Means and standard deviations, or locations and scales? That is the question!
Publication date: August 2018 Source:New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 50 Author(s): David Trafimow, Tonghui Wang, Cong Wang According to standard experimental practice, researchers randomly assign participants to experimental and control conditions, deeming the experiment “successful” if the means of the two conditions differ in the hypothesized direction. Even for complex experiments, with many conditions, success generally depends on a comparison or contrast of means across conditions. Because the experimental manipulation may change the shape of the distribution, we show that a difference in means, even if large...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - March 23, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Emotional strength: A response type, response disposition and organizing principle for emotion experience
We present four hallmarks of emotional strength: (i) openness and vulnerability (ii) emotional responsiveness (iii) self-description using vulnerability-related words (iv) continuing engagement in action. Emotional strength is distinguished from psychological constructs such as mindfulness, emotion regulation, emotion-approach coping, resilience, emotional intelligence, emotion-focused therapy and acceptance and commitment therapy. It is not the point of emotional strength to turn a negative into a positive experience. The skill is to feel deeply into all emotion experience, opening up vulnerability and emotional responsiv...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - March 23, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Is mediated embodiment the response to embodied cognition?
Publication date: August 2018 Source:New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 50 Author(s): Laura Aymerich-Franch Emerging technologies such as virtual reality and robots are evolving to increasingly integrate the user into the interface. During this temporary merge, users experience a digital or a robotic body of an avatar as their own. Embodied cognition sustains that the body and its interactions with the environment play an important role in cognition. I argue that the adoption of mediated embodiment technologies to explore cognitive development might substantially contribute to demonstrating the postulates of embodied cogni...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - March 23, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Personality development in the context of individual traits and parenting dynamics
Publication date: Available online 16 March 2018 Source:New Ideas in Psychology Author(s): Berenice Anaya, Koraly Pérez-Edgar Our conceptualization of adult personality and childhood temperament can be closely aligned in that they both reflect endogenous, likely constitutional dispositions. Empirical studies of temperament have focused on measuring systematic differences in emotional reactions, motor responses, and physiological states that we believe may contribute to the underlying biological components of personality. Although this work has provided some insight into the early origins of personality, we still lack ...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - March 17, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Toward a postmaterialist psychology: Theory, research, and applications
Discussion section, we argue that the transmission hypothesis of the mind-brain relationship can account for all the evidence presented in this article. We also discuss the emerging postmaterialist paradigm and its potential implications for the evolution of psychology. (Source: New Ideas in Psychology)
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - March 3, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Representing is something that we do, not a structure that we “use”: Reply to Gładziejewski
Publication date: Available online 24 February 2018 Source:New Ideas in Psychology Author(s): H. Oğuz Erdin, Mark H. Bickhard (Source: New Ideas in Psychology)
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - February 25, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Prenatal influences on the development and stability of personality
Publication date: Available online 12 February 2018 Source:New Ideas in Psychology Author(s): John E. Krzeczkowski, Ryan J. Van Lieshout The brain rapidly develops during the prenatal period; therefore, intrauterine conditions can affect neurodevelopment, behavior and health across the lifespan. The developmental origins of health and disease hypothesis posits that physiological alterations are made by the fetus to adapt to prenatal conditions. Research examining links between perinatal adversity and neurodevelopment has focused mainly on the risk for mental health problems. However, these disorders are likely the prod...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - February 13, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
The quiet virtues of sadness: A selective theoretical and interpretative appreciation of its potential contribution to wellbeing
Publication date: April 2018 Source:New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 49 Author(s): Tim Lomas Critical emotion theorists have raised concerns that “normal” human emotions like sadness are increasingly being pathologised as disorders. Counter efforts have consequently been made to normalise such emotions, such as by highlighting their ubiquity and appropriacy. This paper goes slightly further by suggesting that sadness may not merely be normal, but could have inherent value, and might even be an integral component of a flourishing life. It offers a selective theoretical and interpretative review of literature on the po...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - February 5, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Does it matter when we want to Be alone? Exploring developmental timing effects in the implications of unsociability
