Embodied Theodicy: From Conceptual to Bodily Engagements with Suffering

Embodied engagements with online pornography

The Bodily Formats Approach to Embodied Cognition

Chapter Overview In the past few decades, many practitioners of cognitive science and philosophy of mind have staked out programs and positions under the label of " embodied cognition " (EC). They have widely differing views, however, of what embodiment consists in and why a program of embodied cognition might be an improvement over classical cognitivism. Frederique de Vignemont and I have rece...

Embodied neural responses to others' suffering.

To investigate whether and how facial mimicry in observers affects their empathic neural responses to others' pain expressions, we recorded event-related potentials (ERPs) from Chinese adults while viewing pain and neutral expressions of Asian and Caucasian faces. Facial mimicry was manipulated by allowing participants to freely move their facial muscles (the relaxed condition) or asking them t...

Embodied Conceptual Combination

Conceptual combination research investigates the processes involved in creating new meaning from old referents. It is therefore essential that embodied theories of cognition are able to explain this constructive ability and predict the resultant behavior. However, by failing to take an embodied or grounded view of the conceptual system, existing theories of conceptual combination cannot account...

A Connectionist Approach to Embodied Conceptual Metaphor

A growing body of data has been gathered in support of the view that the mind is embodied and that cognition is grounded in sensory-motor processes. Some researchers have gone so far as to claim that this paradigm poses a serious challenge to central tenets of cognitive science, including the widely held view that the mind can be analyzed in terms of abstract computational principles. On the ot...