rakoczy, 2012). Avoiding these pitfalls requires the understanding that processes at the procedural level must be organized in some way, and that in and of themselves, processes or mechanisms have no context. It is this issue that brings the focus to competence or formal explanation as a different level of analysis, with the stipulation that this level provides a functional context for a different, complementary level of processes.

Given the above, we can move toward seeing the importance of a dynamic pattern that entails an indissociable relation between organization and activity. To use the terminology of Overton (1991), if the level of procedures is understood as the active processes through which competence comes into being, while simultaneously the competence level serves as a context for organizing the procedural level, we can begin to understand how the two levels operate in a complementary fashion. This allows arrival at a relational frame in which the interleaving of pattern explanation and the understanding of specific processes is appreciated as being fundamental to the scientific enterprise (Overton, in press).

A relational perspective on the different levels of structure and mechanism also brings considerations of change and transformation to the fore (Overton, 1991), because the reciprocal relations between the levels must be seen in the context of the developmental process itself. From the viewpoint of RDS, the dynamic tension between competence (pattern explanation or system) and procedures (specific processes) becomes the basis of an inherently developmental, constructivist perspective. As circular causation, the developmental process recognizes both the emergence of form through process along with the constraining (downward) influence of form on process (Witherington, 2011, 2014).

Through an awareness of circular causality, we can begin to understand how the relational and inherently developmental ties between levels provide an integrative foundation for the study of brain, body, and mind. This understanding then allows us to chart a course away from the fallow territory that psychology currently occupies. The integration of the concept of the developmental system with the relational worldview brings forth the importance of considering “co-acting, co-developing processes functioning according to the reciprocal causality entailed by complex positive and negative feedback loops” (Overton and Lerner, 2012, p. 375). As such, the framework of RDS has been offered as an integrative paradigm in which living organisms are understood as dynamic, adaptive, non-linear, self-organizing and self-regulating systems (Lerner, 2006; Overton, 2013). From this perspective, the notion of a system provides a formal explanation, with the directional features of adaptation and self-organization constituting a final pattern explanation (Overton, 2010). RDS recognizes the dynamic complexity of developmental processes and further exposes the inadequacy of split approaches that emphasize simple interaction and the elevation of one level of analysis over another.

In terms of applications of the relational framework, it is important to recognize that RDS is a “mid-range” metatheory that provides a set of core concepts that can inform more specific theories and guide empirical investigation (Overton, 2013). Compatible approaches are those that reject split, mechanistic, or reductionist tendencies and instead put an emphasis on understanding the ontogeny of the individual in the context of the developmental system. One practical example of how this emphasis is realized comes from the family of empirical methods known as person-centered approaches, which in contrast to variable-centered analyses, focus on intraindividual variation rather than on group means (Nesselroade and Molenaar, 2010; von Eye et al., in press).

Finally, if we consider how developmental processes can illuminate the relational ties between different levels, various fundamental questions arise. How can novel structures arise that are different from the sum of their parts? How can activity at one level of explanation account for change at a qualitatively different level? How can the result of “doing more of the same” not simply be “more of the same”? From a much broader perspective, similar puzzles are at the center of the fundamental philosophical problems of intentionality, consciousness, free will, and agency. The underlying question running through these problems involves the problem of relating a level of system or meaning to a level of processes. The conventional approach of isolating or splitting off one of these levels leads directly to the brain-mind or mind-body problems, which are irresolvable when viewed through the traditional lens of analytic philosophy and an associated Cartesian-Split-Mechanistic framework. In moving toward a more embodied framework, the integration provided by relational developmental systems offers a transformation that is based on the fundamental premise that levels of meaning and processes should not be set against each other, but must be viewed as an indissociable complementarity (Overton, 2006, 2010, 2013, in press).

Conflict of Interest Statement

The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to thank Willis F. Overton and David C. Witherington for providing helpful feedback on a previous version of this manuscript.

References available at the Frontiers site.

From the open access Frontiers in Psychology: Psychology in Clinical Settings, this is an excellent article on embodied affectivity - the interaction of "affective qualities in the environment and the subject's bodily resonance."

Through its resonance, the body functions as a medium of emotional perception: it colors or charges self-experience and the environment with affective valences while it remains itself in the background of one's own awareness. This model is then applied to emotional social understanding or interaffectivity which is regarded as an intertwinement of two cycles of embodied affectivity, thus continuously modifying each partner's affective affordances and bodily resonance.

This is an hypothesis and theory article, heavy on philosophy as well as psychology and neuroscience, and it is highly recommended.

This article is part of the Research Topic: 
Dynamic systems theory and embodiment in psychotherapy...

Full Citation:
Fuchs, T. and Koch, SC. (2014, Jun 6). Embodied affectivity: on moving and being moved. Frontiers in Psychology; 5:508. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2014.00508

Embodied affectivity: On moving and being moved

Thomas Fuchs [1] and Sabine C. Koch [2]

1. Phenomenological Psychopathology and Psychiatry, University Clinic Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany
2. Department of Therapeutic Sciences, SRH University Heidelberg, Heidelberg, Germany

Abstract

There is a growing body of research indicating that bodily sensation and behavior strongly influences one's emotional reaction toward certain situations or objects. On this background, a framework model of embodied affectivity [1] is suggested: we regard emotions as resulting from the circular interaction between affective qualities or affordances in the environment and the subject's bodily resonance, be it in the form of sensations, postures, expressive movements or movement tendencies. Motion and emotion are thus intrinsically connected: one is moved by movement (perception; impression; affection [2] ) and moved to move (action; expression; e-motion). Through its resonance, the body functions as a medium of emotional perception: it colors or charges self-experience and the environment with affective valences while it remains itself in the background of one's own awareness. This model is then applied to emotional social understanding or interaffectivity which is regarded as an intertwinement of two cycles of embodied affectivity, thus continuously modifying each partner's affective affordances and bodily resonance. We conclude with considerations of how embodied affectivity is altered in psychopathology and can be addressed in psychotherapy of the embodied self.