Publication date: Available online 3 February 2018 Source:New Ideas in Psychology Author(s): Robert J. Coplan, Laura L. Ooi, Danielle Baldwin Unsociability is a characteristic that refers to individual differences in the non-fearful preference for solitude. There is continued debate pertaining to the potential costs and benefits of solitude for our well-being. In this essay, we consider various approaches to the conceptualization and measurement of unsociability, and explore its implications for socio-emotional functioning. Further, we propose a somewhat speculative theoretical model of developmental timing effects fo...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - February 4, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Reconsidering interiorization: Self moving across language spacetimes
Publication date: April 2018 Source:New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 49 Author(s): Marie-Cécile Bertau, Andrea Karsten Sociogenesis addresses a pervasive problem in psychology given by Cartesian dualism that assigns the mental an inner locus apart from material activity. Aligning ourselves to the ongoing critical discussions of interiorization in psychology, we explore the crucial notion of space by highlighting language as sociocultural and dialogical activity performed by other-oriented individuals. We discuss space in terms of the “language spacetime”, a symbolic, embodied formation of mutually positioned speaki...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - January 4, 2018 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
When robots appear to have a mind: The human perception of machine agency and responsibility
Publication date: Available online 27 November 2017 Source:New Ideas in Psychology Author(s): Sophie van der Woerdt, Pim Haselager An important topic in the field of social and developmental psychology is how humans attribute mental traits and states to others. With the growing presence of robots in society, humans are confronted with a new category of social agents. This paper presents an empirical study demonstrating how psychological theory may be used for the human interpretation of robot behavior. Specifically, in this study we applied Weiner's Theory of Social Conduct as a theoretical background for studying attr...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - November 28, 2017 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
An ecological approach to creativity in making
Publication date: April 2018 Source:New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 49 Author(s): Rob Withagen, John van der Kamp Cognitive accounts of creativity generally assume that novel ideas originate in the head and precede the actual materialization of them. Over the last decades, this cognitive view has been criticized by, among others, proponents of a sociocultural perspective. In the present paper, we aim to further this critique by developing a genuine ecological approach to creativity in making. We do so by incorporating Ingold's theory of making into the ecological perspective that was initiated by Gibson. It is argued t...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - November 26, 2017 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
The reward of unification: A realist reading of the predictive processing theory
Publication date: January 2018 Source:New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 48 Author(s): Majid Davoody Beni In a recent paper, Colombo and Wright (C & W for short) built on their neat assessment of the activity of mesocorticolimbic dopaminergic (DA) systems to argue that hierarchical predictive processing theory of the brain (PTB) is not the grand unifying theory that has been claimed by its advocates. To the contrary, they argued that the scientific practice is consistent with a pluralist reading (Colombo & Wright, 2016). Despite its reliance on solid experimental resources, C & W's defence of explan...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - November 6, 2017 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
“How do humans make sense?” multiscale dynamics and emergent meaning
Publication date: Available online 9 October 2017 Source:New Ideas in Psychology Author(s): Rick Dale, Christopher T. Kello The challenges posed by the composite nature of sense-making encourage us to study how that composite is dynamically assembled. In this paper, we consider the computational underpinnings that drive the composite nature of interaction. We look to the dynamic properties of recurrent neural networks. What kind of dynamic system inherently integrates multiple signals across different levels and modalities? We argue below that three fundamental properties are needed: dynamic memory, timescale integrati...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - October 10, 2017 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
In defense of spatial models of semantic representation
Publication date: Available online 5 September 2017 Source:New Ideas in Psychology Author(s): Michael N. Jones, Thomas M. Gruenenfelder, Gabriel Recchia Recent semantic space models learn vector representations for word meanings by observing statistical redundancies across a text corpus. A word's meaning is represented as a point in a high-dimensional semantic space, and semantic similarity between words is quantified by a function of their spatial proximity (typically the cosine of the angle between their corresponding vector representations). Recently, Griffiths, Steyvers, and Tenenbaum (2007) demonstrated that spat...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - September 25, 2017 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
