Knowledge claims in cognitive development research: Problems and alternatives
This article analyzes the use of these knowledge claims in cognitive development research on children's understanding of numbers and counting. In this research, attempts to characterize children's knowledge in terms of knowledge claims are repeatedly invalidated by children's inconsistently normative uses of counting. This suggests that rather than describing cognitive structures/states, knowledge claims describe whether, in a certain domain, a person has a disposition to behave normatively (i.e., in a way that fits a consensually established standard of how things are appropriately done). Given that children's developing ...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - March 31, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
On the nature of creepiness
Publication date: December 2016 Source:New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 43 Author(s): Francis T. McAndrew, Sara S. Koehnke Surprisingly, until now there has never been an empirical study of “creepiness.” An international sample of 1341 individuals responded to an online survey. Males were perceived as being more likely to be creepy than females, and females were more likely to associate sexual threat with creepiness. Unusual nonverbal behavior and characteristics associated with unpredictability were also predictors of creepiness, as were some occupations and hobbies. The results are consistent with the hypothes...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - March 30, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Finding common ground: Alternatives to code models for language use
Publication date: Available online 14 March 2016 Source:New Ideas in Psychology Author(s): Carol A. Fowler, Bert Hodges The papers in this special issue offer valuable perspectives on public language activities as they are embedded in cultural and social contexts. The perspectives are diverse in their theoretical perspectives, the issues on which they focus, and the methodologies they use and promote using. They represent language studies from the perspective of ecological psychology, dynamical systems approaches, the Distributed Language Approach, and others. The contributions are, in some cases, revolutionary and...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - March 15, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
A new perspective on self-deception for applied purposes
Publication date: December 2016 Source:New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 43 Author(s): Tatiana Bachkirova The concept of self-deception attracts the attention of many fields of knowledge, however very few attempts have been made to compare and contrast these positions for applied purposes. This paper provides theoretical analysis of the literature on self-deception from a pragmatic perspective that informs personal development work on recognizing and minimizing self-deception and helping practices such as counselling and coaching. Five distinct strands of thought on self-deception are identified and discussed with thei...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - March 12, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Towards a literary account of mental health from James' Principles of Psychology
Publication date: Available online 10 March 2016 Source:New Ideas in Psychology Author(s): Paul Sullivan The field of mental health tends to treat its literary metaphors as literal realities with the concomitant loss of vague “feelings of tendency” in “unusual experiences”. I develop this argument through the prism of William James’ (1890) “The Principles of Psychology”. In the first part of the paper, I reflect upon the relevance of James' “The Psychologist's Fallacy” to a literary account of mental health. In the second part of the paper, I develop the argument that “connotations” and “feeli...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - March 11, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
An axiological model of the relationship between consciousness and value
Publication date: Available online 4 March 2016 Source:New Ideas in Psychology Author(s): Sanford L. Drob There is a long tradition in both philosophy and psychology that views consciousness as the sine qua non of value. The author draws upon axiological theory to explore how consciousness is related to value and argues that because of this relationship, psychology is, to a large extent, an inquiry into values. The author articulates 14 modes of our conscious life and shows how these modes provide the basis for a cartography of values. In taking our conscious life as its subject matter psychology inevitably both stud...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - March 4, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Always looking for a moral identity: The moral licensing effect in men convicted of domestic violence
Publication date: April 2016 Source:New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 41 Author(s): María L. Vecina, Daniela Marzana People who act in accord with moral standards enjoy a strong moral self-concept, but people with a strong moral concept do not always behave morally: sometimes they exhibit consistent behaviors and sometimes compensatory behaviors. Through two studies, this paper shows that people who do wrong enjoy a stronger moral self-concept and regulate their moral behavior accordingly. Specifically, men in court-mandated psychological treatment for having employed violence against their partners manage to preser...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - February 24, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Inter- and En- activism: Some thoughts and comparisons
Publication date: April 2016 Source:New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 41 Author(s): Mark H. Bickhard Interactivism and enactivism spring from some similar insights and intuitions. There are, however, some arguably significant divergences, and I will explore a few of the important similarities and differences. Topics addressed include the basic notions of how cognition and mind emerge in living systems; how growth, learning, development, and adaptation can be modeled within the basic frameworks; and how phenomenological investigations can be taken into account and their phenomena modeled. (Source: New Ideas in Psychology)
