Establishing a Comprehensive Hierarchical construct of Eustress (CHE).

Unlabelled: Eustress as a positive response to challenging situations has received increasing attention across diverse literatures, reflecting its potential to improve wellbeing, work performance, and personal growth. In the process, eustress has been defined, measured, and manipulated in myriad ways, leading to fragmentation and vagueness. Because a unified and well-specified construct would significantly support eustress research, we developed one here.

Habitualness, reward and external constraints: Exploring the underlying influences of daily water intake using the Situated Assessment Method.

Understanding what facilitates and hinders water drinking is crucial to inform interventions for preventing underhydration. Using the Situated Assessment Method, we extended previous research by examining what influences water drinking in daily life. We studied 213 UK adults, assessing 13 potential predictors (e.

The Situated Assessment Method (SAM2): Establishing individual differences in habitual behavior.

From the perspectives of grounded, situated, and embodied cognition, we have developed a new approach for assessing individual differences. Because this approach is grounded in two dimensions of situatedness-situational experience and the Situated Action Cycle-we refer to it as the Situated Assessment Method (SAM2). Rather than abstracting over situations during assessment of a construct (as in traditional assessment instruments), SAM2 assesses a construct in situations where it occurs, simultaneously measuring factors from the Situated Action Cycle known to influence it.

Implications of Grounded Cognition for Conceptual Processing Across Cultures.

Cross-linguistic differences in concepts have implications for all theories of concepts, not just for grounded ones. Failure to address these implications does not imply the belief that they do not exist. Instead, it reflects a division of labor between researchers who focus on general principles versus cultural variability.

Brain correlates of action word memory revealed by fMRI.

Understanding language semantically related to actions activates the motor cortex. This activation is sensitive to semantic information such as the body part used to perform the action (e.g.

Incidental exposure to hedonic and healthy food features affects food preferences one day later.

Memories acquired incidentally from exposure to food information in the environment may often become active to later affect food preferences. Because conscious use of these memories is not requested or required, these incidental learning effects constitute a form of indirect memory. In an experiment using a novel food preference paradigm (n = 617), we found that brief incidental exposure to hedonic versus healthy food features indirectly affected food preferences a day later, explaining approximately 10% of the variance in preferences for tasty versus healthy foods.

Chinese-English bilinguals show linguistic-perceptual links in the brain associating short spoken phrases with corresponding real-world natural action sounds by semantic category.

Higher cognitive functions such as linguistic comprehension must ultimately relate to perceptual systems in the brain, though how and why this forms remains unclear. Different brain networks that mediate perception when hearing real-world natural sounds has recently been proposed to respect a taxonomic model of acoustic-semantic categories. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) with Chinese/English bilingual listeners, the present study explored whether reception of short spoken phrases, in both Chinese (Mandarin) and English, describing corresponding sound-producing events would engage overlapping brain regions at a semantic category level.

Challenges and Opportunities for Grounding Cognition.

According to the grounded perspective, cognition emerges from the interaction of classic cognitive processes with the modalities, the body, and the environment. Rather than being an autonomous impenetrable module, cognition incorporates these other domains intrinsically into its operation. The Situated Action Cycle offers one way of understanding how the modalities, the body, and the environment become integrated to ground cognition.

Studying human eating behaviour in the laboratory: Theoretical considerations and practical suggestions.

Robinson and colleagues (2018) make important first steps in highlighting the shortcomings of laboratory studies of human eating behaviour, and providing some general suggestions to increase methodological and reporting quality. In this commentary, we present additional important theoretical considerations and practical suggestions. First, we discuss the role of situational cues in eating behaviour and highlight the implications for designing ecologically valid laboratory experiments.

Primary Interoceptive Cortex Activity during Simulated Experiences of the Body.

Studies of the classic exteroceptive sensory systems (e.g., vision, touch) consistently demonstrate that vividly imagining a sensory experience of the world-simulating it-is associated with increased activity in the corresponding primary sensory cortex.

Moving beyond the distinction between concrete and abstract concepts.

From the perspective of the situated conceptualization framework, the primary purpose of concepts is for categorizing and integrating elements of situations to support goal-directed action (including communication and social interaction). To the extent that important situational elements are categorized and integrated properly, effective goal-directed action follows. Over time, frequent patterns of co-occurring concepts within situations become established in memory as situated conceptualizations, conditioning the conceptual system and producing habitual patterns of conceptual processing.

Learning situated emotions.

