Framing a Phenomenological Mixed Method: From Inspiration to Guidance

The phenomenological model of depression: from methodological challenges to clinical advancements

In this article our overall aim is to illustrate how phenomenological psychopathology can advance the clinical work on depression. To do so, we start by unfolding the current phenomenological model of depression. We argue that this model faces a methodological challenge, which we define as 'the challenge of patho-description'. Mental disorders, such as depression, influence how people are able to access and describe their own experiences. This becomes a challenge for phenomenological psychopathology since its methodology is based on people's ability to describe their own experiences. To deal with this challenge, in the case of depression, we turn to the framework of phenomenological interview. We interview 12 participants (7 women, 5 men, age-range from 29 to 57 years) with moderate and severe depression. From the interview results, we show how phenomenological interview deals with the challenge of patho-description and how patho-description in depression conceals experiential nuances. We unfold these nuances and describe how people with depression pre-reflectively experience a variety of feelings, a type of agency, overly positive self-image, and relations in a hyper-social way. These descriptive nuances not only strengthen the phenomenological model of depression, but they also help advance the clinical work on depression. We firstly illustrate how the descriptive nuances can be added to current manuals and rating scales to advance diagnostic work. Secondly, we illustrate how phenomenological, 'bottom-up', and embodied approaches function at the pre-reflective level of experience, and that further effort at this level can help advance therapy for depression.

Moving beyond the lab: investigating empathy through the Empirical 5E approach

Empathy is a complex and multifaceted phenomenon that plays a crucial role in human social interactions. Recent developments in social neuroscience have provided valuable insights into the neural underpinnings and bodily mechanisms underlying empathy. This methodology often prioritizes precision, replicability, internal validity, and confound control. However, fully understanding the complexity of empathy seems unattainable by solely relying on artificial and controlled laboratory settings, while overlooking a comprehensive view of empathy through an ecological experimental approach. In this article, we propose articulating an integrative theoretical and methodological framework based on the 5E approach (the "E"s stand for embodied, embedded, enacted, emotional, and extended perspectives of empathy), highlighting the relevance of studying empathy as an active interaction between embodied agents, embedded in a shared real-world environment. In addition, we illustrate how a novel multimodal approach including mobile brain and body imaging (MoBi) combined with phenomenological methods, and the implementation of interactive paradigms in a natural context, are adequate procedures to study empathy from the 5E approach. In doing so, we present the Empirical 5E approach (E5E) as an integrative scientific framework to bridge brain/body and phenomenological attributes in an interbody interactive setting. Progressing toward an E5E approach can be crucial to understanding empathy in accordance with the complexity of how it is experienced in the real world.

The rhythm of chemotherapy and the felt experience of time: a front-loaded phenomenological retrospective cohort study

It is well-known that chemotherapy brings about various adverse physical effects such as fatigue, nausea, or vomiting, and that it lowers mental well-being. It is less known that it desynchronizes patients with social environment. This study explores the temporal aspects and challenges of chemotherapy. Three groups equal in size and distinguished according to weekly, biweekly, and triweekly treatment schemes, each independently representative in terms of sex and age of the cancer population (total N = 440) were compared. The study found that chemotherapy sessions, regardless of their frequency, patients' age, and the overall length of treatment, have a very large effect on changing the felt pace of time from flying to dragging (Cohen's d = 1.6655). Most patients pay more attention to the passing of time than before treatment (59.3%), which has to do with the disease (77.4%). They also experience the loss of control over time, which they subsequently attempt to regain. The patients' actual activities before and after chemotherapy, however, are mostly the same. All these aspects create a unique 'chemo-rhythm', in which the significance of the type of cancer and demographic variables is negligible, and the mere rhythmic nature of treatment plays a central role. In conclusion, patients find the 'chemo-rhythm' stressful, unpleasant and difficult to control. It is vital to prepare them for it and help to reduce its adverse effects.