Introduction

Emotions may be considered some of the most complex phenomena of subjective experience. This is mirrored by the host of different and often opposing emotion theories both in philosophy and psychology. Of the many attempts to reduce the complexity of emotions to a more simplified concept, two should be mentioned. The first focuses on their bodily component, as in the famous theory of James and Lange (James, 1884), simply put: we do not shiver because we are scared of the lion, but we shiver, and this is what we feel as our fear. In other words, emotions are feelings of bodily changes. This counter-intuitive assumption has been widely criticized for neglecting the intentional content or “aboutness” of emotions.

On the other hand, the contrary theory seems no less one-sided: according to prevailing cognitive approaches (Solomon, 1976; Lyons, 1980; Nussbaum, 2001), an emotion mainly consists in an act of evaluation or appraisal of a given situation. The bodily experience of emotions is then regarded as just an additional quale without further relevance (Gordon, 1987) or serving the limited purpose to assure us that an emotion is going on (Lyons, 1980). Again simplified: we believe or judge the lion to be dangerous, want to run away, and this is our fear of him. However, belief-desire concepts of emotions have been notoriously unable to capture their experiential and phenomenal aspect. A purely cognitive or functional approach to the phenomenon loses its peculiar self-affecting character. In particular, it fails to account for the changing intensity of emotions: it seems virtually impossible to indicate what a more intense anger, shame, or fear should be without referring to bodily experience (e.g., to one's increased sense of muscle tension, breath restriction, heated face or pounding heart). Cognitions as such do not differ in intensity. We may put the belief that “the lion is dangerous” into the comparative “the lion is very dangerous,” or we may repeat the thought with high frequency, but this does not yield a different affective experience unless we feel the “very” or the repetition as expressing a more activated, tense or stressful bodily state (Lang et al., 1993; Reisenzein, 1994). There is, however, no necessity and no indication to impose a linear causality model upon the complex phenomena of emotions (Boettinger, 2012). Given the divergent and inconclusive findings under the assumption of linear causality, models of circular causality may lead to a more appropriate understanding of emotional phenomena.

In the past decades a growing body of research on embodiment has demonstrated that not only bodily sensations, but also bodily postures, gestures and expressions are inherent components of emotional experience and tacitly influence the evaluation of persons, objects and situations as well as memory recall. To provide some examples:

• Riskind (1984) found that individuals recalled more negative life events when sitting in a slumped position, and more positive events when sitting in an upright position.

• Strack et al. (1988) demonstrated that activation of the smiling muscle (by asking participants to hold a pen between their teeth) caused participants to judge cartoons to be funnier than when smiling was inhibited by holding the pen between their lips.

• Cacioppo et al. (1993) reported that Chinese ideographs presented during arm flexion (an approach motion) were evaluated more positively than ideographs presented during arm extension (an avoidance motion; see also Neumann and Strack, 2000).

• Koch (2014; this issue) showed that an approach movement of the arms and a receptive movement of the hands caused a more positive attitude toward target objects than an avoidance movement; similarly, dynamic qualities of movement with smooth transitions caused more positive affect and a higher receptivity toward the environment than movement with sharp transitions.

• Cuddy et al. (2012) found that when people stood or sat for 7 min in a “power position” (different forms of extension of the body), they performed better in a subsequent mock job interview.

• Williams and Bargh (2008) showed that holding a hot cup of coffee elicits a “warmer” (more generous, caring) impression of a target person than holding a cup of iced coffee. Bodily felt warmth thus directly affected the interpersonal impression of warmth.

• Conversely, Zhong and Leonardelli (2008) found that people estimated the room temperature as being colder than before after they had experienced social exclusion from a group. Interpersonal coldness was thus felt as physical coldness. Correspondingly, Bargh and Shalev (2012) found that persons who experience social loneliness show an increased tendency to take warm baths or showers.

• The cleaning away of guilt is another interesting case: Meier et al. (2012) report a number of studies showing that cleansing can wash away feelings of guilt (Lee and Schwarz, 2011) or sin (Zhong and Liljenquist, 2006), and had a mildness influence on one's moral judgment (Schnall et al., 2008).

• Last but not least, Havas et al. (2010) found that the injection of botulinum toxin (Botox) into the frowning muscles impaired the understanding of negative semantic content such as criticism in a text which subjects had to read. This indicates that such understanding normally affords a slight frowning movement. On the other hand, injection of botulinum toxin into these muscles may significantly improve depressive symptoms in patients as has been shown in a randomized controlled trial by Wollmer et al. (2012). Obviously, negative evaluation of oneself as well as of semantic content is supported by corresponding facial expressions.

These and related research results may be summarized as follows:

1. When individuals adopt or produce emotion-specific postures, facial expressions or gestures, (a) they tend to experience the associated emotions, and (b) their behavior and also their preferences, judgement and attitudes toward objects or persons are thereby tacitly influenced.

2. Conversely, when individuals' expressive movements are inhibited, the experiencing of the associated emotions as well as the processing of corresponding emotional information is impaired. This is even the case when the information is presented in a merely cognitive or non-expressive way (as shown by the study of Havas et al., 2010, above).

Empirical findings thus show that embodiment has a far reaching influence on our emotional life. How may this influence be adequately understood? While we know that proprioceptive body feedback (based on afferent neural pathways from the body to the brain) is one of the responsible mechanisms (Hatfield et al., 1994; Koch, 2011), its interplay with the emotional perception and evaluation of a given situation still needs to be clarified. If we want to integrate the existing empirical research results into a comprehensive model of embodied affectivity, it seems advisable to follow a step-by-step approach: We will first consider emotions under different aspects, then we will try to integrate these aspects into an embodied and enactive concept of emotions. Finally, we will apply this concept to the special situation of social interactions or what may be called “embodied interaffectivity.”

What are Emotions?

In a first approximation, emotions may be regarded as affective responses to certain kinds of events of concern to a subject, implying conspicuous bodily changes and motivating a specific behavior (De Sousa, 2010). Accordingly, we will consider emotions under the aspects of (a) affective intentionality, (b) bodily resonance, (c) action tendency, and (d) function and significance.

