An introduction to

Micro-phenomenology
Dr Bruna Petreca (RCA, UCLIC)
3rd February 2023
Micro-phenomenology intro-session aims
● An overview of the micro-phenomenological approach to explore the lived
experience

● Emphasis on:
○ the importance of knowing how to help the interviewee in accessing and articulating
their own experiences in fine grain descriptions - what questions to ask?

○ helping interviewee to get in touch with a unique experience - what is evocation

state?

○ satellites of the experience and of generalisations - what are these and how to
avoid?
Micro-phenomenology: what is it?
“Psychological microscope”: to explore our lived experience very finely
❖ Lived experience - phenomena that constitute the texture of our existence, are difficult to
describe, and have thus far been excluded from scientific investigation

Neurobiologist Francisco Varela -"neurophenomenological" program

● to understand the functioning of the mind, science cannot rely solely on the
study of cerebral activity
● to create rigorous methods to study human experience
Source: www.alexgrey.com
Micro-phenomenological interview
● Combines psychology and phenomenology
approaches to obtain a first-person verbal description
of cognitive and experiential processes (Varela and
Shear, 1999)

● Aims at assisting interviewees to verbally explain the

Source: www.microphenomenology.com
subjective experience that is generally inaccessible,
unknown or difficult to articulate

● Provides first-person fine-grained descriptions of

specific moments in lived experiences.
Example case study
Petitmengin, C., Remillieux, A., Cahour, B. and Carter-Thomas, S., 2013. A gap in
Nisbett and Wilson’s findings? A first-person access to our cognitive processes.
Consciousness and cognition, 22(2), pp.654-669.

● Reproduced Johansson et al. (2005) experiment

● Showed pairs of grayscale pictures of female faces to participants and asked
them to choose which face in each pair they found most attractive.
● Just after their choice, the interviewer re-presented the chosen face and asked
the participants to state the reasons behind their choice. However, in certain
trials, the experimenter instead presented the face that was not chosen.
Example case study: length of descriptions
Example case study: heightened awareness
Interview method: Main elements
● Choice of singular experience
● Evoking the experience
● Content-empty questions
● Diachronic and synchronic dimensions
● Satellite dimensions
● Relation between interviewer and interviewee
Choice of singular experience
How to choose a singular experience?

Easily reproducible (e.g. memorising a list of nouns)

-

- researcher can devise a protocol enabling the interviewee to live the experience in-situ, and
immediately afterwards helps them describe it.

Unique experience (e.g. emergence of an idea)

-

- researcher helps the interviewee find in the past a particular occurrence of this experience.
Evoking the experience
Bringing the interviewee to an evocation state
- Evoke a past scene while being associated with the present scene
- Help the interviewee to re-enact the experience, by evoking the precise temporal/spatial context

Evocation state: “back” in the situation

Interviewee “feels” as if they were back at the moment of that experience, and
provide the most detailed descriptions
Inducing the evocation state
I would like you to go back to this situation. When was it? Where was it?

Sensory questions:
Starting with visual
○ When you are there, what are you seeing?
○ I would like you to describe this place to me, as you saw it at the time…
○ Look around you again… what do you see?

Transition to sound - “And in this place, there may be sounds…”

○ What are you hearing?
○ Listen again to all that you were hearing…

Transition to feelings - “While listening to everything, let sensations come back…”

○ At that time, what are you feeling?
○ Notice the bodily sensations, the emotions...
Content-Empty Questions
How to ask questions?

Elicit verbalizations of subjective experiences

Focus on ‘what’ and ‘how’

‘Why’ is never asked (Vermersch, 2009), to avoid “explanations and

Source: www.microphenomenology.com
abstract considerations” (Petitmengin et al, 2013)

Such questions are content empty (not inducing), and

instead explore the unfolding of the experience in time
(‘Diachronic' dimension) and the facets of an experience at
a specific time ('Synchronic' dimension).
 Sequence of questions
“... sequence of questions that enable the deepening of a highly implicit inner
concentration operation:

P: I am concentrating.
-

I: What do you do to concentrate?

-

P: (...) I am listening to what is happening inside me.

-

I: What do you do to listen? If you wanted to teach me how to do it, what would
you tell me?
P: (...) First, I am going to put my consciousness much further towards the back
of the skull.
I: What do you do to put your consciousness at the back of the skull? (...)”
-

Petitmengin, C., 2006. Describing one’s subjective experience in the second person: An interview method for
the science of consciousness. Phenomenology and the Cognitive sciences, 5(3), pp.229-269.
 Typical (content-empty) questions
● What do you do to…?

● How do you do…?

● How do you make…?

● How do you know that…?