Mind wandering in reading: An embodied approach

In the last 20 years, the study of mind wandering has attracted the attention of a growing number of researchers from fields like psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience. Mind wandering has been characterized in multiple ways: as task-unrelated, unintentional, stimulus-independent, or unguided thought processes. Those accounts have mostly focused on the identification of neurocognitive mechanisms that enable the emergence of mind-wandering episodes. Reading is one activity in which mind wandering frequently occurs, and it is widely accepted that mind wandering is detrimental for reading flow, comprehension and the capacity to make inferences based on the text. This mind wandering scepsis in reading is based on two unchallenged views: (i) that reading is a disembodied, mental activity of information processing, and (ii) that mind wandering is essentially characterized as a task-unrelated and involuntary thought process that disrupts all kinds of goal-oriented behavior. However, recent developments within cognitive science treat the mind as embodied and thus challenge both ontological and epistemological assumptions about what mind wandering is, where it is located, and how it is being studied empirically during reading. In this article we integrate embodied accounts of mind wandering and reading to show how reading benefits from nested mind wandering processes. Empirically, we investigate how a reader can move successfully in and out of different embodied processes and mesh different cognitive strategies over time, including some forms of mind wandering. While such changes in reading are frequently deemed dysfunctional, we suggest an alternative interpretation: Rather than seeking constant flow and fluency, we propose that reading is multi-actional and benefits from drawing on different cognitive strategies spanning mind wandering processes and goal-oriented behavior. In that sense, we suggest that mind wandering has a potential for enriching cognitive processes underlying reading, such as imagining and reflection. We exemplify these insights through analyses of data obtained in ethnographic and semi-experimental studies of reading practices. We conclude that to capture cognitive phenomena within an embodied framework, a richer methodology must be developed. Such a methodology must not only be capable of accounting for brains, bodies, and contexts in isolation, but must consider an overall brain-body-environment system.

Wearing face masks impairs dyadic micro-activities in nonverbal social encounter: A mixed-methods first-person study on the sense of I and Thou

The COVID-19 pandemic has manifold negative consequences for people around the world, of which the psychosocial ones have been rather underrepresented in the public eye. Regarding social distancing measures, there is already some experimental work demonstrating that the use of face masks has detrimental effects on various aspects of social cognition such as emotion reading, face identification, and perceived closeness of persons. However, while these findings provide important clues, they do not shed light on what people experience when interacting in real life in a masked society. Therefore, in critical distance to cognitivist accounts and taking Direct Social Perception (DSP) approaches seriously, we developed a first-person experimental design and conducted a study with thirty-four participants in a dyadic setting with two conditions (without vs. with face mask). Data were analyzed with mixed methods including in-depth qualitative coding at three levels, code relations analyses, and various statistical tests. Results yielded significant differences across conditions at all qualitative levels, comprising, for example, expressive behavior, and, in particular, significant decreases of content-independent, complimentary mental micro-activities. In the context of DSP, we argue in the paper that these activities suggest the constitution of a quasi-sensory modality - conceived as I-Thou sense - that oscillates between strongly and weakly embodied mental activities, as the analyses show. In sum, this study suggests that mask-wearing impairs both functional directions of mental activity in relation to more or less embodied experience and thus intervenes deeply in fundamental processes of social perception and interaction.

More phenomenology in psychiatry? Applied ontology as a method towards integration

There have been renewed calls to use phenomenology in psychiatry to improve knowledge about causation, diagnostics, and treatment of mental health conditions. A phenomenological approach aims to elucidate the subjective experiences of mental health, which its advocates claim have been largely neglected by current diagnostic frameworks in psychiatry (eg, DSM-5). The consequence of neglecting rich phenomenological information is a comparatively more constrained approach to theory development, empirical research, and care programmes. Although calls for more phenomenology in psychiatry have been met with enthusiasm, there is still relatively little information on how to practically facilitate this integration. In this Personal View, we argue that phenomenological approaches need a shared semantic framework to drive their innovative potential, thus enabling consistent data capture, exchange, and interoperability with current mental health data and informatics approaches (eg, the Research Domain Criteria project). We show how an applied ontology of phenomenological psychopathology offers a suitable method to address these challenges.