(a) Affective intentionality. There is wide agreement among philosophers and psychologists that emotions are characterized by intentionality—they relate to persons, objects, events and situations in the world (see e.g., Solomon, 1976; Frijda, 1994; De Sousa, 2010). However, this intentionality is of a special kind: it is not neutral, but concerns what is particularly valuable and relevant for the subject. In a sense, emotions are ways of perceiving, namely attending to salient features of a situation, giving them a significance and weight they would not have without the emotion. Referring to Gibson's (1979) concept of affordances (that means, offerings in the environment that are available to animals, such as a tree being “climbable,” water “drinkable,” etc.), one could also speak of affective affordances: things appear to us as “important,” “worthwhile,” “attractive,” “repulsive,” “expressive,” and so on. Without emotions, the world would be without meaning or significance; nothing would attract or repel us and motivate us to act.

Of course, this meaning-making implies an evaluative or appraising component which should not, however, be conceived in terms of propositional attitudes (believing that p is the case, for example, believing that a lion is dangerous; cf. Lyons, 1980); otherwise, emotions could not be experienced by small children or higher animals lacking language. The evaluative aspect of affective intentionality is not dependent on verbally structured judgements, but on more basic cognitive-emotional schemes which are acquired in the course of affect-inducing experiences. Thus, an approaching lion will be immediately perceived and felt as a dangerous object once one has heard a lion's terrible roaring before, seen its leap toward a prey, etc. It has then acquired a threatening appearance which does not necessarily imply a belief such as “this is a lion,” “lions are dangerous,” etc. Of course there are emotional situations which are largely determined by higher forms of cognition (e.g., if an emotionally relevant information is provided in written form, or requires abstract concepts such as knowledge about an imminent stock market crash). But even then it is only the embodied response to the recognized situation that mediates its affective appeal and significance [see (b)]. Appraisal theories are highly relevant for explaining different emotional reactions of individuals on the basis of their preset attitudes, biases, beliefs, or judgements. But they are insufficient, when it comes to explain the holistic phenomenon of emotional experience itself [3]. 

Moreover, the appraisal component may not be regarded as a mere cognitive judgement, because in emotions, oneself is affected. They always imply a particular relation to the feeling subject in its very core: through emotions, I experience how it is for me to be in this or that situation. It is me who is surprised, hurt, angry, joyful, etc. Affective intentionality is thus twofold: it discloses an affective or value quality of a given situation as well as the feeling person's own state in the face of it (Slaby and Stephan, 2008). To be afraid of an approaching lion (world-reference) means at the same time being afraid for oneself (self-reference). To feel envy toward another person means to begrudge her an advantage or success as well as to feel inferior and dissatisfied with oneself. Each emotion, thus, implies the two poles of feeling something and feeling oneself as inextricably bound together.

(b) Bodily resonance. How do we experience the affective qualities or affordances of a given situation? Emotions are experienced through what we call bodily resonance. This includes all kinds of local or general bodily sensations: feelings of warmth or coldness, tickling or shivering, pain, tension or relaxation, constriction or expansion, sinking, tumbling or lifting, etc. They correspond, on the one hand, to autonomic nervous activity (e.g., raised heartbeat, accelerated respiration, sweating, trembling, visceral reactions), on the other hand, to various muscular activations, bodily postures, movements and related kinaesthetic feelings (e.g., clenching one's fist or one's jaws, moving backwards or forwards, bending or straightening oneself, etc.). Particularly rich fields of bodily resonance are the face and the gut. Thus, for example, sadness may be felt locally as a lump in the throat, a tightening in the chest or in the belly, a tension around the eyes, a tendency to weep, or globally as a sagging tendency or a painful wave spreading through the entire body (Gendlin, 1967). Bodily resonance is also related to Damasio's concept of the “somatic markers,” consisting of interoceptive and proprioceptive feedback from the body that needs to be integrated with other more cognitive information in the frontal lobe of the brain in order to guide one's behavior, in particular in every day decision-making (Damasio, 1994, 1996).

In sum, as William James put it, the body is a most sensitive “sounding-board” in which every emotion reverberates (James, 1884), both within and between us. In addition, our bodies have a varying degree of permeability (“Durchlässigkeit”; Lewin, 1935), affectability and responsivity (e.g., Stern, 1985; Trevarthen, 2009) at any given point in time. The tired body is more permeable than the wake body, the drunk body more permeable than the sober body (Lewin, 1935). At the same time, these bodily feelings have an immediate repercussion on the emotion as a whole: Feeling one's heart pound in fear raises one's anxiety, feeling one's cheeks burn with shame increases the painful experience of exposure and humiliation (Ekman et al., 1972). Therefore, bodily feelings should not be conceived as a mere by-product or add-on, distinct from the emotion as such, but as the very medium of affective intentionality. Being afraid, for instance, is not possible without feeling a bodily tension or trembling, a beating of the heart or a shortness of breath, and a tendency to withdraw. It is through these sensations that we are anxiously directed toward a frightening situation.

According to traditional appraisal-theories (Lazarus, 1982), the evaluation of a given situation is a primary and separate component of emotions which precedes any bodily changes. From an embodied perspective, however, it is the lived body with its background sensations that is co-constitutive of the evaluation, which means that we should rather speak of an “embodied appraisal” (Prinz, 2004). For example, when feeling tired or exhausted, a familiar way uphill appears steeper and longer than normally. This appraisal does not result from a separate evaluative judgement, but from the very mismatch between one's bodily capacity and the task one faces. The hill is “too high,” that means it is perceived in this way through the tired, incapable body. Even in cases where emotionally relevant information is presented in merely abstract form (such as the text with negative content in the Botox study by Havas et al. see above), the evaluation obviously also depends on the simultaneous bodily resonance. More generally, our feeling body is the way we are emotionally related to the world, or in other words, affective experiences are bodily feelings-toward (Goldie, 2000). In emotions, there is no separation between an appraisal and a bodily component for they are only realized as a synthesis or “full circle” of all mutually interacting components.

