Embodiment Theory: Glossary of Terms
Neuroscience, Biology, Basic Science Terms
Wikimedia Foundation. (2025, February 19). Various pages cited below. Wikipedia. https://www.wikipedia.org/ [lightly edited, more fully integrated]
Action potential occurs when the membrane potential of a specific cell location rapidly rises and falls: this depolarization then causes adjacent locations to similarly depolarize. Action potentials occur in several types of animal cells, called excitable cells, which include neurons, muscle cells, endocrine cells, glomus cells, and in some plant cells.
Fixed action pattern is an ethological term describing an instinctive behavioral sequence that is highly stereotyped and species-characteristic. Fixed action patterns are said to be produced by the innate releasing mechanism, a “hard-wired” neural network, in response to a sign stimulus or releaser. Once released, a fixed action pattern runs to completion.
Attention is the behavioral and cognitive process of selectively concentrating on a discrete aspect of information, whether considered subjective or objective, while ignoring other perceivable information. Attention remains a crucial area of investigation within education, psychology, neuroscience, cognitive neuroscience, and neuropsychology. Areas of active investigation involve determining the source of the sensory cues and signals that generate attention, the effects of these sensory cues and signals on the tuning properties of sensory neurons, and the relationship between attention and other behavioral and cognitive processes, which may include working memory and psychological vigilance. Attention also varies across cultures.
Behavior is the actions and mannerisms made by individuals, organisms, systems or artificial entities in conjunction with themselves or their environment, which includes the other systems or organisms around as well as the (inanimate) physical environment. It is the computed response of the system or organism to various stimuli or inputs, whether internal or external, conscious or subconscious, overt or covert, and voluntary or involuntary.
Bioelectricity refers to the regulation of cell, tissue, and organ-level patterning and behavior as the result of endogenous electrically mediated signaling. Cells and tissues of all types use ion fluxes to communicate electrically. The charge carrier in bioelectricity is the ion (charged atom), and an electric current and field is generated whenever a net ion flux occurs. Endogenous electric currents and fields, ion fluxes, and differences in resting potential across tissues comprise an ancient and highly conserved communicating and signaling system. It functions alongside (in series and in parallel to) biochemical factors, transcriptional networks, and other physical forces to regulate the cell behavior and large-scale patterning during embryogenesis, regeneration, cancer, and many other processes.
Cognition refers to “the mental action or process of acquiring knowledge and understanding through thought, experience, and the senses”. It encompasses many aspects of intellectual functions and processes such as: attention, the formation of knowledge, memory and working memory, judgment and evaluation, reasoning and “computation”, problem solving and decision making, comprehension and production of language. Cognitive processes use existing knowledge and generate new knowledge.
Muscle contraction is the activation of tension generating sites within muscle fibers. In natural movements that underlie locomotor activity, muscle contractions are multifaceted as they are able to produce changes in length and tension in a time-varying manner. In vertebrates, skeletal muscle contractions are neurogenic as they require synaptic input from motor neurons to produce muscle contractions. A single motor neuron is able to innervate multiple muscle fibers, thereby causing the fibers to contract at the same time. Once innervated, the protein filaments within each skeletal muscle fiber slide past each other to produce a contraction, which is explained by the sliding filament theory. The contraction produced can be described as a twitch, summation, or tetanus, depending on the frequency of action potentials.
Emotions are biological states associated with the nervous system brought on by neurophysiological changes variously associated with thoughts, feelings, behavioral responses, and a degree of pleasure or displeasure. There is currently no scientific consensus on a definition. Emotions are often intertwined with mood, temperament, personality, disposition, creativity and motivation. Based on discoveries made through neural mapping of the limbic system, the neurobiological explanation of human emotion is that emotion is a pleasant or unpleasant mental state organized in the limbic system of the mammalian brain. If distinguished from reactive responses of reptiles, emotions would then be mammalian elaborations of general vertebrate arousal patterns, in which neurochemicals (for example, dopamine, noradrenaline, and serotonin) step-up or step-down the brain’s activity level, as visible in body movements, gestures and postures.