Phenomenological Qualitative Methods Applied to the Analysis of Cross-Cultural Experience in Novel Educational Social Contexts

The qualitative method of phenomenology provides a theoretical tool for educational research as it allows researchers to engage in flexible activities that can describe and help to understand complex phenomena, such as various aspects of human social experience. This article explains how to apply the framework of phenomenological qualitative analysis to educational research. The discussion within this article is relevant to those researchers interested in doing cross-cultural qualitative research and in adapting phenomenological investigations to understand students’ cross-cultural lived experiences in different social educational contexts.

Knowing the Knowing. Non-dual Meditative Practice From an Enactive Perspective

Within a variety of contemplative traditions, non-dual-oriented practices were developed to evoke an experiential shift into a mode of experiencing in which the cognitive structures of self-other and subject-object subside. These practices serve to de-reify the enactment of an observing witness which is usually experienced as separate from the objects of awareness. While several contemplative traditions, such as Zen, Mahāmudrā, Dzogchen, and Advaita Vedanta emphasize the importance of such a non-dual insight for the cultivation of genuine wellbeing, only very few attempts in contemplative science have turned toward the study of non-dual-oriented practices. This article starts from a recently developed theoretical cognitive science framework that models the requirements of a temporary experiential shift into a mode of experiencing free from cognitive subject-object structure. This model inspired by the enactive approach contributes theoretically grounded hypotheses for the much-needed rigorous study of non-dual practices and non-dual experiences. To do so, three steps are taken: first, common elements of non-dual-oriented practices are outlined. Second, the main ideas of enactive cognitive science are presented including a principled theoretical model of what is required for a shift to a pure non-dual experience, that is, an experiential mode that is unbound by subject-object duality. Third, this synthesized theoretical model of the requirements for the recognition of the non-dual is then compared with a specific non-dual style of meditation practice, namely, Mahāmudrā practice from Tibetan Buddhism. This third step represents a heuristic for evaluating the external coherence of the presented model. With this, the aim is to point toward a principled enactive view of non-dual meditative practice. In drawing the implications of the presented model, this article ends with an outlook toward next steps for further developing a research agenda that may fully address the concrete elements of non-dual practices.

Affective Instability and Emotion Dysregulation as a Social Impairment

Borderline personality disorder is a complex psychopathological phenomenon. It is usually thought to consist in a vast instability of different aspects that are central to our experience of the world, and to manifest as “a pervasive pattern of instability of interpersonal relationships, self-image, and affects, and marked impulsivity” [American Psychiatric Association (APA), 2013, p. 663]. Typically, of the instability triad—instability in (1) self, (2) affect and emotion, and (3) interpersonal relationships—only the first two are described, examined, and conceptualized from an experiential point of view. In this context, disorders of self have often motivated analyses of self-experience and the sense of self, affective disorders have been frequently considered in the light of emotional experience and its phenomenological structure. Patterns in the phenomenology of social experience have found comparatively little traction when it comes to the conceptualization of the interpersonal disturbances in borderline. In this paper, I argue that interpersonal instability in borderline consists in much more than fragile and shifting relationships but, most importantly, also involves certain styles in experiencing others. These styles, I suggest, may play an explanatory role for the borderline-typical patterns of interpersonal turmoil and so deserve more attention. To better describe and understand these styles, I explore the phenomenological structure of borderline affective instability and discuss the implications it might have for how a person experiences and relates to other people. Considering core aspects of borderline affective instability, such as alexithymia, emotional contagion, emotion dysregulation, and chronic emptiness, I propose borderline can be interpreted as a disturbance of interaffective exchange, which gives rise to certain ways of experiencing others that imply a social impairment.