(c) Action tendency. Bodily resonance of emotions is not restricted to autonomic nervous system activity or facial expression (which are in the focus of most empirical studies), but includes the whole body as being moved and moving. Fear, for example, does not only mean a raised heart beat or widely opened eyes but also the urge to break free, to flee or to hide (Sheets-Johnstone, 1999). The term “emotion” is derived from the Latin emovere, “to move out,” implying that inherent in emotions is a potential for movement, a directedness toward a certain goal (be it attractive or repulsive) and a tension between possible and actual movement. Correspondingly, Frijda (1986) has characterized emotions in terms of action readiness, according to the different patterns of action which they induce: approach (e.g., desire), avoidance (e.g., fear), being-with (enjoyment, confidence), attending (interest), rejecting (disgust), non-attending (indifference), agonistic (anger), interrupting (shock, surprise), dominating (arrogance), and submitting (humility, resignation).

Similarly, according to Kafka (1950) and De Rivera (1977), there exist four basic emotional movements: moving oneself “toward the other” (e.g., affection, mourning), moving the other “toward oneself” (e.g., desire, greed), moving the other “away from oneself” (e.g., disgust, anger) and moving oneself “away from the other” (e.g., fear, disgust). The four are related to the gestures of giving, getting, removing and escaping. These basic movements are connected to a bodily felt sense of expansion or contraction, relaxation or tension, openness or constriction, etc. In anger, for example, one feels a tendency of expansion toward an object in order to push it away from self. In affection, one feels a relaxation, opening and emanation toward an object or person. Emotions can thus be experienced as the directionality of one's potential movement, although this movement need not necessarily be realized in physical space; they are phenomena of lived space (Fuchs, 2007).

(d) Functions and significance. On the basis of the analysis so far, the role of emotions for the individual may be determined as follows: Emotions “befall us”; they interrupt the ongoing course of life in order to inform us, warn us, tell us what is important and what we have to react upon. They (re)structure the field of relevance and values; some of our plans, intentions or beliefs must be revised (Downing, 2000). Emotions thus provide a basic orientation about what really matters to us; they contribute to defining our goals and priorities. At the same time, they sketch out a certain scope and direction of possible responses, which are complementary to the meaning the emotion gives to the situation. Bodily resonance, autonomic arousal and musular activations make us become ready to act: in anger we prepare for attack, in fear we prepare for flight, in shame we want to hide or disappear, in love we want to approach and be approached. Emotion may thus be regarded as a bodily felt transformation of the subject's world, which solicits the lived body to action. However, even when the action tendency of emotions does not win through, they still retain an expressive function: by indicating the individual's state and possible action to others, they serve a communicative function in social life which will be explained in the section on “interaffectivity.”

An Embodied and Extended Concept of Emotions

We now have gathered the necessary components that may be integrated into an embodied and extended model of emotions:

1. Emotions emerge as specific forms of a subject's bodily directedness toward the valences and affective affordances of a given situation [4]. They encompass subject and situation and therefore may not be localized in the interior of persons (be it their psyche or their brain). Rather, the affected subject is engaged with an environment that itself has affect-like qualities. For example, in shame, an embarrassing situation and the dismissive gazes of others are experienced as a painful bodily affection which is the way the subject feels the sudden devaluation in others' eyes. The emotion of shame is extended over the feeling person and his body as well as the situation as a whole (on this extended concept of affectivity cf. Schmitz et al., 2011).

2. Emotions imply two components of bodily resonance:

• a centripetal or affective component, i.e., being affected, “moved” or “touched” by an event through various forms of bodily sensations (e.g., the blushing and “burning” of shame);
• a centrifugal or “emotive” component, i.e., a bodily action readiness, implying specific tendencies of movement and directedness (e.g., hiding, avoiding the other's gaze, “sinking into the floor” from shame).

On this basis, feelings may be regarded as circular interactions or feedback cycles between centripetal affection and centrifugal e-motion (cf. Figure 1). Being affected by affective affordances of a situation triggers a specific bodily resonance (“affection”) which in turn influences the emotional perception and evaluation of the situation and implies a corresponding action readiness (“e-motion”). Affective intentionality consists in the entire interactive cycle, which is mediated by the resonance of the feeling body. Thus, in affectivity we are moved by movement (impression, affection) and moved to move (expression, e-motion), indicating the kinetic-kinaesthetic ambiguity of the body (Sheets-Johnstone, 1999).

3. Bodily resonance thus acts as the medium of our affective engagement in a given situation. It imbues, taints and permeates the perception of this situation without necessarily stepping into the foreground. In Polanyi's terms, bodily resonance is the proximal, and the perceived situation is the distal, component of affective intentionality, with the proximal component receding from awareness in favor of the distal (Polanyi, 1967). This may be compared to the sense of touch which is at the same time a self-feeling of the body (“proximal”) and a feeling of the touched surface (“distal”); or to the subliminal experience of thirst (“proximal”) which first becomes conspicuous as the perceptual salience of water flowing nearby (“distal”).

4. If the resonance or affectability of the body is modified in specific ways, this will change the person's affective perception accordingly. This is the common basis of the studies on embodiment and emotions that we mentioned above. Thus, a lack of resonance (e.g., after injection of botulinum toxin) will impede the perception of corresponding affective affordances in the environment. Conversely, increasing a certain bodily feeling (e.g., holding a hot cup of coffee), adopting a certain position or moving in a certain way favors the correlated affective perception. Thus, the different components of the affection-intention-motion cycle influence one another.

FIGURE 1

Figure 1. Embodied affectivity. We use phenomenological terminology in the model; in psychological terminology subject could be replaced by person, and affection by affect. Expression is constitutive of e-motion (centrifugal), impression is constitutive of affection (centripetal), resulting in interoceptive and proprioceptive body feedback or bodily resonance (arrows in subject). Emotion is mediated by the expressive ability (e.g., Laban, 1980), and affection is mediated by the permeability of the person system (Lewin, 1935). Both expression and impression (Wallbott, 1990) constitute the unity of movement and perception (cf. Weizsäcker, 1940), and form an integral part of our personality.