Emotional contagion is the phenomenon of having one person’s emotions and related behaviors directly trigger similar emotions and behaviors in other people. Emotions can be shared across individuals in many different ways both implicitly or explicitly. The behavior has been found in humans, other primates, and dogs. Unlike cognitive contagion, emotional contagion is less conscious and more automatic. In humans it relies mainly on non-verbal communication, although it has been demonstrated that emotional contagion can, and does, occur via telecommunication. For example, people interacting through e-mails and “chats” are affected by the other’s emotions, without being able to perceive the non-verbal cues. One view describes the emotional contagion process as a primitive, automatic and unconscious behavior. Another view, emanating from social comparison theories, sees emotional contagion as demanding more cognitive effort and being more conscious. According to this view, people engage in social comparison to see if their emotional reaction is congruent with the persons around them. Contrary to the automatic infection of feelings described above, there are times when others’ emotions are being manipulated by a person or a group in order to achieve something. This can be a result of intentional affective influence by a leader or team member. Suppose this person wants to convince the others of something, he may do so by sweeping them up in his enthusiasm. In such a case, his positive emotions are an act with the purpose of “contaminating” the others’ feelings. A different kind of intentional mood contagion is by giving the group a reward, or treat, in order to alleviate their feelings.
Emotional regulation is the ability to respond to the ongoing demands of experience with the range of emotions in a manner that is socially tolerable and sufficiently flexible to permit spontaneous reactions as well as the ability to delay spontaneous reactions as needed. It can also be defined as extrinsic and intrinsic processes responsible for monitoring, evaluating, and modifying emotional reactions. Emotional regulation belongs to the broader set of emotion regulation processes, which includes both the regulation of one’s own feelings and the regulation of other people’s feelings. Emotion regulation is a complex process that involves initiating, inhibiting, or modulating one’s state or behavior in a given situation — for example the subjective experience (feelings), cognitive responses (thoughts), emotion-related physiological responses (for example heart rate or hormonal activity), and emotion-related behavior (bodily actions or expressions). Functionally, emotion regulation can also refer to processes such as the tendency to focus one’s attention to a task and the ability to suppress inappropriate behavior under instruction. Emotion regulation is a highly significant function in human life. Generally speaking, emotion dysregulation has been defined as difficulties in controlling the influence of emotional arousal on the organization and quality of thoughts, actions, and interactions. Individuals who are emotionally dysregulated exhibit patterns of responding in which there is a mismatch between their goals, responses, and/or modes of expression, and the demands of the social environment. For example, there is a significant association between emotion dysregulation and symptoms of depression, anxiety, eating pathology, and substance abuse. Higher levels of emotion regulation are likely to be related to both high levels of social competence and the expression of socially appropriate emotions.
Feelings are the conscious subjective experience of emotion. Feelings are only felt and are abstract in nature.
Instinct is the inherent inclination of a living organism towards a particular complex behavior. The simplest example of an instinctive behavior is a fixed action pattern (FAP), in which a very short to medium length sequence of actions, without variation, are carried out in response to a corresponding clearly defined stimulus. Instincts are inborn complex patterns of behavior that exist in most members of the species, and should be distinguished from reflexes, which are simple responses of an organism to a specific stimulus, such as the contraction of the pupil in response to bright light or the spasmodic movement of the lower leg when the knee is tapped. The absence of volitional capacity must not be confused with an inability to modify fixed action patterns. For example, people may be able to modify a stimulated fixed action pattern by consciously recognizing the point of its activation and simply stop doing it, whereas animals without a sufficiently strong volitional capacity may not be able to disengage from their fixed action patterns, once activated.
