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How do we understand and explain phenomena in psychology? What does the concept of “causality” mean when we discuss higher psychological functions and behavior? Is it possible to generate “laws” in a psychological and behavioral science—laws that go beyond statistical regularities, frequencies, and probabilities? An international group of authors compare and contrast the use of a causal model in psychology with a newer model—the catalytic model. The Catalyzing Mind: Beyond Models of Causality proposes an approach to the qualitative nature of psychological phenomena that focuses on the psychological significance and meaning of conditions, contexts, and situations as well as their sign-mediating processes. Contributors develop, apply, and criticize the notion of a catalyzing mind in hopes of achieving conceptual clarity and rigor. Disciplines such as philosophy, psychology, semiotics and biosemiotics are used for an interdisciplinary approach to the book. Research topics such as history and national identity, immigration, and transitions to adulthood are all brought into a dialogue with the concept of the catalyzing mind. With a variety of disciplines, theoretical concepts, and research topics this book is a collective effort at an approach to move beyond models of causality for explaining and understanding psychological phenomena.
This magistral treatise approaches the integration of psychology through the study of the multiple causes of normal and dysfunctional behavior. Causality is the focal point reviewed across disciplines. Using diverse models, the book approaches unifying psychology as an ongoing project that integrates genetics, experience, evolution, brain, development, change mechanisms, and so on. The book includes in its integration free will, epitomized as freedom in being. It pinpoints the role of the self in causality and the freedom we have in determining our own behavior. The book deals with disturbed behavior, as well, and tackles the DSM-5 approach to mental disorder and the etiology of psychopathology. Young examines all these topics with a critical eye, and gives many innovative ideas and models that will stimulate thinking on the topic of psychology and causality for decades to come. It is truly integrative and original. Among the topics covered: Models and systems of causality of behavior. Nature and nurture: evolution and complexities. Early adversity, fetal programming, and getting under the skin. Free will in psychotherapy: helping people believe. Causality in psychological injury and law: basics and critics. A Neo-Piagetian/Neo-Eriksonian 25-step (sub)stage model. Unifying Causality and Psychology appeals to the disciplines of psychology, psychiatry, epidemiology, philosophy, neuroscience, genetics, law, the social sciences and humanistic fields, in general, and other mental health fields. Its level of writing makes it appropriate for graduate courses, as well as researchers and practitioners.
The book deals with current issues, pertinent every healthcare relationship. Changes in medicine as well as some constant aspects over time arise within a cultural ground and generate new questions and issues that are not only purely medical, but also bioethical, social, political, economic and psychological of course. On the one hand, changes in medicine generate new questions for society, on the other hand, the society poses new questions to the medicine, new challenges, and in some cases they can conflict with consolidated models and practices. Never the progress of Western medicine and its therapeutic practices have been as significant as in the last decades but the increase of specific competence and effectiveness of medical treatments are not linearly translated into an increase of consensus, dialogue and alliance between medicine and society. How does psychology take on a position of interlocutor towards medicine and its transformations? How does Cultural Psychology, Health Psychology, Clinical Psychology confront themselves with the processes of meaning making generated by medicine? The interest of the book is aimed to grasp the construction of processes of cultural, relational and subjective meaning in the dialogical encounter between medicine and society, between doctor and patient. The book intends to focus in particular on two specific plans: on the one hand, to present a reflection and analysis on contemporary medicine and its on?going transformations of the healthcare relationship; on the other hand, to present and discuss experiences of intervention and possible models of intervention addressed to healthcare and doctor?patient relationships during its crucial steps (consultation, formulation and communication of diagnosis, therapy, conclusion). The book’s purposes are aimed to discuss crucial and current issues on the borders between medicine and psychology: consensus and sharing, decision?making and autonomy, subjectivity and narration, emotions and affectivity, medical semeiotics and cultural semiotics, training of physicians, and epistemological, theoretical and methodological issues.
This volume is the firstborn of the Annals of Cultural Psychology-- a yearly edited book series in the field of Cultural Psychology. It came into being as there is a need for reflection on “where and what” the discipline needs to further develop, in such a way, the current frontiers and to foster the elaboration of new fruitful ideas. The topic chosen for the first volume is perhaps the most fundamental of all- motherhood. We are all here because at some unspecifiable time in the past, different women labored hard to bring each of us into this World. These women were not thinking of culture, but were just giving birth. Yet by their reproductive success—and years of worry about our growing up—we are now, thankfully to them, in a position to discuss the general notion of motherhood from the angle of cultural psychology. Each person who is born needs a mother—first the real one, and then possibly a myriad of symbolic ones—from “my mother” to “mother superior” to “my motherland”. Thus, it is not by coincidence if the first volume of the series is about motherhood. We the editors feel it is the topic that links our existence with one of the universals of human survival as a species. In very general terms what this book aims to do is to question the ontology of Motherhood in favor of an ontogenetic approach to Life’s Course, where having a child represents a big transition in a woman’s trajectory and where becoming (or not becoming) mother is heuristically more interesting than being a mother. We here present a reticulated work that digs into a cultural phenomenon giving to the readers the clear idea of making motherhood (and not taking for granted motherhood). By looking at absences, shadows and ruptures rather than the normativeness of motherhood, cultural psychology can provide a theoretical model in explaining the cultural multifaceted nature of human activity.