The last point is of particular psychotherapeutic importance, for it shows that emotions may not only be influenced by cognitive means (i.e., by changing the cognitive component of the cycle), but also by modifying the bodily resonance. It can be diminished as well as increased. The first is the case in habitual body defences: When an emotion emerges, one often tends to defend against it by bodily counteraction: suppressing one's tears or cries, compressing one's lips, tightening one's muscles, keeping a stiff posture, “pulling oneself together,” etc. This often happens unconsciously, as part of one's early acquired bodily habitus (cf. Bourdieu, 1990). On the other hand, the experience of vague or diffuse emotions may be enhanced and differentiated by carefully attending to the bodily feelings and kinaesthetic tendencies which these emotions imply, in order to render them accessible to verbal explication in psychotherapy.

In concluding the section, we may add that the connections of affectivity and embodiment that we have presented in a general model show considerable cultural and individual variations. The culture-specific forms of emotional expression or restraint as well as the habitus of a person which has incorporated basic attitudes such as introversion or extroversion, shyness or pride, submissiveness or dominance, etc., have become part of the individual body memory (Fuchs, 2012) and thus influence the circular relations between affective affordances, bodily resonance and emotional response in a given situation. Here lies a rich field for future research into the impact of culture and biography on the embodiment of emotions.

Interaffectivity

As we have seen, emotions imply embodied action tendencies. More specifically, in the social sphere they are characterized by various potential movements toward, or away from, an actual or implicit other (Kafka, 1950; De Rivera, 1977), i.e., they are essentially relational. As such, they are not only felt from the inside, but also displayed and visible in expression and behavior, often as bodily tokens or rudiments of action [5]. The facial, gestural and postural expression of a feeling is part of the bodily resonance that feeds back into the feeling itself, but also induces processes of interaffectivity: Our body is affected by the other's expression, and we experience the kinetics and intensity of his emotions through our own bodily kinaesthesia and sensation.

Emotions thus imply two components of bodily resonance or feedback:

• Self- or individual resonance: proprio- and interoceptive feedback providing the organism with useful information from body postures, gestures or sensations (Zajonc and Markus, 1984; Hatfield et al., 1994: the body as “interface” between cognition and affect).
• Interactional or interbodily resonance: dynamic mutual feedback between two bodies (e.g., you lift your arms and I feel slightly “uplifted”). This body feedback can occur through the visual, auditory or tactile channel (such as from a handshake or an embrace; Koch, unpublished Manuscript), but also through the kinaesthetic channel (such as from directional movements; e.g., Koch et al., 2011).

This means that in every social encounter, two cycles of embodied affectivity (cf. Figure 1 above) become intertwined, thus continuously modifying each subject's affective affordances and resonance. This complex process may be regarded as the bodily basis of empathy and social understanding.

To illustrate this (Figure 2), let us assume that the SELF (A) is a person whose emotion, e.g., anger, manifests itself in typical bodily (facial, gestural, interoceptive, etc.) changes. He feels the anger as the tension in his face, the sharpness of his voice, the arousal in his body etc. This resonance is an expression of the emotion at the same time, i.e., the anger becomes visible and is perceived as such by the OTHER (B). But what is more, the expression will also produce an impression, namely by triggering corresponding or complementary bodily feelings in the OTHER. Thus, A's sinister gaze, the sharpness of his voice or expansive bodily movements might induce in B an unpleasant tension or even a jerk, a tendency to withdraw, etc. (similarly, shame that one witnesses may induce embarrassed aversion, sadness a tendency to connect and console, and so forth). Thus, B not only sees the emotions in the A's face and gesture, but also senses it with his own body, through his own bodily resonance.

FIGURE 2 



Figure 2. Interaffectivity. The figure is an integration of Koch (2011), Froese and Fuchs (2012), and Fuchs (2013). Interaffectivity includes body feedback (i.e., the impression function within self and other) which is necessary for interbodily resonance. Components of interbodily resonance are: mirroring or complementing movements, body awareness (via proprioceptive body feedback), and kinaesthetic empathy; they are psychotherapeutically important in phenomena such as somatic countertransference (Pallaro, 2002).

However, it does not stay like this, for the impression and bodily reaction caused in B in turn becomes an expression for A. It will immediately affect his bodily reaction, change his own expression, however slightly (e.g., increasing or decreasing his expression of anger), and so forth. This creates a circular interplay of expressions and reactions running in split seconds and constantly modifying each partner's bodily state. They have become parts of a dynamic sensorimotor and interaffective system that connects both bodies in interbodily resonance or intercorporality (Merleau-Ponty, 1964). Of course, the signals and reactions involved proceed far too quickly to become conscious as such. Instead, both partners will experience a specific feeling of being connected with the other in a way that may be termed “mutual incorporation” (Fuchs and De Jaegher, 2009). Each lived and felt body reaches out, as it were, to be extended by the other. In both partners, their own bodily resonance mediates the perception of the other. It is in this sense that we can refer to the experience of the other in terms of an embodied perception, which, through the interaction process, is at the same time an embodied communication.

No mental representation is necessary for this process. There is no strict separation between the inner and the outer, as if a hidden mental state in X produced certain external signs, which Y would have to decipher. For X's anger may not be separated from its bodily expression; and similarly, Y does not perceive X's body as a mere object, but as a living, animate and expressive body that she/he is coupled with.

Nor is a simulation required for the process of mutual incorporation. We certainly do not simulate the other's angry gaze or voice, even less his anger, but rather feel tense, threatened or even invaded by his expressive bodily behavior. Bodily sensations, tensions, action tendencies, etc. that arise in the interaction do not serve as a separate simulation of the other person, but are fed into the mutual perception. In Polanyi's terms, one could also say that the felt bodily resonance is the proximal, the other's perceived body is the distal component of one's empathic perception, with the proximal component receding from awareness in favor of the distal (Polanyi, 1967). Stuart (2012) has recently coined the term “enkinesthesia,” that means, “feeling one's own movements into the other,” or: empathy through subliminal co-movement. It is in this sense that we can refer to the experience of the other in terms of “embodied” perception, which, through the interaction process, is at the same time an “embodied” communication. In Merleau-Ponty's account:

“The communication or comprehension of gestures comes about through the reciprocity of my intentions and the gestures of others, of my gestures and the intentions discernible in the conduct of other people. It is as if the other person's intentions inhabited my body and mine his” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962).

