How objectivity undermines the study of personhood: Toward an intersubjective epistemology for psychological science
Publication date: Available online 24 November 2016 Source:New Ideas in Psychology Author(s): Michael F. Mascolo As a science, psychology embraces the value of objectivity. An objective observation is one that is (a) based upon publically observable phenomena (i.e., overt behavior); (b) unbiased, in the sense that it records only what was observed, without either adding or taking away from the observation, and (c) an accurate representation of the world as it truly is. To understand the person, however, it is necessary to come to grips with seemingly elusive concepts such as agency, symbolism, experience, meaning, inter...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - November 25, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Persons as dialogical-hermeneutical-relational beings – New circumstances ‘call out’ new responses from us
Publication date: Available online 24 November 2016 Source:New Ideas in Psychology Author(s): John Shotter Shifting from a world of already-made-things to a world of things-continually-in-the-making changes everything. Psychology, like all other sciences, tries to proceed by analysis, by breaking down a living, unique, always developing organic whole into a set of general, already-existing, nameable elements. But as Bakhtin makes clear, in discussing how Dostoevsky portrays the inner dynamics of people worrying over how to act for the best in living their lives, such an itemization of merely observed behavioural charact...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - November 24, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Understanding personhood: Can we get there from here?
Publication date: Available online 22 November 2016 Source:New Ideas in Psychology Author(s): Michael F. Mascolo, Catherine Raeff (Source: New Ideas in Psychology)
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - November 22, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Going where the action is to conceptualize the person
Publication date: Available online 18 November 2016 Source:New Ideas in Psychology Author(s): Catherine Raeff Contemporary psychology is highly structured in terms of conventional and traditional methodological practices, including fragmenting, objectifying, and aggregating. Such practices sometimes impede understanding and investigating the person in terms of what he/she does as an integrated active individual who develops. The goal of this paper is to outline a systems conceptualization of the person as a developing individual who acts in relation to others in cultural practices. Such action is conceptualized as emerg...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - November 18, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Studying persons in context: Taking social psychological reality seriously
This study provides a particular and concrete example of the sociocultural and psychological constitution of personhood, selfhood, and human agency as emergent and lived in particular lives. Throughout the article, the material, objective bases for social-cultural and psychological personhood are emphasized. (Source: New Ideas in Psychology)
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - November 16, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Psychologism as a style of reasoning and the study of persons
Publication date: Available online 15 November 2016 Source:New Ideas in Psychology Author(s): Jeff Sugarman “Psychologism” is proposed as a “style of reasoning” dominant in psychology that has set the agenda for determining what counts as psychological phenomena, their nature, and how they are to be investigated and understood. The assumptions of psychologism and particularities of its procedure are detailed and, subsequently, illustrated by example using the psychological study of attitudes. The failure of psychologism is raised and an alternative to the conception of persons implicit in psychologism is discuss...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - November 15, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
How to operationalize a person
Publication date: Available online 15 November 2016 Source:New Ideas in Psychology Author(s): Mark H. Bickhard The notion of operationally defining a person is absurd, but no more so than other uses of “operationalization”. ‘Persons’ make that absurdity particularly clear because there is no sense in which persons can be directly observed, nor defined in terms of what might be observable, and thereby exposes the emptiness of the idea of operationalization more broadly. On the other hand, persons can be modeled, and their ontology investigated, within frameworks that can address the processes and organizations th...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - November 15, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
The explanatory significance of wholes: How exclusive reliance on antecedent-consequent models of explanation undermines the study of persons
Publication date: Available online 15 November 2016 Source:New Ideas in Psychology Author(s): David C. Witherington Psychology has long labored under a mechanistic view of persons as reducible to parts (i.e., traits) that dictate human functioning. Efforts to study persons holistically—as embodied wholes embedded in the world—have resuscitated the study of personhood and its development, overhauling linear cause-effect models of psychological functioning in favor of emergence-focused, dynamic process alternatives rooted in the concept of persons as necessarily constituted within interactive context. Focused on agenc...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - November 15, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Psychology between science and common sense: William James and the problems of psychological language in the Principles
Publication date: Available online 20 October 2016 Source:New Ideas in Psychology Author(s): Saulo de Freitas Araujo The suspicion that language can become an obstacle to human knowledge is not new in the Western intellectual tradition. Following the empiricist legacy, many authors have suggested the perils and pitfalls of common sense language for science. Applied to psychology, this leads to the issue of the reliability of psychological language for scientific psychology. William James, in his Principles of Psychology, was one of the first psychologists to address this problem explicitly. The goal of this paper is to ...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - October 28, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Emmanuel Mounier and personalism: Contributions to personal and community life
Publication date: Available online 2 August 2016 Source:New Ideas in Psychology Author(s): Joseph Lee (Source: New Ideas in Psychology)
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - September 25, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Practicing psychology without an empirical evidence-base: The bricoleur model
Publication date: December 2016 Source:New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 43 Author(s): Jan Smedslund The scientist-practitioner-model is rejected, based on an earlier critique of the current paradigm for psychological research. Ten cases exemplifying a bricoleur type of practice without a discernible empirical evidence-base are briefly presented. In the absence of useful empirical scientific evidence, the bricoleur model is proposed as a possible rationale for professional psychological practice. (Source: New Ideas in Psychology)
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - September 25, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Beyond the three snares: Implications of James ’ ‘psychologist’s fallacy’ for 21st century science
Publication date: Available online 1 June 2016 Source:New Ideas in Psychology Author(s): Jaan Valsiner William James in his Principles of Psychology (1890, pp. 194–197) warned psychologists against their own habits of assuming that other human beings are like they are. He outlined “three snares” which he considered as obstacles for psychology becoming a science: 1. The misleading influence of language, 2. The confusion of one’s own standpoint with that of mental fact, and 3. The assumption of conscious reflection in the participant as that is the case for the researcher. His challenges remain valid to the dis...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - June 17, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Beyond the three snares: Implications of James’ ‘psychologist’s fallacy’ for 21st century science
Publication date: Available online 1 June 2016 Source:New Ideas in Psychology Author(s): Jaan Valsiner William James in his Principles of Psychology (1890, pp. 194–197) warned psychologists against their own habits of assuming that other human beings are like they are. He outlined “three snares” which he considered as obstacles for psychology becoming a science: 1. The misleading influence of language, 2. The confusion of one’s own standpoint with that of mental fact, and 3. The assumption of conscious reflection in the participant as that is the case for the researcher. His challenges remain valid to the dis...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - May 31, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
From heart to mind and back again. A duality of emotion overview on emotion-cognition interactions
Publication date: December 2016 Source:New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 43 Author(s): Kamil K. Imbir This paper presents a model of emotion-cognition interactions based on a duality of mind approach to mental processes, distinguishing between automatic and controlled cognitive processes. The emotional domain may be treated as a specific kind of cognitive process, which implies that a dual mind systems approach could be very useful in understanding some types of emotion-cognition relations. Recently, a duality of mind approach has been applied to distinguish between so called automatic and reflective emotions. This pro...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - May 27, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Methodological consequences of weak embodied cognition and shared intentionality
Publication date: December 2016 Source:New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 43 Author(s): Joe J. Thompson, Nehdia Sameen, Timothy P. Racine Embodied approaches to cognition have been empirically successful both in developmental psychology and robotics. Shared intentionality has been similarly productive in developmental and comparative psychology. However, embodiment and shared intentionality both have a rich philosophical history. As a consequence, researchers who aim to benefit from the methodological advances of these literature must navigate through a variety of different usages, many of which rest on potentially ...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - April 12, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
