Meta-Awareness

To have an experience is not necessarily to know that one is having it. Situations such as suddenly realizing that one has not been listening to one's spouse (despite nodding attentively) or catching oneself shouting, “I'm not angry,” illustrate that people sometimes fail to notice what is going on in their own heads. The intuition that there is a difference between having an experience and recognizing it permeates everyday language, as illustrated by the popular expression “getting in touch with your feelings” and the famous lyrical refrain “if you're happy and you know it, clap your hands.” A variety of psychological terms have been used to characterize how people vary in their awareness of their thoughts and feelings, including metacognitive awareness, private self-awareness, reflective awareness, introspective awareness, higherorder consciousness, second-order consciousness, autonoetic consciousness, and mindfulness. Nevertheless, typically when researchers consider the awareness associated with psychological phenomena, the question boils down to whether a particular phenomenon is conscious. Attitudes are implicit or explicit, thoughts are conscious or unconscious, behaviors are automatic or controlled. Routinely, discussions fail to acknowledge the possibility that a thought, feeling, or action could be experienced without being explicitly noticed.

In this entry, the term meta-awareness is used to refer to the explicit noticing of the content of experience. Importantly, meta-awareness need not be assumed to be a distinct state of consciousness; rather, it may merely entail a particular topic for the focus of attention, that is, “What am I thinking or feeling.” Because this is just one of many possible directions in which attention can be focused, it follows that meta-awareness is intermittent. The answer to this question represents a description of one's state, rather than the state itself, so it offers individuals the opportunity to step out of the situation, which may be critical for effective self-regulation. However, it also raises the possibility that in the redescription process, individuals might get it wrong.

Two types of dissociations follow from the claim that meta-awareness involves the intermittent rerepresentation of the contents of consciousness. Temporal dissociations occur when one temporarily fails to attend to the contents of consciousness. Once the focus of conscious turns onto itself, translation dissociations may occur if the re-representation process misrepresents the original experience.