Learning is the process of acquiring new understanding, knowledge, behaviors, skills, values, attitudes, and preferences. The ability to learn is possessed by humans, animals, and some machines; there is also evidence for some kind of learning in certain plants. Some learning is immediate, induced by a single event (e.g. being burned by a hot stove), but much skill and knowledge accumulate from repeated experiences. Human learning starts at birth (it might even start before) and continues until death as a consequence of ongoing interactions between people and their environment. Also critical is to understand how primates and other animals learn through habituation, imprinting, cultural transmission, observational learning, imitation and other teaching methods. Also Social Learning Theory integrated behavioral and cognitive theories of learning in order to provide a comprehensive model that could account for the wide range of learning experiences that occur in the real world.
Key tenets of Social Learning Theory are as follows: (1) Learning is not purely behavioral; rather, it is a cognitive process that takes place in a social context, (2) Learning can occur by observing a behavior and by observing the consequences of the behavior (vicarious reinforcement). (3) Learning involves observation, extraction of information from those observations, and making decisions about the performance of the behavior (observational learning or modeling). Thus, learning can occur without an observable change in behavior. (4) Reinforcement plays a role in learning but is not entirely responsible for learning. (5) The learner is not a passive recipient of information. Cognition, environment, and behavior all mutually influence each other (reciprocal determinism).
Memory is the faculty of the brain by which data or information is encoded, stored, and retrieved when needed. It is the retention of information over time for the purpose of influencing future action.
Declarative, or explicit, memory is the conscious storage and recollection of data.
Non-declarative, or implicit, memory is the unconscious storage and recollection of information. Memory is not a perfect processor, and is affected by many factors. The ways by which information is encoded, stored, and retrieved can all be corrupted.
Implicit memory (procedural memory) refers to the use of objects or movements of the body, such as how exactly to use a pencil, drive a car, or ride a bicycle.
Emotional memory, the memory for events that evoke a particularly strong emotion, is a domain that can involve both declarative and procedural memory processes. Emotional memories are consciously available, but elicit a powerful, unconscious physiological reaction. Research indicates that the amygdala is extremely active during emotional situations, and acts with the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex in the encoding and consolidation of emotional events.
Working memory is not part of long-term memory, but is important for long-term memory to function. Working memory holds and manipulates information for a short period of time, before it is either forgotten or encoded into long-term memory. Then, in order to remember something from long-term memory, it must be brought back into working memory. If working memory is overloaded it can affect the encoding of long-term memory. If one has a good working memory they may have a better long-term memory encoding.
Mind is the set of faculties including cognitive aspects such as consciousness, imagination, perception, thinking, intelligence, judgement, language and memory, as well as noncognitive aspects such as emotion and instinct.
Muscle is a soft tissue found in most animals. Muscles function to produce force and motion. They are primarily responsible for maintaining and changing posture, locomotion, as well as movement of internal organs, such as the contraction of the heart and the movement of food through the digestive system via peristalsis.
Nervous system is a highly complex part of an animal that coordinates its actions and sensory information by transmitting signals to and from different parts of its body. The nervous system detects environmental changes that impact the body, then works in tandem with the endocrine system to respond to such events.
The central nervous system (CNS) and the peripheral nervous system (PNS). The CNS consists of the brain and spinal cord. The PNS consists mainly of nerves, which are enclosed bundles of the long fibers or axons, that connect the CNS to every other part of the body. Nerves that transmit signals from the brain are called motor or efferent nerves, while those nerves that transmit information from the body to the CNS are called sensory or afferent. Spinal nerves serve both functions and are called mixed nerves. The PNS is divided into three separate subsystems, the somatic, autonomic, and enteric nervous systems. Somatic nerves mediate voluntary movement.
The autonomic nervous system is further subdivided into the sympathetic and the parasympathetic nervous systems. The sympathetic nervous system is activated in cases of emergencies to mobilize energy, while the parasympathetic nervous system is activated when organisms are in a relaxed state.