From the perspective of constructivist theories, emotion results from learning assemblies of relevant perceptual, cognitive, interoceptive, and motor processes in specific situations. Across emotional experiences over time, learned assemblies of processes accumulate in memory that later underlie emotional experiences in similar situations. A neuroimaging experiment guided participants to experience (and thus learn) situated forms of emotion, and then assessed whether participants tended to experience situated forms of the emotion later.

What does semantic tiling of the cortex tell us about semantics?

Recent use of voxel-wise modeling in cognitive neuroscience suggests that semantic maps tile the cortex. Although this impressive research establishes distributed cortical areas active during the conceptual processing that underlies semantics, it tells us little about the nature of this processing. While mapping concepts between Marr's computational and implementation levels to support neural encoding and decoding, this approach ignores Marr's algorithmic level, central for understanding the mechanisms that implement cognition, in general, and conceptual processing, in particular.

A core eating network and its modulations underlie diverse eating phenomena.

We propose that a core eating network and its modulations account for much of what is currently known about the neural activity underlying a wide range of eating phenomena in humans (excluding homeostasis and related phenomena). The core eating network is closely adapted from a network that Kaye, Fudge, and Paulus (2009) proposed to explain the neurocircuitry of eating, including a ventral reward pathway and a dorsal control pathway. In a review across multiple literatures that focuses on experiments using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI), we first show that neural responses to food cues, such as food pictures, utilize the same core eating network as eating.

Establishing the situated features associated with perceived stress.

We propose that the domain general process of categorization contributes to the perception of stress. When a situation contains features associated with stressful experiences, it is categorized as stressful. From the perspective of situated cognition, the features used to categorize experiences as stressful are the features typically true of stressful situations.

Mindful attention reduces linguistic intergroup bias.

A brief mindfulness intervention diminished bias in favor of one's in-group and against one's out-group. In the linguistic intergroup bias (LIB), individuals expect in-group members to behave positively, and out-group members to behave negatively. Consequently, individuals choose abstract language beset with character inferences to describe these expected behaviors, and in contrast, choose concrete, objective language to describe unexpected behaviors.

On Staying Grounded and Avoiding Quixotic Dead Ends.

The 15 articles in this special issue on The Representation of Concepts illustrate the rich variety of theoretical positions and supporting research that characterize the area. Although much agreement exists among contributors, much disagreement exists as well, especially about the roles of grounding and abstraction in conceptual processing. I first review theoretical approaches raised in these articles that I believe are Quixotic dead ends, namely, approaches that are principled and inspired but likely to fail.

Putting Everything in Context.

In response to Casasanto, Brookshire, and Ivry (2015), we address four points: First, we engaged in conceptual replications of Brookshire, Casasanto, and Ivry (2010), not direct replications. Second, we did not question the validity of Brookshire et al.'s (2010) results, nor the similar findings of other researchers, but instead explained divergent findings within an integrated theoretical framework.

A shift in perspective: Decentering through mindful attention to imagined stressful events.

Ruminative thoughts about a stressful event can seem subjectively real, as if the imagined event were happening in the moment. One possibility is that this subjective realism results from simulating the self as engaged in the stressful event (immersion). If so, then the process of decentering--disengaging the self from the event--should reduce the subjective realism associated with immersion, and therefore perceived stressfulness.

The benefits of simply observing: mindful attention modulates the link between motivation and behavior.

Mindful attention, a central component of mindfulness meditation, can be conceived as becoming aware of one's thoughts and experiences and being able to observe them as transient mental events. Here, we present a series of studies demonstrating the effects of applying this metacognitive perspective to one's spontaneous reward responses when encountering attractive stimuli. Taking a grounded cognition perspective, we argue that reward simulations in response to attractive stimuli contribute to appetitive behavior and that motivational states and traits enhance these simulations.

Are Automatic Conceptual Cores the Gold Standard of Semantic Processing? The Context-Dependence of Spatial Meaning in Grounded Congruency Effects.

According to grounded cognition, words whose semantics contain sensory-motor features activate sensory-motor simulations, which, in turn, interact with spatial responses to produce grounded congruency effects (e.g., processing the spatial feature of up for sky should be faster for up vs.

Variety in emotional life: within-category typicality of emotional experiences is associated with neural activity in large-scale brain networks.

The tremendous variability within categories of human emotional experience receives little empirical attention. We hypothesized that atypical instances of emotion categories (e.g.

Situating emotional experience.

Psychological construction approaches to emotion suggest that emotional experience is situated and dynamic. Fear, for example, is typically studied in a physical danger context (e.g.