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - January 28, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Systemizing in autism: The case for an emotional mechanism
Publication date: April 2016 Source:New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 41 Author(s): Geir Overskeid More often than others, people with autism engage in systemizing – attempts to understand and build rule-based systems. The mechanism behind the increased frequency of such behavior in autism is unknown, however. The assumption has long existed that emotions exist to motivate behavior, and there is now much evidence that people with autism tend to have stronger, more easily elicited emotions than the average person. This appears to be the cause of increased systemizing in autism – through a negative and a positive emo...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - January 27, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Self as a second-order object: Reinterpreting the Jamesian “Me”
This article traces current disagreements over the definition of the self to a crucial ambiguity in William James's original delineation of the “Me.” Implicit in James's delineation was a distinction between first-order objects and second-order objects: while first-order objects are things as they are, independent of the perception of a knowing subject, second-order objects are things as perceived by a knowing subject. This article makes this distinction explicit and argues that the self is a second-order object associated with the first-person or “emic” perspective. Defined as the empirical existence of the indivi...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - January 12, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
The dual component theory of inhibition regulation: A new model of self-control
Publication date: April 2016 Source:New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 41 Author(s): Joshua J. Reynolds, Sean M. McCrea Self-control is one of the most extensively studied topics in psychology and the resource or ego depletion model is one of the most popular. Although evidence supports some aspects of this model, other evidence is problematic for the notion that self-control is a limited resource. Herein, a new theory is proposed: the Dual Component Theory of Inhibition Regulation (DCTIR). The following paper will highlight key issues in self-control, describe the DCTIR, demonstrate how the DCTIR can account for the ...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - January 12, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Exploring wisdom in the Confucian tradition: Wisdom as manifested by Fan Zhongyan
This study focuses on Confucianism, which emphasizes self-cultivation and humaneness, and explores the wisdom manifested by Fan Zhongyan (989–1052), a Confucian scholar-official in Song-dynasty China and a model for Chinese intellectuals subsequently. Wisdom is defined as a process involving cognitive integration, embodying actions, and resulting positive effects for oneself and others. The study shows that Fan generated positive effects for himself and others through multiple efforts to embody his integrated idea,—being “the first to worry about the world's troubles and the last to take pleasure in its happiness.”...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - December 15, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Developmental stages, Piagetian stages in particular: A critical review
Publication date: January 2016 Source:New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 40, Part B Author(s): Orlando M. Lourenço Developmental stages in general and Piaget's stages in particular have given rise to considerable controversy. Much of this controversy revolves around the responses that have been given to the following five central questions: (1) Do developmental stages exist? (2) If they exist, where are they? (3) What features define a developmental sequence as a sequence of developmental stages? (4) What psychological processes underlie developmental change? (5) Should we abandon the concept of developmental stages? T...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - November 14, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Disentangling the self. A naturalistic approach to narrative self-construction
Publication date: January 2016 Source:New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 40, Part B Author(s): Massimo Marraffa, Alfredo Paternoster In this article we explore the implications of a definition of self-consciousness as a process, by which we mean the self-representing of a multilevel system (the human organism). This sets the stage for a developmental story about how a narrative identity is progressively constructed from body awareness, which becomes bodily self-awareness between 18 and 24 months of age. The final outcome is an approach to narrative self-construction which, drawing on findings in developmental, dynamic...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - November 14, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
Evolutionizing human nature
Publication date: January 2016 Source:New Ideas in Psychology, Volume 40, Part B Author(s): John Klasios Many have argued that the very notion of human nature is untenable given the facts of evolution and should accordingly be discarded. This paper, by contrast, argues that the notion can be retained in a coherent and modern way. The present account expounds on the view of human nature as a collection of species-typical psychological adaptations, and outlines how it can be understood in formally modeled computational terms. The view defended is also heavily developmental and connects directly with contemporary evolut...
Source: New Ideas in Psychology - November 14, 2015 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Source Type: research
