FormalPara Embodiment Definition

Mind-body reciprocity is a fundamental property of a person’s cognition, with emphasis on the role of the body in embodied communication and embodied social cognition.

The concept of embodiment rests on some very general assumptions. The most basic of these is that mind and body are closely entangled. What does this mean—closely entangled?

There are several aspects of this entanglement. The first is this: viewing mind and body as entangled entities means that the nature of their effects on one another is not one-sided but reciprocal instead. In the embodiment literature, this mutual, reciprocal relationship is commonly termed the ‘bidirectionality’ of mind-body interaction. An example for illustration: when we feel depressed or sad, this will likely show in our bodily and nonverbal expression—our posture may become bent forward and stooped, our gait may change characteristically. This is the conventional finding in psychology. Experiments have however shown that there is also a reverse effect—if we are surreptitiously made to walk and pose as if sad, we may in the end actually feel saddened.

Secondly, the notion of entanglement goes beyond stating that there are two distinguishable directions of causal effects. It is more a circular interaction (Fig. 5.1a) that is continuously active, commonly without our being aware of it. For example, we may ponder quite abstractly about an issue—at the same time, the muscles and visceral systems in our body will become prepared and activated in close correspondence to the thoughts. This ideomotor effect was studied by psychologists as early as in the nineteenth century. Inadvertently, we ‘simulate’ the bodily actions that would be associated with the issue, in case we should have to act on it. Embodiment theory says there is no such thing as pure and abstract thought because unconsciously we are always in this simulation mode. In the contemporary discussion of psychology and neuroscience, this is covered by the concepts of enactive cognition, of sensorimotor behaviour, and active inference. ‘Enactive’ proposes that we actively engage with the environment by directly responding to environmental constraints, not by representing the environment in some sort of cognitive map. ‘Sensorimotor behaviour‘ means that there is a seamless coupling between the senses (hence, the mind) and motor action (the body). And finally, ‘active inference’ pertains to the kind of coupling that is present here: in all behaviour, we act by making an inference (i.e., a prediction) of the sensory consequences this behaviour should generate, and then in further behaviour closely watch the discrepancy between inferred sensory stimulation and actual sensory stimulation. The goal is to minimize discrepancies. This may go as far as to perceiving the discrepancies only, rather than what is expectedly present.

Fig. 5.1
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(a) Entanglement of mind and body: Embodied cognition. (b) Social entanglement of minds and bodies: Embodied communication

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Ideomotor effect: Even when only thinking of a movement (‘ideo’), we subconsciously tend to activate our muscles accordingly (‘motor’). The effect—an aspect of embodied cognition—was described as early as in the nineteenth century, then to account for esoteric phenomena such as using pendula in decision making.

Enactive cognition: Both cognition and perception result from an active engagement with the environment, rather than from a representation or mapping of the environment. The enactive approach views mind, body and environment as highly interdependent elements of one (ecological) system.

Active inference: While we act, we continuously infer and predict what to sense as a consequence of our action. In an online mode, we are comparing this inferred sensory stimulation to actual sensory stimulation, checking for discrepancies. This enables us to minimize discrepancies, even while we are still in the midst of performing the ongoing action.

Thirdly, embodiment means that the mind is embodied and the body is mental (German phenomenology even has coined a word for the mental body: Leib, to distinguish it from the physical body, Körper). Hence, embodiment does not conform to popular reductionisms such as, “the mind is nothing but brain activity”. Embodiment proposes that there are two qualitatively different kinds, the mental and the material. There is a longstanding philosophical debate about whether these two kinds are ontologically different entities (Descartes’ dualism), or epistemologically different aspects of reality (modern dual-aspect philosophy).

The embodiment stance holds that this mind-body reciprocity is a fundamental property of a person’s cognition. Yet in this chapter, we are dealing with social interaction between persons. Thus the question must be extended and rephrased. In recent decades, we have been witnessing a “corporeal turn” towards embodied cognition, so is there a corresponding turn towards embodied communication and embodied social cognition?

1 Joint Action

The extension of embodiment thinking to the social context focuses on the way people communicate—is there communication above and beyond the transmission of verbal information? Yes, of course.

There is a vast field of so-called body language, by which we send ample information on our mental, emotional, somatic and social circumstances, and receive that information from others. Mehrabian (1970) famously estimated that nonverbal communication, not the words per se, may account for about 90% of the effects of messages in a social context.

