Cognitive science is the interdisciplinary, scientific study of the mind and its processes with input from linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, philosophy, computer science/artificial intelligence, and anthropology. It examines the nature, the tasks, and the functions of cognition. Cognitive scientists study intelligence and behavior, with a focus on how nervous systems represent, process, and transform information. Mental faculties of concern to cognitive scientists include language, perception, memory, attention, reasoning, and emotion; to understand these faculties, cognitive scientists borrow from fields such as linguistics, psychology, artificial intelligence, philosophy, neuroscience, and anthropology. The typical analysis of cognitive science spans many levels of organization, from learning and decision to logic and planning; from neural circuitry to modular brain organization. One of the fundamental concepts of cognitive science is that "thinking can best be understood in terms of representational structures in the mind and computational procedures that operate on those structures."
J. A. Scott Kelso is an American neuroscientist, and Professor of Complex Systems and Brain Sciences, Professor of Psychology, Biological Sciences and Biomedical Science at Florida Atlantic University (FAU) in Boca Raton, Florida and The University of Ulster in Derry, N. Ireland.
Acceptance and commitment therapy is a form of psychotherapy, as well as a branch of clinical behavior analysis. It is an empirically based psychological intervention that uses acceptance and mindfulness strategies along with commitment and behavior-change strategies to increase psychological flexibility.
Lawrence W. Barsalou is an American psychologist and a cognitive scientist, currently working at the University of Glasgow.
Enactivism is a position in cognitive science that argues that cognition arises through a dynamic interaction between an acting organism and its environment. It claims that the environment of an organism is brought about, or enacted, by the active exercise of that organism's sensorimotor processes. "The key point, then, is that the species brings forth and specifies its own domain of problems ...this domain does not exist "out there" in an environment that acts as a landing pad for organisms that somehow drop or parachute into the world. Instead, living beings and their environments stand in relation to each other through mutual specification or codetermination" (p. 198). "Organisms do not passively receive information from their environments, which they then translate into internal representations. Natural cognitive systems...participate in the generation of meaning ...engaging in transformational and not merely informational interactions: they enact a world." These authors suggest that the increasing emphasis upon enactive terminology presages a new era in thinking about cognitive science. How the actions involved in enactivism relate to age-old questions about free will remains a topic of active debate.
Embodied embedded cognition (EEC) is a philosophical theoretical position in cognitive science, closely related to situated cognition, embodied cognition, embodied cognitive science and dynamical systems theory. The theory states that intelligent behaviour emerges from the interplay between brain, body and world. The world is not just the 'play-ground' on which the brain is acting. Rather, brain, body and world are equally important factors in the explanation of how particular intelligent behaviours come about in practice.
Embodied music cognition is a direction within systematic musicology interested in studying the role of the human body in relation to all musical activities.
Buddhism includes an analysis of human psychology, emotion, cognition, behavior and motivation along with therapeutic practices. Buddhist psychology is embedded within the greater Buddhist ethical and philosophical system, and its psychological terminology is colored by ethical overtones. Buddhist psychology has two therapeutic goals: the healthy and virtuous life of a householder and the ultimate goal of nirvana, the total cessation of dissatisfaction and suffering (dukkha).
Hermann Haken is physicist and professor emeritus in theoretical physics at the University of Stuttgart. He is known as the founder of synergetics and one of the "fathers" of quantum-mechanical laser theory. He is a cousin of the mathematician Wolfgang Haken, who proved the Four color theorem. He is a nephew of Werner Haken, a doctoral student of Max Planck.
Leslie Samuel Greenberg is a Canadian psychologist born in Johannesburg, South Africa, and is one of the originators and primary developers of Emotion-Focused Therapy for individuals and couples. He is a professor emeritus of psychology at York University in Toronto, and also director of the Emotion-Focused Therapy Clinic in Toronto. His research has addressed questions regarding empathy, psychotherapy process, the therapeutic alliance, and emotion in human functioning.
Emotionally focused therapy and emotion-focused therapy (EFT) are a family of related approaches to psychotherapy with individuals, couples, or families. EFT approaches include elements of experiential therapy, systemic therapy, and attachment theory. EFT is usually a short-term treatment. EFT approaches are based on the premise that human emotions are connected to human needs, and therefore emotions have an innately adaptive potential that, if activated and worked through, can help people change problematic emotional states and interpersonal relationships. Emotion-focused therapy for individuals was originally known as process-experiential therapy, and it is still sometimes called by that name.
