Close relationships provide a critical context for health. In this Plenary Session, David Sbarra will discuss the evolutionary basis of the relationship-health association, and in particular the central role of perceived partner responsiveness (PPR) as a key interpersonal behavior that maintains high-quality relationships. After reviewing research in this area, he will discuss a growing literature …
Continue reading “Relationships, Health, and Technology: Toward an Evolutionary Mismatch?”
This lecture will review salient examples of social connectivity — in mood, mind states, and physiology. We will explore how different states or tendencies — biases toward threat appraisals, mind wandering, and engagement in the present, are related to social, psychological, and biological well being. Elissa Epel will focus more deeply on social influences on …
Continue reading “Social Connectivity, Mind States, and Biological Aging”
How do we understand life and mind? For Kym Maclaren, understanding something means “letting it be.” We understand something only to the extent that we do not fully determine it. Understanding something wrongly can do an injustice to it. Imagine a horse trainer only interested in the moneymaking his animal can do; it will collapse …
Continue reading “Love and Enaction: Towards an Engaged Epistemology”
This presentation will outline the Buddha’s basic approach to understanding our cognitive processes, focusing on dependent arising or radical interdependency. William Waldron will discuss the factors involved in the dependent arising of cognitive awareness and the co-arising of our “world” as first articulated in the early teachings. He will then present how these basic analyses …
Continue reading “Interdependency: the Buddha’s Central Insight”
In the last decades, plasticity research has suggested that training of mental capacities such as attention, mindfulness and compassion is effective and leads to positive changes in socio-affective and cognitive functions. Tania Singer will show first results of the ReSource Project, a large-scale multi-methodological one-year secular mental training program in which participants were trained in …
This panel will examine the growing role of social media and handheld technology uses in various relationships, individual and group health, intergroup dynamics, and its effects on prosocial behavior. Panelists will discuss the opportunities, misbeliefs and dangers of increased connectedness through technology, with reflections on current research findings and will raise important questions for future …
This lecture will give an overview of the enactive approach to cognition, according to which cognition is a mode of embodied action. The implications of the enactive approach for understanding intersubjectivity, social cognition and contemplative practice will be explored.
Academic psychology and neuroscience have typically centered viewpoints of the dominant culture (WEIRD: White, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic), which has influenced both the process and content of contemplative neuroscience. By incorporating more diverse perspectives through a lens of social justice, Helen Weng will present new lines of work that center viewpoints of meditators who belong …
Continue reading “Contemplative Neuroscience through the Lens of Diversity and Social Justice”
In this session, Rob Roeser will present selected developmental science research on social cognition and person-perception—defined in relation to how individuals’ perceptions and understandings of other people/groups develop from infancy through adolescence, and moral and self-development—defined in relation to how individuals’ capacities for self-regulation, compassion, and fairness in social interactions, and their related moral identities …
Lasana Harris’ presentation will focus on flexible social cognition—our ability to infer the mental states of other people, animals, and non-human objects, and to withhold this ability in the presence of others. This latter phenomenon termed dehumanised perception is moderated by the social context, such that people read cues from the situation, as well as …
Continue reading “Flexible Social Cognition and Dehumanisation”