Environmental psychology and social psychology have been the disciplines within academia that were among the first to systematically study the embodiment of social interaction. They were followed by social neuroscience—a group of Italian neuroscientists (Rizzolatti, Fogassi, & Gallese, 2006) discovered by coincidence that some neurons in the motor cortex of monkey brains, which researchers expected would be active when the monkey grasps an object, were also active when the monkey only saw somebody grasp this object. The Italian neuroscientists called these neurons ‘mirror neurons’ because of their double function, as these neurons were involved in own motor action but also in reflecting the action of others. Thus apparently a brain correlate for immediate social interaction was described.

A large number of corresponding psychological ‘mirroring’ phenomena were described much earlier. There are many anecdotal reports that emotional expressions can be highly contagious, i.e. when the emotional expression is encountered in a social context, people automatically respond in a similar manner, even to the extent that they mimic that expression. For instance, if one person in a group starts laughing, others tend to follow. In the same manner, suicidal acts when prominently published in a newspaper or book can propagate in a population as if they were contagious (the Werther effect). Social contagion is also present in language—speech mannerisms, such as the so-called ‘vocal fry’ and ‘upspeak’ , have been observed to have epidemic-like qualities among English-speaking women. Generally, the tendency towards joint action can be described as a synchronization of behaviours in an interpersonal, sometimes even societal context. Thus, the minds and bodies of interacting individuals become entangled (Fig. 5.1b), often inadvertently and outside the awareness of the people who are ultimately synchronized .

A new field of psychological research has come to the fore in recent years, in which this synchronization of behaviour is explicitly studied. ‘Nonverbal synchrony’ is the technical term used in many publications, which denotes the temporal coordination of behaviour of two or more interacting individuals. Synchrony is present when their behaviour is positively or negatively correlated to a degree exceeding random correlations. The existence and extent of nonverbal synchrony in various social situations have been studied, and different aspects of behaviour have been used to compute the correlations. Individuals in a conversation, for instance, synchronize not only their verbal utterances but also their nonverbal body movement. During conversation, nonverbal synchrony arises when both individuals move in response to each other, by coordinating posture changes , seating positions, gestures, facial expressions, or head movements. The most economic approach to detect synchrony is by measuring body movement, which can be achieved by automated, and therefore objective, video analysis (so-called Motion Energy Analysis , MEA: Ramseyer & Tschacher, 2011). A longstanding conventional approach is the systematic coding of aspects of the body language of interacting individuals, which can be more specific, but is very time-consuming and requires rater trainings.

Non-verbal synchrony: In social interaction, apart from explicit verbal communication, people show an implicit tendency to ‘resonate’, i.e. they synchronize their nonverbal behaviour. The In-Sync model of Koole and Tschacher (2016) distinguishes a hierarchy of levels of nonverbal synchronization: Movement synchrony, mirroring of ‘body language’, physiological synchrony, and central-nervous synchrony.

Synchrony of behaviour: In addition to nonverbal synchrony, synchronization also arises in verbal behaviour, when people find their ‘common language’. Such linguistic alignment and coordination is manifest in using the same words, or adapting to one another’s dialect and prosody.

The activity of the autonomous nervous system of individuals closely corresponds to their emotions and action tendencies . The sympathetic branch of the autonomous nervous system is active in fight-or-flight situations and during stress, whereas the parasympathetic branch relates to relaxation and regeneration. Therefore, the physiological markers of interacting persons offer further possibilities to study social coupling via synchronization (Tschacher, 1997). Many recent studies have monitored electrodermal activity, which signals sympathetic responses. Meanwhile, a number of studies have supported the existence of physiological synchrony of participants in interaction, often specifically in psychotherapeutic interaction (e.g., Karvonen, Kykyri, Kaartinen, Penttonen, & Seikkula, 2016).

Obviously, interpersonal synchrony on one of the different levels is a ubiquitous phenomenon that characterizes embodied interaction and communication. This fact is per se interesting, as it shows that social systems have a tendency towards pattern formation. Pattern formation of complex systems is found very generally in nature, and it is modelled and studied by a special field of systems theory called self-organization theory or synergetics (Haken, 1977; Tschacher, 1997).

Synergetics: A mathematical structural science that describes processes of spontaneous pattern formation in complex open systems composed of many parts. Pattern formation is a phenomenon of self-organization or emergence. By forming the patterns, the parts show ordered collective dynamics, which is governed by ‘order parameters’.

In addition to this ubiquitous phenomenon, nonverbal synchrony is associated with cognitive and affective processes as well as with attributes of participants’ personalities. Empirical research has shown that nonverbal synchrony is linked with empathy, relationship quality, and other prosocial emotions and is commonly connected with positive affect of the participants.