As we can see, the concept of mutual incorporation leads to the opposite of the representationalist account: Primary social understanding is not an inner modeling in a detached observer, but the other's body extends onto my own, and my own extends onto the other.

This can perhaps best be studied in early childhood. Emotions primarily emerge from and are embedded in dyadic interactions of infant and caregiver. Stern (1985) has shown in detail how emotions are cross-modally expressed, shared, and regulated. Infants and adults experience joint affective states in terms of dynamic flow patterns, intensities, shapes, and vitality affects (for example, crescendo or decrescendo, fading, bursting, pulsing, effortful or easy, etc.) in just the way that music is experienced as affective dynamics. This includes the tendency to mimic and synchronize each other's facial expressions, vocalizations, postures, movements, and thus to converge emotionally (Condon, 1979; Hatfield et al., 1994). All this may be summarized by the terms affect attunement and interaffectivity (Stern, 1985; p. 132): The emerging affect during a joyful playing situation between mother and infant may not be divided and distributed among them. It arises from the “in-between,” or from the over-arching process in which both are immersed. Affect attunement is carried by kinaesthetic empathy (Kestenberg, 1975; Fischman, 2008), which is also employed in dance/movement therapy diagnostics and intervention (for a systematization of forms of attunement and mirroring see Eberhard-Kaechele, 2012).

Affect attunement was first investigated by Kestenberg (1975); Kestenberg and Sossin 1973, (1979), who systematized it into quality and shape attunement and described developmental regularities and sequences. Kestenberg emphasized that in the individuation process, partial attunement of mother and child was more productive than complete attunement to serve the child's development. A basic dimension of meaning are smooth vs. sharp reversals between rhythms (Koch, 2011). Via kinaesthetic empathy, researchers can notate body rhythms (Figure 3) that may be used to analyse affect attunement differentially (Koch, 2014). These rhythm curves reflect what Stern calls “vitality affects” or “vitality contours” (Stern, 1985, 2010). Shared vitality affects then form a vital part of our emotions.

FIGURE 3 



Figure 3. Movement rhythms. Example of rhythm writing to capture affect expression and vitality contours (Kestenberg and Sossin, 1973, 1979; Stern, 2010).

Thus, emotions are not inner states that we experience only individually or that we have to decode in others, but primarily shared states that we experience through interbodily affection. Even if one's emotions become increasingly independent from another's presence in the course of childhood, intercorporality remains the basis of empathy: There is a bodily link which allows emotions to immediately affect the other and thus enables empathic understanding without requiring a Theory of Mind or verbal articulation (Fuchs and De Jaegher, 2009). On this basis, we have created a short scale that measures the degree of feeling understood by and understanding of others through movement. The Embodied Intersubjectivity Scale (EIS; see Appendix) consists of ten items measuring the degree of closeness created by different forms of attuning and mirroring in movement. It complements the Body Self-Efficacy Scale (BSE; see Appendix), which measures the body-based “I can't” of a person (Husserl, 1952) also with 10 items. Perceived body self-efficacy is related to a positive body image, positive movement-based affect (MBAS; Koch, 2014) and the ability for embodied interaffectivity (Appendix).

(Psycho)Pathological Implications

The model of embodied affectivity that we have presented may gain additional plausibility from different kinds of disturbances which occur in psychopathology. We will illustrate its implications by using the examples of (1) anxiety disorder, (2) depression, (3) Parkinson's disease, (4) alexithymia, and (5) autism.

(1) Anxiety disorders are characterized by a heightened alert of the body which reacts to threatening affective affordances in the environment with intense feelings of oppression mainly in throat, breast or gut (corresponding physiologically to muscular tension, trembling, palpitation, hyperventilation, sweating, etc.) [6]. This bodily affection motivates, on the one hand, a hypervigilant perception: The anxious person scans the environment for threatening cues and anticipates lurking danger. On the other hand, the bodily resonance also implies a specific action tendency, namely to escape the oppressing situation through flight or to avoid it in advance. Phobias particularly related to space, such as agoraphobia, claustrophobia or acrophobia, dynamize the otherwise static quality of experienced space and illustrate the overall spatial structure of anxiety as encompassing body and environment.

(2) In contrast, a lack or loss of bodily affectability is characteristic of severe depression. The constriction, rigidity and missing tension-flow modulation (neutral flow; Kestenberg, 1975) of the lived body in depression leads to a general emotional numbness and finally to affective depersonalization (Fuchs, 2005). The deeper the depression, the more the affective qualities and atmospheres of the environment fade. The patients are no longer capable of being moved and affected by things, situations or other persons. They complain of a painful indifference, a “feeling of not feeling” and of not being able to sympathize with their relatives any more. In his autobiographical account, Solomon describes his depression as “… a loss of feeling, a numbness, (which) had infected all my human relations. I didn't care about love; about my work; about family; about friends … ” (Solomon, 2001; p. 45). Thus patients feel disconnected from the world; they lose their participation in the interaffective space that we normally share with others (Fuchs, 2013).

(3) In some way similar to depression, we find in progressed Parkinson's disease a “freezing” of face and body, which leads to loss of emotional expressivity. As a result, patients tend to experience a decreased intensity of their emotions and complain of no longer being able to participate in interaffective exchange with others as before. Studies have also found that patients with Parkinson's disease were less accurate than healthy controls in decoding angry, sad and disgusted facial expressions of others, pointing to a lack of bodily resonance as the proximal component of affective perception (see Mermillod et al., 2011, for an overview).