Neurons have special structures that allow them to send signals rapidly and precisely to other cells. They send these signals in the form of electrochemical waves traveling along thin fibers called axons, which cause chemicals called neurotransmitters to be released at junctions called synapses. A cell that receives a synaptic signal from a neuron may be excited, inhibited, or otherwise modulated. The connections between neurons can form neural pathways, neural circuits, and larger networks that generate an organism’s perception of the world and determine its behavior. The signaling process is partly electrical and partly chemical. Neurons are electrically excitable, due to maintenance of voltage gradients across their membranes. If the voltage changes by a large enough amount over a short interval, the neuron generates an all-or-nothing electrochemical pulse called an action potential. This potential travels rapidly along the axon, and activates synaptic connections as it reaches them. Synaptic signals may be excitatory or inhibitory, increasing or reducing the net voltage that reaches the soma.
Perception is the organization, identification, and interpretation of sensory information in order to represent and understand the presented information or environment. All perception involves signals that go through the nervous system, which in turn result from physical or chemical stimulation of the sensory system.
Sensation is the physical process during which sensory systems respond to stimuli and provide data for perception. A sense is any of the systems involved in sensation. During sensation, sense organs engage in stimulus collection and transduction. Sensation is often differentiated from the related and dependent concept of perception, which processes and integrates sensory information in order to give meaning to and understand detected stimuli, giving rise to subjective perceptual experience, or qualia. Sensation and perception are central to and precede almost all aspects of cognition, behavior and thought.
Thinking encompasses an “aim-oriented flow of ideas and associations that can lead to a reality-oriented conclusion.” Although thinking is an activity of an existential value for humans, there is still no consensus as to how it is adequately defined or understood. Because thought underlies many human actions and interactions, understanding its physical and metaphysical origins and its effects has been a longstanding goal of many academic disciplines including philosophy, linguistics, psychology, neuroscience, artificial intelligence, biology, sociology and cognitive science. Thinking allows humans to make sense of, interpret, represent or model the world they experience, and to make predictions about that world. It is therefore helpful to an organism with needs, objectives, and desires as it makes plans or otherwise attempts to accomplish those goals.
Gestalt Psychotherapy Terms
Gestalt Psychotherapy is a form of psychotherapy that emphasizes personal responsibility and focuses on the individual's experience in the present moment, the therapist–client relationship, the environmental and social contexts of a person's life, and the self-regulating adjustments people make as a result of their overall situation.
Yontef, G. M. (1993). Awareness, dialogue & process: Essays on gestalt therapy. Gestalt Journal Press. [lightly edited]
Confluence is the absence of differentiation between self and other, a surrender to sameness. Reflexive compliance/subordination to another is a form of confluence. Confluence is a loss of one’s separate identity — a loss of ego boundary. The confluent person does not experience sufficient self-support to enable an autonomous relationship.
Contact is the whole process of acknowledging Self and Other by moving toward connecting/merging and also toward separating/withdrawing. Contact is the basic process of relationship. It entails appreciating the difference between self and other … When a person contacts, he connects and maintains his separate existence, his autonomy. When two people contact each other they connect (even temporarily merge) and maintain their separate identities.
Formative Psychology Terms
Stanley Keleman is the founder of Formative Psychology®, a field that he created within somatic psychotherapy. Throughout his career, Keleman persistently developed his philosophy and methodology. The inseparability of emotional and biological realities is its core principle; changing anatomical shapes give rise to emotions, thoughts, and experiences. The practice of Formative Psychology™ entails learning to influence one’s behavior using a method he called voluntary muscular effort.
Keleman, S. (1987a). Bonding: A somatic-emotional approach to transference. Center Press.
Keleman, S. (1987). Embodying experience: Forming a personal life. Center Press.
Keleman, S. (1989). Emotional anatomy: The structure of experience. Center Press.
Boundary An anatomical structure that defines an inside and an outside, and acts to regulate what enters and exits.
Containment The ability to organize a membrane, a boundary for the expansion and contraction of excitatory pulsations.
Excitation Bio-electrical current that connects structures and fuels the behavior of these structures.