2 Embodied Emotion Is Crucial to Human Interactions

Contacting, expressing and accepting one’s emotional impulses constitute core processes in psychotherapy, and finding ways towards emotion regulation is a general goal of therapy. In psychology, an emotion is commonly operationalized by a triad of components: a specific feeling and experiencing (mind), a specific expressive behaviour that can be observed by others (body), and a specific physiological response (body). Therefore, there is little dissent that all emotions are embodied since they consist of mental and physical ingredients. Accordingly, a precursor of contemporary embodiment research is often recognized in the James-Lange theory of emotion, proposed by the nineteenth century psychologist William James and the physiologist Carl Lange. This theory claims that people perceive and recognize emotions through perceiving their own bodily changes that are associated with the emotions. Hence, I feel angry because I sense the muscular and physiological correlates of anger in my body. Experiencing emotion thus becomes a result of reading my own somatic markers of the emotion.

Such James-Langean effects were illustrated in a study by Michalak et al. (2009), who modulated the gait of participants walking on a treadmill using feedback. Participants who were made to walk like depressed persons developed a memory bias that characterizes depressed clients: they recalled negative items better than positive ones. In general, behaving as if sad can make one sad.

The various emotions can be distinguished by body sensation maps or somatograms (Nummenmaa, Glerean, Hari, & Hietanen, 2014), which show the areas of the body surface that are activated or suppressed during an emotional episode. The authors had these maps rated and drawn by participants in a large international study, finding consistent patterns for each emotion. The sensation maps were also generalizable from European to East-Asian samples. Such bodily localization of emotions goes back to physiological and motoric activations, and their reliability as signatures of emotions has obvious social significance—we can in principle read emotional states off the bodies of people we interact with. There are bidirectional parasympathetic pathways that convey an individual’s present physiological state via prosody, posture and facial expression to others. It is for these same reasons that the bodies (and nervous systems) of social agents become coupled, as we described in the previous section. These mechanisms support social engagement between people, often in a subliminal fashion.

Tschacher, Rees, and Ramseyer (2014) studied the effects of nonverbal synchrony on the affectivity of individuals. 84 dyads were formed by previously unacquainted participants who then engaged in several 5-min conversations about general topics. It was found that positive affect was significantly higher when participants had synchronized more in the preceding conversation (synchrony was unobtrusively measured using MEA ).

This and an increasing number of further studies have shown that synchrony, i.e. the coordination of physiological and motoric behaviour, has predominantly prosocial effects. Vice versa, it was also found that artificially induced synchrony (e.g. by an experimenter’s affiliate in a study) can result in higher sympathy and liking in interacting individuals. Positive therapeutic alliance, for instance, was found associated with nonverbal synchrony between therapist and client in the therapy sessions .

Thus, the higher the synchrony the higher the sympathy? This, however, is not always the case. There are indications that synchronization can also be overdone. Too much of synchrony can be suddenly perceived as mocking the other person, which is when the prosocial affect generated by synchrony is tipped and gives way to negative emotion. Willful imitation of one’s gestures or facial expression invariably creates discomfort and anger in the imitated person. This makes sense from an evolutionary, biological standpoint: Synchrony is a signal of affiliative interest in a person, i.e. it is a biologically crucial signal. Yet synchrony, especially nonverbal synchrony, can be falsified, which makes it a sensitive and even dangerous signal at the same time. Therefore, marked negative affect arises when too much ‘false’ synchrony is suspected .

Some studies have supported this assumption that the association of synchrony with positive emotion may not be linear but curvilinear (Fig. 5.2a). Low nonverbal synchrony is linked with negative affect because a lack of interest is implicitly communicated. The medium degree of synchrony is optimal because it signals affiliation and even courtship (Grammer, Kruck, & Magnusson, 1998). Very large movement synchrony is again linked with negative affect, and is often perceived as mocking and inauthentic. This curvilinear relationship may hold for movement synchrony, and psychotherapies with high levels of nonverbal synchrony had high dropout rates; it may however not hold for physiological synchrony, because it cannot be easily falsified. More work is needed to illuminate the generality of the presumed nonlinear relationship between emotion and synchrony.