In psychology, constructivism refers to many schools of thought that, though extraordinarily different in their techniques, are all connected by a common critique of previous standard approaches, and by shared assumptions about the active constructive nature of human knowledge. In particular, the critique is aimed at the "associationist" postulate of empiricism, "by which the mind is conceived as a passive system that gathers its contents from its environment and, through the act of knowing, produces a copy of the order of reality".
Systematic musicology is an umbrella term, used mainly in Central Europe, for several subdisciplines and paradigms of musicology. "Systematic musicology has traditionally been conceived of as an interdisciplinary science, whose aim it is to explore the foundations of music from different points of view, such as acoustics, physiology, psychology, anthropology, music theory, sociology, and aesthetics." The most important subdisciplines today are music psychology, sociomusicology, philosophy of music, music acoustics, cognitive neuroscience of music, and the computer sciences of music. These subdisciplines and paradigms tend to address questions about music in general, rather than specific manifestations of music. In the Springer Handbook of Systematic Musicology, "(the) sections follow the main topics in the field, Musical Acoustics, Signal Processing, Music Psychology, Psychophysics/Psychoacoustics, and Music Ethnology while also taking recent research trends into consideration, like Embodied Music Cognition and Media Applications. Other topics, like Music Theory or Philosophy of Music are incorporated in the respective sections."
Systems psychology is a branch of both theoretical psychology and applied psychology that studies human behaviour and experience as complex systems. It is inspired by systems theory and systems thinking, and based on the theoretical work of Roger Barker, Gregory Bateson, Humberto Maturana and others. Groups and individuals are considered as systems in homeostasis. Alternative terms here are "systemic psychology", "systems behavior", and "systems-based psychology".
Luciano "Luc" Ciompi is a Swiss psychiatrist. He was professor of psychiatry, medical director of the University Social Psychiatric Clinic and co-director of the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Berne/Switzerland from 1977 to 1994. He is the founder of the concept of Affect-logics, an interdisciplinary theory of the rules of interaction between emotion and cognition, and the founder of Soteria Berne, He also proposed a conceptual framework towards an integrative, psycho-socio-biological understanding of mental illnesses, and promoted community-based halfway institutions for crisis intervention and social reintegration of the mentally ill.
Embodied cognition is the theory that many features of cognition, whether human or otherwise, are shaped by aspects of an organism's entire body. The cognitive features include high-level mental constructs and performance on various cognitive tasks. The bodily aspects involve the motor system, the perceptual system, the bodily interactions with the environment (situatedness), and the assumptions about the world built the functional structure of organism's brain and body.
The free energy principle is a theoretical framework that suggests that the brain reduces surprise or uncertainty by making predictions based on internal models and updating them using sensory input. It highlights the brain's objective of aligning its internal model with the external world to enhance prediction accuracy. This principle integrates Bayesian inference with active inference, where actions are guided by predictions and sensory feedback refines them. It has wide-ranging implications for comprehending brain function, perception, and action.
The person-centered systems theory is a multi-level concept aiming at the reconstruction and explanation of human experience, action and interaction processes in such a way that inappropriate reductions to the focus of individual therapeutic schools of thought are avoided as far as possible. It has been developed by the German psychologist and psychotherapist Jürgen Kriz.
Jürgen Kriz is a German psychologist, psychotherapist and emeritus professor for psychotherapy and clinical psychology at the Osnabrück University, Germany. He is a prominent thinker in systems theory and the founder of the person-centered systems theory – a multi-level concept for the understanding of processes in psychotherapy, counseling, coaching and clinical psychology.
Cognition and Emotion is a peer-reviewed scientific journal with a specific focus on the interplay between thinking and feeling, or cognition and emotion. Within Western thought, cognition and emotion have traditionally been conceived as adversaries. However, it is also possible to understand emotion within a cognitive framework, or to treat cognition and emotion as integrated neural networks. These and other perspectives on the relation between cognition and emotion are studied and debated within the pages of Cognition & Emotion. Cognition and Emotion has an interdisciplinary orientation and publishes contributions from cognitive psychology, social psychology, personality psychology, developmental psychology, psychophysiology, and cognitive neuroscience.