Since 2011 the world has experienced an explosion of popular uprisings that began in the Middle East and quickly spread to other regions. What are the different social-psychological conditions for these events to emerge, what different trajectories do they take, and how are they are represented to the public? To answer these questions, this book applies the latest social psychological theories to contextualized cases of revolutions and uprisings from the eighteenth to the twenty-first century in countries around the world. In so doing, it explores continuities and discontinuities between past and present uprisings, and foregrounds such issues as the crowds, collective action, identity changes, globalization, radicalization, the plasticity of political behaviour, and public communication.
The result of a deep research work sustained for more than two decades, this book studies the construction of social knowledge from a constructivist perspective inherited from Piagetian thought. It thus advances in a process of revision and discussion, while maintaining crucial aspects of this current for the approach to the construction of the subject and the object of knowledge, in the search for the elaboration of an explanatory theory for the formation of new knowledge. A collaborative proposal between different disciplines of potential interest for the different actors who study and intervene in this field.
This books arises from the observation that mainstream psychology, especially work and organisational psychology (WOP), suffers from critical limitations in its attempts to deal with the complexities of work as a cultural phenomenon. We can only mention a few examples here. In the WOP field, especially in Anglo- Saxon tradition, work experiences are seen through the lenses of traditional behavioural approaches, whereas culture is seen as a ‘software of the mind’, to use a popular definition found in this field (based on cross-cultural mainstream psychology). ‘Competences’, to take another example, are thought of as something that do or do not people have inside them. Suffering, like stress (a common work-based problem of our times), is considered to be dependent on a person’s personality, perceptions or as a set of behaviours triggered by facing an ‘objective’ environment. Even meaning-making process can be found to be defined from a WOP mainstream point of view: meanings are ‘social cognitions’ shared by people by means of unidirectional socialisation processes. Therefore, the goal of this book is to deliver to the reader a new and challenging theoretical and methodological tool box, inspired by insights developed from a broad cultural psychological perspective. Its focus is on the consideration of work and organisations based on core concepts developed inside cultural psychology. Therefore, it is designed to discuss potential extensions of these concepts to work psychology.
Though many psychological theories refer to imagination as a relevant phenomena, we still lack knowledge about imaginative processes. The book “The Method of Imagination” is aimed at expanding the knowledge about imaginative processes as higher mental function, by starting from the empirical and phenomenological studies. The volume is an innovative multidisciplinary exploration in the study of imaginative processes as complex phenomena. It covers a wide range of fields, from psychology to sociology, from art and design to marketing and education. The book gathers young and experienced scholars from 6 different countries worldwide, providing a fresh look into the theoretical, methodological and applicative aspects of imagination studies. The audience for this book includes scholars and students in social and human sciences interested in the study and the use of imaginative processes. The volume can be also used as textbook/integrative reading in undergrad and master courses.
Making of the Future is the first English?language coverage of the new methodological perspective in cultural psychology—TEA (Trajectory Equifinality Approach) that was established in 2004 as a collaboration of Japanese and American cultural psychologists. In the decade that follows it has become a guiding approach for cultural psychology all over the World. Its central feature is the reliance on irreversible time as the basis for understanding of cultural phenomena and the consideration of real and imaginary options in human life course as relevant for the construction of personal futures. The book is expected to be of interest in researchers and practitioners in education, developmental and social psychology, developmental sociology and history. It has extensions for research methodology in the focus on different sampling strategies.
Jaan Valsiner has made numerous contributions to the development of psychology over the last 40 years. He is internationally recognized as a leader and innovator within both developmental psychology and cultural psychology, and has received numerous prizes for his work: the Alexander von Humboldt prize, the Hans Killian prize, and the Outstanding International Psychologist Award from the American Psychological Association. Having taught at Universities in Europe, Asia and north and south America, he is currently Niels Bohr professor at Aalborg University, Denmark. This book is the first to discuss in detail the different sides of Valsiner’s thought, including developmental science, semiotic mediation, cultural transmission, aesthetics, globalization of science, epistemology, methodology and the history of ideas. The book provides an overview, evaluation and extension of Valsiner’s key ideas for the construction of a dynamic cultural psychology, written by his former students and colleagues from around the world.