Petitmengin, C., 2006. Describing one’s subjective experience in the second person: An interview method for the
science of consciousness. Phenomenology and the Cognitive sciences, 5(3), pp.229-269.
Diachronic and Synchronic dimensions
Questions will facilitate the exploration of

● the unfolding of an experience over time → ‘diachronic’ dimension (1)

● specific facets of the experience at a particular moment → ‘synchronic’ dimension (2)

(1)

(2)
Content-Empty questions: diachronic dimension
● Beginning
○ How do you start? What happens first?
● Sequence
○ What do you do then?
○ And then, what happened?
● End
○ What happens at the end?
● Tests
○ How do you know that you have [done X]
● To go deeper
○ Could you go back to phase X? When you do X, what do you do?
Content-Empty questions: synchronic dimension
● Sound
○ And when you hear X, what do you hear?
○ From where does this sound come?
○ What is its volume?
● Mental image
○ And when you see X, what do you see?
○ Is it in colour or black and white?
○ Is it clear or fuzzy?
○ Is it static or moving?
● Bodily sensation
○ And when you feel X, what do you feel?
○ Where is this sensation? Where do you feel it in your body?
○ What is its size? How intense is it?
Experience 1: Imagine…
Imagine a bird!
Diachronic (the whole experience):
● Did you see it at once, or did it emerge progressively?
● What senses were involved?
● When/how did you know that you were imagining a bird? What was your criteria?

Synchronic (deep into a specific aspect/event):

● Was it in colour?
● Was it static or moving?
● Were you in the scene or looking at a picture/film?
Let’s try!
Experience 2: spelling a word

Would you spell a word for me, without saying

it aloud?

The word is...

Spelling a word...

Elephant
A video by Elsa Oliarj-Ines

https://vimeo.com/202005553
Satellites and generalisations
● Choice of singular experience avoids generalisations

● “Satellite” dimensions
○ Judgements
○ Assessments
○ Beliefs
○ Comments
○ Theoretical knowledge

● These don’t give detailed information about the single lived experience, but
instead tend to be more generic to how people think they “normally”
do/experience things
Managing the relationship with the interviewee
1. “Contract” is fundamental for trust, because you will be exploring intimate experiences -
this is about how each person lives, and how they became aware of their lived
experiences
“If you agree, I would like you to describe…/ I’d like to come back to the moment when…”

1. Reformulations:
- important to make sure the description reflects the past moment of the lived experience,
and not being produced during the present moment
- enables to verify the accuracy of the obtained description
- give the interviewee a feeling of having being understood
- help to stabilise attention

1. Avoid inducing questions, as they can make the interviewee uncomfortable, but also bias
the content of the descriptions
Further tips for the interviewer
Keeping the evocation state
- Non-verbal (eyes movement and gestures),
- paraverbal (pace of speech) and
- verbal cues (use of “I”, present tense, detailed vocabulary)

Deepening descriptions and “trampoline” effect

- Use of reformulations as a strategy to encourage subjects to refine or improve the description
Auto-Elicitation
You can interview yourself!
“In the first case I look at the mirrors themselves, at their edges that
meet the ground and between each other. I look at them as mirrors. I try
to understand what is at stake in this strange arrangement.
And then I drop that. I look at the space that appears in the mirror, in
the mirror background. I look at it globally without focusing on any
specific details. I look further than the mirror surface, deeper into space,

Source: www.microphenomenology.com
but not at the objects that are reflected. I look at space itself. It’s a small
adjustment of the gaze. That space is much more open. The edges
disappear. I forget them. There is only one space which is not
kaleidoscopic any more, not broken in parts but a whole space.”

See examples of auto-elicitation interviews at:

https://docs.wixstatic.com/ugd/5609aa_42fa6f869dfd4ae6817251776920daca.pdf
After interviews
What to do when we have collected the data?

1. Transcribe the recordings

2. Reduce the description of the experience (not necessary to include satellites)
3. Re-sequence the description of the experience
4. Identify phases of the experience
5. Represent the diachronic structure, highlighting its phases
6. For each phase, identify synchronic structure(s), if existing
7. Identify possible generic structures
8. Iterate

Reference: Valenzuela-Moguillansky, C. and Vásquez-Rosati, A., 2019. An analysis procedure for

the micro-phenomenological interview. Constructivist Foundations, 14(2), pp.123-145.
What we have learnt: key concepts
● Choosing a singular experience
● Evocation state
● Content-empty questions
● Diachronic and Synchronic dimensions
● “Satellites” and generalisations
● Contract with interviewee
References
Recommended:
1. Petitmengin, C., 2006. Describing one’s subjective experience in the second person: An interview method for the science of
consciousness. Phenomenology and the Cognitive sciences, 5(3), pp.229-269.
2. Video “Elephant” by Elsa Oliarj-Ines (experiences of spelling a word): https://vimeo.com/202005553

Additional:
2. Prpa, M., Fdili-Alaoui, S., Schiphorst, T. and Pasquier, P., 2020, April. Articulating experience: reflections from experts
applying micro-phenomenology to design research in HCI. In Proceedings of the 2020 CHI Conference on Human Factors in
Computing Systems (pp. 1-14).
3. Bitbol, M. and Petitmengin, C., 2013. A Defense of Introspection from Within. Constructivist foundations, 8(3).
4. Petreca, B., Baurley, S. and Bianchi-Berthouze, N., 2015, September. How do designers feel textiles?. In Affective
Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), 2015 International Conference on (pp. 982-987). IEEE.
5. Petitmengin, C., Remillieux, A. and Valenzuela-Moguillansky, C., 2019. Discovering the structures of lived experience.
Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 18(4), pp.691-730.

The Micro-Phenomenology website: https://www.microphenomenology.com/home

 Questions?
Check: www.microphenomenology.com

Thank you!
bruna.petreca@rca.ac.uk