(4) Persons characterized by alexithymia have marked difficulties to identify, differentiate and describe their own emotions, while at the same time being unable to recognize the affective nature of bodily sensations associated with certain emotions (Taylor and Taylor, 1997). This is often accompanied by a lack of understanding of the feelings of others, which leads to unempathic emotional responding (Hesse and Floyd, 2008). Alexithymia is particularly frequent in patients with somatoform disorders who are have often problems to relate their bodily resonance to corresponding affective situations, leading to detached feelings of pressure, burning, pain, etc., which are then attributed to assumed somatic illnesses (Duddu et al., 2003). Moreover, interoceptive sensitivity, measured as a person's ability to accurately perceive one's heartbeats at rest, has been found to be reduced in somatoform patients which was associated with a reduced capacity of emotional self-regulation (Pollatos et al., 2011; Weiß et al., 2014). Interoceptive sensitivity normally facilitates successful self-regulation by providing a fine-tuned feedback of the present emotional state (Füstös et al., 2011).

What is obviously lacking in alexithymia is the proximal-distal structure of affective intentionality: Whereas bodily resonance normally functions as the proximal medium of our affective perception, for alexithymic patients their bodily reactions seem unrelated to affective affordances of a given situation, which means that the full circle of affectivity does not come about. Bodily sensations of resonance either are not felt at all, or they may come to the fore separately, instead of receding from awareness in favor of affective intentionality. In both cases, this is connected to a sense of emotional detachment of patients from themselves. Pathogenetically, a lack of interaffective mirroring and feedback in early childhood seems to play a major role: If caregivers are incapable of recognizing and validating emotional expressions in the child, this can impair the child's capacity to understand and differentiate emotional states within himself as well as in others (Graerne and Bagby, 2000).

(5) Finally, autism or autistic spectrum disorder may be regarded as a disturbance of embodied interaffectivity, namely as a lack of perceiving others' expressions, gestures and voicings in terms of affective affordances. Correspondingly, eye tracking studies have shown that children with autism focus on inanimate and irrelevant details of interactive situations while missing the relevant social cues, e.g., neglecting the eyes and mouths of protagonists (Klin et al., 2002). Another study asked children to sort people who varied in terms of age, sex, facial expressions of emotion and the hat that they were wearing (Weeks and Hobson, 1987). In contrast to typical children who grouped pictures by emotional expressions, the participants with autism grouped the people by the type of hat they were wearing. Generally, they prefer to attend to inanimate objects over other humans (Klin et al., 2003; Jones et al., 2008). Furthermore, while imitation and co-movement serves as a major instrument for early affect attunement and social cognition, several studies have found that autistic children do not readily imitate the actions of others (Smith and Bryson, 1994; Hobson and Lee, 1999).

As a result of these deficiencies, there is a general lack of the embodied or kinaesthetic empathy that normally mediates the affective perception of the other. The feedback cycles of mutual incorporation are not achieved; instead, for children with autism the others remain rather mysterious, detached objects whose behavior is troublesome to predict. According to embodied and enactive approaches, what these children primarily lack is not a theoretical concept of others' minds (Klin et al., 2003; Gallagher, 2004; De Jaegher, 2013). This is supported by the fact many autistic symptoms such as lack of emotional contact, anxiety or agitation are already present in the first years of life, i.e., long before the supposed age of 4–5 years to acquire a Theory of Mind. Much rather, high-functioning autistic persons often develop precisely an explicit “Theory of Mind” approach to emotions, i.e., they learn to infer or “figure out” what emotion the other is experiencing (Grandin, 1995).

Embodied Therapies

Our model of embodied affectivity can be elucidating for the interpersonal processes taking place on a non-verbal level in psychotherapy and for the explicit thematization of bodily experience in body psychotherapy and dance movement therapy. These approaches use non-verbal modalities to start change processes, to gain access to affect and memories that dominated in a former situation—actualizations that are important, for example, in trauma treatment (Caldwell, 2012; Eberhard-Kaechele, 2012). Embodied therapies are increasingly framed in non-linear causality, enactive, ecological and dynamic systems approaches (cf. Koch and Fishman, 2011), to account for the complexity of motor processes and their interwovenness with brain functions and sociocultural/environmental factors.

The embodied affectivity model allows us to locate disorders on the continuum of e-motion and affectivity and to plan embodied interventions accordingly. Anxiety (1) for example, can be addressed and be alleviated by engagement in low intensity and gradual swaying movements—particularly with advancing movement in the horizontal plane—which are part of many meditative circle dances (Koch, 2011), strengthening their ability to calm down and perceive their environment as less threatening. Depression (2) can be temporarily alleviated by moving into high arousal, high intensity, abrupt movements with round reversals (such as in jogging or dancing) particularly in the vertical plane (Koch et al., 2007) which awakens joy and vitality, and decreases negative affect. Persons affected from Parkinson (3) profit from Tango Argentino (Duncan and Earhart, 2012),—characterized by its mostly low intensity abrupt movements and turns with flow adjustment, which address initiation, balance and gait, but also intersubjective sensitivity,—and from expressive dance training, which strengthens their expressive abilities. Alexithymia (4) is common in both somatoform and autistic populations. Somatoform patients benefit from structured authentic movement interventions (The Body Mind Approach (TBMA), Payne and Stott, 2010) including a partner exchange, which support the connections between feeling and verbalization; and autists (5) from mirroring in movement—including structured authentic movement—, which can improve their intersubjective abilities (Koch et al., 2014b). This mostly evidence-based literature on the effects of movement therapy on (psycho-)pathological conditions has been summarized in Koch et al. (2014a).