Map refers to creating a muscular model of a behavior. The purpose is to hold still a motor action and give definition to a pattern of behavior. Map refers to the neural activity of motor behavior. The interaction between a muscular frame and a neural map is the link between behavior and cognition.
Layers Small muscular changes that make distinct shapes within a larger anatomical shape or pattern of behavior.
Somatic Bodily; physical; from the Greek word “soma,” meaning “body.”
Organization The complex patterns of feelings and expressions that are bodily organized for dealing with life situations.
Shape The body shapes and experiences that are the physical and emotional foundation for a person’s sense of identity and self-reference.
Psychodynamic Terms
Psychodynamics, also known as psychodynamic psychology, in its broadest sense, is an approach to psychology that emphasizes systematic study of the psychological forces underlying human behavior, feelings, and emotions and how they might relate to early experience. It is especially interested in the dynamic relations between conscious motivation and unconscious motivation.
McWilliams, N. (2020). Psychoanalytic diagnosis, second edition: Understanding personality structure in the clinical process. Guilford Publications.
Projection — In both projection and introjection, there is a permeated psychological boundary between the self and the world … in normal infancy, before the child has developed a sense of which experiences come from inside and which ones have their sources outside the self, we assume that there is a generalized sense of “I” being equivalent to “the world.” A baby with colic probably has the experience of “Hurt!” rather than “Something inside me hurts.” The infant cannot yet distinguish between an internally located pain like colic and an externally caused discomfort like pressure from diapers that are too tight. From this era of relative undifferentiation come the processes that later, in their defensive function, we refer to as projection and introjection … Projection is the process whereby what is inside is misunderstood as coming from outside. In its benign and mature forms, it is the basis for empathy. In its malignant forms, projection breeds dangerous misunderstanding and untold interpersonal damage. When the projected attitudes seriously distort the object on whom they are projected, or when what is projected consists of disowned and highly negative parts of the self, all kinds of difficulties can ensue. Others resent being misperceived and may retaliate when treated, for example, as judgmental, envious, or persecutory (attitudes that are among the most common of those that tend to be ignored in the self and ascribed to others).
Introjection is the process whereby what is outside is misunderstood as coming from inside. In its benign forms, it amounts to a primitive identification with important others. Young children take in all kinds of attitudes, affects, and behaviors of significant people in their lives. Long before a child can make a subjectively voluntary decision to be like Mommy or Daddy, he or she seems to have “swallowed” them in some primal way. In its problematic forms, introjection can, like projection, be highly destructive. The most striking examples of pathological introjection involve the process that has been labeled, somewhat inappropriately in view of its primitivity, “identification with the aggressor.
Intellectualization is the name given to a higher-order version of the isolation of affect from intellect. The person using isolation typically reports that he or she has no feelings, whereas the one who intellectualizes talks about feelings in a way that strikes the listener as emotionless. For example, the comment, “Well, naturally I have some anger about that,” delivered in a casual, detached tone, suggests that while the idea of feeling anger is theoretically acceptable to the person, the actual expression of it is still inhibited.”
Dissociating under unbearable conditions are obvious: The dissociating person cuts off pain, terror, horror, and conviction of imminent death. Anyone who has had an out-of-body experience when in mortal danger, and even those of us without such a dramatic basis for empathy, can readily understand a preference for being outside rather than inside the sense of impending obliteration. Occasional or mild dissociation may facilitate acts of singular courage. The great drawback of the defense, of course, is its tendency to operate automatically under conditions in which one’s survival is not realistically at risk, and when more discriminating adaptations to threat would extract far less from one’s overall functioning. Traumatized people may confuse ordinary stress with life-threatening circumstances, becoming immediately amnesic or totally different, much to their own confusion and that of others. Outsiders, unless they also have a traumatic history, rarely suspect dissociation when a friend suddenly forgets some major incident or appears inexplicably changed. Rather, they conclude that their acquaintance is moody, or unstable, or a liar. There is thus a high interpersonal price paid by the habitual user of this defense.