Fig. 5.2
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(a) Presumed relationship between embodied emotion and nonverbal synchrony. (b) In-Sync model of psychotherapy: A hierarchy of synchronizations underlie the process of psychotherapy

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3 Embodied Empathy

Movement synchrony between therapists and clients in psychotherapy have repeatedly been found connected with a positive therapeutic relationship or alliance. Such findings are important for psychotherapy because the therapeutic alliance is generally considered the most important ‘common factor’ of psychotherapy. Common factors are ingredients of successful therapies no matter what kind of therapeutic approach is chosen or what kind of disorder is being treated.

Alliance is not a homogenous factor—is is composed of constituents, particularly of goal consensus (therapist and client have shared goals), of mutual liking (connected to positive emotions, see above), and of therapist’s empathy. Clients sympathize with their therapist when they feel understood, in other words, when the therapist is accepting and empathic. Empathy is at the core of social relationships in general, and also of the alliance in psychotherapy.

Empathy has been analyzed in psychology in different guises. An important cognitive aspect of empathy is the ability of a person to take the perspective of another person. This ability is expressed and studied in the concept ‘Theory of Mind’ (ToM) . A large literature in cognitive social psychology and psychopathology has centered on ToM, the cognitive modeling of the other’s mind, as a way to conceptualize empathy .

In this volume, however, we are striving towards a full perspective of social relationship, which has become accessible in the shape of the embodiment framework. This perspective can also be applied to empathy, by pointing out that ToM is only the cognitive component of empathy. Full empathy is embodied and enactive, not just a cognitive representation of the other’s mind. Social neuroscience and enactive psychology assume that we can be empathic because we predict and perceive the other’s responses in basically the same way as we perceive our own . This view is supported by numerous everyday examples of empathic processing – we can actually feel the pain in our own body when we see somebody cut their finger. Empathy understood in this way goes beyond ‘theory of mind’ as it is neither merely theoretical nor is it restricted to just the mind of the other person.

Several studies have shown the association of empathy and embodied interaction. Some of these had examined simulated psychotherapy sessions, showing that therapists were rated as more empathic when instructed to synchronize their movements with clients. Postural congruence and physiological synchrony also have positive effects on perceived therapist’s empathy. The association is likewise present at the verbal level – a higher synchronization with respect to linguistic style and prosodic attributes of speech (such as the pitch of the voice) was found linked with higher empathy ratings .

Koole and Tschacher (2016) have recently reviewed the available research on the various synchronizations underlying the process of psychotherapy, and formulated their In-Sync model (Fig. 5.2b). The core of psychotherapy is the alliance with its functions of affective sharing, empathy (‘I-sharing’) and the gradual development of a common language between therapist and client. This intermediate level of synchronization originates from highly dynamic (‘phasic’) processes of sensorimotor coupling, the basis of embodiment as outlined in the first section of this chapter. In the social context of psychotherapy , this leads to embodied communication, and becomes manifest as movement synchrony, physiological synchrony, and the synchrony of central-nervous systems (‘inter-brain coupling’). At a longer, chronic timescale, these synchronizations allow successful emotion regulation, a core outcome of psychotherapy .

4 Cultural Aspects of Embodied Self-Other Interactions

Nummenmaa’s study of somatotopic emotion maps has suggested that these may be cultural universals. Hence, emotions are likely located in the body in quite similar ways in people with different ethnic and cultural backgrounds. The embodiment of cognition and emotion is presumably a shared working principle of humans of all cultures, and due to its evolutionary origin, also of other species. This does however not imply that the social expression of embodiment, and of the In-Sync model, are necessarily identical. There is as yet very little systematic research on intercultural differences. Yet, there is one field of embodiment, that of proxemics and distance behaviour (Hall, 1966), were cultural differences have become quite obvious .

Proxemics, a term coined by Hall, describes the way in which we make use of physical space during social interaction. All individuals keep certain distances from others, and this distance behaviour depends on own psychological, emotional and cultural attributes. Hall termed the individual distance connected with well-being and comfort this individual’s ‘personal space‘, which denotes a sort of invisible boundary or bubble surrounding the physical body. Personal space is a psychological space, therefore a space that emanates from the Leib rather than the physical Körper. It may thus be considered an aspect of body language, and distance behaviour is one of the social consequences of embodied cognition. If one’s personal space is trespassed, negative affect, physiological arousal and behavioural adaptations are the consequences, as if in an invasion of private territory .

Proxemics: A field within social psychology and ecological psychology that studies the way in which we make use of physical space during social interaction. For instance, we keep certain distances from others, depending on our psychological, emotional and cultural attributes. Territoriality and personal space are further concepts that describe how we demarcate, claim, and use spaces around our bodies.