From Contact to Enact: Reducing Prejudice Toward Physical Disability Using Engagement Strategies

The contact hypothesis has dominated work on prejudice reduction and is often described as one of the most successful theories within social psychology. The hypothesis has nevertheless been criticized for not being applicable in real life situations due to unobtainable conditions for direct contact. Several indirect contact suggestions have been developed to solve this “application challenge.” Here, we suggest a hybrid strategy of both direct and indirect contact. Based on the second-person method developed in social psychology and cognition, we suggest working with an engagement strategy as a hybrid hypothesis. We expand on this suggestion through an engagement-based intervention, where we implement the strategy in a theater performance and investigate the effects on prejudicial attitudes toward people with physical disabilities. Based on the results we reformulate our initial engagement strategy into the Enact (Engagement, Nuancing, and Attitude formation) hypothesis. To deal with the application challenge, this hybrid hypothesis posits two necessary conditions for prejudice reduction. Interventions should: (1) work with engagement to reduce prejudice, and (2) focus on the second-order level of attitudes formation. Here the aim of the prejudice reduction is not attitude correction, but instead the nuancing of attitudes.

Experimental Phenomenology as an Approach to the Study of Contemplative Practices

During history humans have developed a large variety of contemplative practices, in many different areas of life, and as part of many different traditions and contexts. Although some contemplative practices are very old, the research field of Contemplation Studies is young, and there are no agreed-upon definitions of central concepts such as contemplative practices and contemplative experiences. The present paper focuses on contemplative practices, defined as practices that are engaged in for the sake of the contemplative experiences they afford (e.g., the contemplation of nature, or the contemplation of various aspects of being-in-the world). The purpose of the present paper is to discuss the potential of experimental phenomenology to contribute to the development of the research field of Contemplation Studies. Experimental phenomenology is defined as the investigation of phenomenological practices and their effects on experience. Phenomenological practices involve intentional variations of experiencing by means of changes in the direction of attention and the choice of attitude, typically as guided by verbal instructions or self-instructions. It is suggested that contemplative practices represent a subcategory of phenomenological practices. Two different varieties of experimental phenomenology are described and illustrated in the present paper: (1) an informal variety which involves the development of new phenomenological practices by creative variation of procedures and observation of effects; and (2) a more rigorously scientific variety, which involves the systematic variation of phenomenological practices in accordance with experimental designs to study their experiential effects. It is suggested that the development of contemplative practices during the ages is the result of an informal experimenting of the first kind; this variety of experimental phenomenology can also be used to develop personalized health interventions in a clinical setting. As to the more rigorously scientific experimental phenomenology, it is possible that it may lead not only to an improved understanding of general principles underlying contemplative practices, but also to a more systematic development of new contemplative practices. The experimental-phenomenological approach to contemplative practices is illustrated by various examples involving mindfulness, gratitude, receiving and giving.

Existential phenomenology as a unifying philosophy of science for a mixed method study

This article discusses how existential phenomenology may serve as a frame in a mixed-methods study of changes in weight and body composition among women in adjuvant treatment for breast cancer. In accordance with ontologically and epistemologically fundamental assumptions in nursing, we link mixed-methods and existential phenomenology from the perspective of the French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty and his notion of a unified body subject. Letting this perspective permeate our philosophy, methodology and issues at the method level in mixed-method research undermines the distinction between first- and third-person perspective when applying and integrating different data sources in a mixed-methods study. Applying Merleau-Ponty's third way, the women's bodily experiences appear as gestalt; a 'figure' against a ground of existential threats that are grasped through insight from data integrating in joint displays, which revealed the women's experiences on a deep existential level. Existential phenomenology as a frame in mixed-method studies can speak not only to nurses but also to a multidisciplinary audience in a shared attempt to deepen the understanding of a patient's healthcare problem.

Looking from within: Comparing first-person approaches to studying experience

Fostering our understanding of how humans behave, feel and think is a fundamental goal of psychological research. Widely used methods in psychological research are self-report and behavioral measures which require an experimenter to collect data from another person. By comparison, first-person measures that assess more subtle facets of subjective experiences, are less widely used. Without integrating such more subtle first-person measures, however, fundamental aspects of psychological phenomena remain inaccessible to psychological theorizing. To explore the value and potential contribution of first-person methods, the current article aims to provide an overview over already established first-person methods and compare them on relevant dimensions. Based on these results, researchers can select suitable first-person methods to study different facets of subjective experiences. Overall, the investigation of psychological phenomena from a first-person perspective can complement and enrich existing research from a third-person perspective.