Dance movement therapy starts on the moving and e-motion side (e.g., Levy, 2005), whereas embodied therapies such as focusing (Gendlin, 1967) and functional relaxation (Fuchs, 1997) start on the sensing and affectivity side of the model. Most experienced body psychotherapists—no matter which background they work from—integrate both sides in a balance of sensing and moving (e.g., Lahmann et al., 2010; Caldwell, 2012). A focus on breathing can help find the basis of this balance (e.g., Williams et al., 2007). Rogers (1951) already pointed out that persons entering into a sensing, reflective, and affective mode during the process of therapy, pausing and giving room to integrate the bodily feedback into the progression of a therapeutic session, are the ones that profit most from psychotherapy. Damasio (1994, 1996), in his somatic marker hypothesis, specified that no decision of practical relevance can produce authentic results without interoceptive and proprioceptive feedback from the body. Embodied therapies can help the individual to access this somatic information and to take it into account for daily living—a step that becomes increasingly difficult for many persons in Western societies with their largely exteroceptive focus.

Conclusion

In sum, emotions result from the body's own feedback and the circular interaction between affective affordances in the environment and the subject's bodily resonance, be it in the form of sensations, postures, expressive movements, or movement tendencies. Through its resonance, the body functions as a medium of emotional perception.

Our account places particular emphasis on the intersubjective dimension of affectivity. In interaffectivity, our body is tacitly affected by the other's expression, and we experience the kinetics and intensity of his emotions through our own bodily kinaesthesia and sensation. This means that in every social encounter, two cycles of embodied affectivity become intertwined, thus continuously modifying each partner's affective affordances and resonance. Infant research demonstrates how the mutual bodily resonance of facial, gestural and vocal expression engenders our primary affective attunement to others. From birth on, the body is embedded in intercorporality, and thus becomes the medium of interaffectivity. Hence, affects are not enclosed in an inner mental sphere to be deciphered from outside, but come into existence, change and circulate between self and other in the interbodily dialog. Emotions are neither individual nor unidirectional phenomena; they operate in cycles that can involve multiple people in processes of mutual influence and bonding. These processes of embodied interaffectivity as well as their disturbances are of major importance for psychiatry, psychosomatics, and psychotherapeutic interactions and can be addressed in embodied therapies.

Conflict of Interest Statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

We thank the German Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) for the national grant 01UB0930A to Sabine Koch and Thomas Fuchs for developing a theory model in the context of the project Body Language of Movement and Dance. We thank Michela Summa and Boris Böttinger for their input on the model in various discussions, and Rixta Fambach for proof reading. We acknowledge the financial support of the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft and Ruprecht-Karls-Universität Heidelberg within the funding program “Open Access Publishing.”

Footnotes

1. ^This model has formerly been introduced in a chapter on “The phenomenology of affectivity” by T. Fuchs in Fulford et al. (2013). Some parts are reprinted here with kind permission by the publisher.

2. ^The term “affection” is used in the model in the sense of “being affected by something.”

3. ^The focus of this article is on emotions. The various interfaces with cognition result naturally from the intrinsic connection of emotion and cognition (e.g., Zajonc and Markus, 1984); to address them in the article would exceed its scope and length. It would in fact not even be necessary, since each situation that affects us emotionally does also concern us cognitively, and vice versa. I have to recognize the lion in order to feel afraid of it; I have to understand the words that insult me cognitively before they can create an affective affordance for me. Just as there is no cognition without emotion, at least in the sense of emotionally driven attention and interest, there is also no emotion without a cognitive grasp of the given situation.

4. ^As pointed out above, the concept of affective intentionality and affective affordances also implies components of cognition (schemes, attitudes, beliefs, etc.) which shape the individual's emotional perception of, and response to a situation. Perceiving a goal in a football match, for example, will elicit quite different emotional responses depending on which team one supports. However, the focus of our model lies not on such preset attitudes, beliefs, biases etc. but on explaining the phenomenon of emotional experience as a whole (for which the term “embodied appraisal” (Prinz, 2004) seems much more adequate than the predominantly discussed “emotional appraisal”).

5. ^According to (Darwin, 1872/1904), emotional expressions once served particular action functions (e.g., baring one's teeth in anger to prepare for attack), but now accompany emotions in rudimentary ways in order to communicate these emotions to others. Evolutionary psychologists have advanced the hypothesis that hominids have evolved both with increasingly differentiated facial expressions and with sophisticated capabilities of understanding these affect displays. In any case, though strongly varying between and within cultures, emotional expression is a crucial facet of interpersonal communication in all societies.

6. ^Similarly, in Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) there is an increased bodily responsivity (racing heart, dyspnea, fear-sweat, sickness) to certain environmental triggers that are related to former traumatic experiences (sights, sounds, smells, etc.), that means, the body resonance is shaped by a traumatic body memory (van der Kolk, 1994; Fuchs, 2012).

References available at the Frontiers site.

Appendix

Body Self-Efficacy-Scale (BSE; Koch, Unpublished Manuscript)

Please answer how the following statements apply to you on a scale from 0 to 5 with 0 representing “applies not at all” and 5 representing “applies exactly”:

Embodied Intersubjectivity Scale (EIS; Koch, Unpublished Manuscript)

Please think about the last situation in which you have moved with others in a group (e.g., in movement therapy, in dancing). In how far did the following statements apply to you on a scale from 0 to 5 with 0 representing “applies not at all” and 5 representing “applies exactly”:

Both measures had been pretested in a longer version on a sample of 80 psychology students at the University of Heidelberg and had been cut down from an item pool of twice the amount of items using the criterion of internal consistency scores. Both, the BSE and the EIS, were then tested with a sample of 63 students of therapy sciences at SRH University of Heidelberg, resulting in a Cronbach's alpha (BSE) of 0.75; and a Cronbach's alpha (EIS) of 0.87 (Kelbel, unpublished thesis). They were further employed in the context an RCT on movement therapy with schizophrenic and autistic populations (n = 83; 42 schizophrenic patients and 41 Autism Spectrum Disorder, mostly high functioning) and were found reliable for these patient groups (Cronbach's alpha BSE = 0.83; Cronbach's alpha EIS = 0.90; Kelbel, unpublished thesis).

The BSE (of both student and patient sample data) was validated with the Ryckman Scale (Ryckman et al., 1982) a standardized questionnaire on perceived physical ability. The two scales showed a correlation of r = 0.55, p < 0.01, indicating high agreement, even though, Ryckman et al. did not cover the aesthetic aspects included in the BSE.