Additionally, specific distance zones have been distinguished that allow specific social activities: the intimate (zero to half a meter) and the personal (0.5–1.3 m) zones prescribe the adequate distances between intimate partners and close friends or family members, respectively. The social distance zone (1.3–4 m) is observed when acquaintances and colleagues communicate; the public distance zone (4–8 m) is occupied during speeches at conferences and other public events. Psychotherapeutic interaction commonly takes place in the social distance zone .

There are considerable differences in the cultural definition of the distance zones. A social distance, by the standards of Mediterranean cultures, may be interpreted already as located within the personal distance zone by Anglo-Saxon judgments. In a defined social interaction, one and the same metric distance may be perceived as invasive by one cultural standard and as overly cold by the other. Thus, distance behaviour is a field that is highly susceptible to intercultural misunderstandings. The distances taken between conversing dyads were consistently found modulated by culture: North Americans have larger distances than Mediterraneans and Eastern Europeans, and the closest distances were reported from Latin Americans. Large distances were also observed in Japanese dyads. In addition, sex differences have been reported. Female dyads usually interact at closer distances than mixed and male dyads .

The choice of personal space metrics thus depends on culture and sex, but only when a considerable number of context variables are held constant, such as: the size of the spaces in which distance behaviour occurs, further architectural properties of the environment, physical objects such as barriers or tables, number of persons in the room, the perceived presence of ‘crowding’, emotional states, social status of the participants, their body orientation and posture, and others. For example, when interaction distances are too small for comfort, people tend to respond by modifications of body language – by less direct body orientation, gaze avoidance, closed postures or synchrony reduction .

Thus generally, the large number of variables in embodied communication and interaction should be regarded as a complex multivariate constellation, in which the change of one variable leads to corresponding adaptations and compensations in other variables. As remarked before, a dynamical systems approach appears adequate to model the complexity of embodied social interaction in naturalistic settings.

The confluence of many variables that result in feelings of ease or discomfort has obvious ramifications for the practice of embodied interaction. Therefore, psychotherapists carefully design the spaces they work in to achieve the best outcomes. Some therapeutic approaches actively even make use of embodied spatial constellations. Gestalt therapy and family therapy use spatial arrangements as therapeutic techniques, e.g. in chair work or family constellations work .

Clinical Guidelines

Embodied Communication in psychotherapy is an active area of research. At present, it would be premature to derive guidelines or even manual-like prescriptions from this state of research. Nevertheless, recent findings already allow formulating hypotheses and assumptions.

Alliance: Several studies have found an association of the quality of therapist-client alliance with nonverbal synchrony. This is also true of the relationship quality of couples. Thus we may assume that alliance and relational quality is embodied in the (often observable) synchrony of people interacting.

Psychopathology: Research interest in the psychomotor aspects of psychopathology has largely increased, especially regarding schizophrenia spectrum and affective disorders. Movement therapy and body-based psychotherapy may be specifically indicated to treat the negative syndrome and depression. The extent of pacing or leading in interactional synchrony between client and therapist depends on the client’s symptom profile.

Synchronizing: Nonverbal synchrony in psychotherapy sessions is an emergent phenomenon that is correlated with positive common factors such as self-efficacy and empathy. Even if plausible, it is currently unclear whether it can be implemented intentionally as a technique by therapists. Too low synchrony is connected with drop-out. Too much synchrony can likewise have contrary effects. Targeted interventions using pacing and leading, as suggested by Neurolinguistic Programming (NLP) in the 1970s, have not been studied and are still scientifically uncorroborated.

Emotion regulation: Improving client’s emotion regulation is a major goal of psychotherapy. Nonverbal synchrony in non-clinical dyads is linked with positive affect. Thus, affective co-regulation via physiological and motoric synchronization of therapist and client can be seen as the fundament of emotion regulation in the session.

Authenticity: In social interaction, intentional and explicit synchronization in the sense of mimicking of body movement, gestures, facial expression etc. is detrimental to the relationship as soon as it is considered unauthentic (i.e. as conflicting with Carl Rogers’ common factor ‘congruence’). Thus, authenticity provides an upper bound for explicit synchronization in the sense of mirroring.

Therapeutic presence: Psychotherapy occurs in the here-and-now of the therapeutic setting. Therapeutic presence, a therapist’s being attuned to the client and thus ‘present’ in the session, can be defined by the duration of interpersonal synchrony. This aspect of shared nowness is closely linked with empathy, and thus with alliance quality, and with mindfulness.