Psychology

Naiṇī (or Nāginā) is the name of nine Hindu goddesses, who rule over nine villages of Pindar valley in the Indian Himalaya. Seven of these goddesses establish the rule over their territory through a half-year-long journey (yātrā), during which they are carried around, embodied in the shape of a bamboo pole. To start such a journey, a Naiṇī has to be literally “unearthed”: a clay pot is taken from under the ground, which means that she is brought up from Nāglok, the underworld of serpent deities.

Through their yātrās, the Naiṇīs re-establish their family ties to the women of their respective village who have married into other villages. The explicit goal of the rituals, festivals and processions devoted to the Naiṇīs is to make them happy and to ease their anger about a lack of worship. Thus, the question what a Naiṇī feels is at the core of their religion. This study approaches this evasive topic from two angles: the emotions named when people tell about her and the feelings displayed in ritual interactions with her. The wide array of feelings "unearthed" in this sense shows that asking about nonhuman emotions can contribute to our understanding of religion in general.

Readers of Susan Cain's Quiet and Daniel Pink's When will appreciate this passionate investigation into creativity and the human brain—from the perspective of an author investigating her own brain after a concussion.

Author and journalist Hilde Østby was cycling to work one day when she crashed head-first into a stone bridge. At the hospital, she was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury and prescribed rest and relaxation. But her brain was anything but restful: ideas for new writing projects popped into her head at a frenzied pace. Never before had she had so many 'aha' moments. But at the same time, simple tasks like walking through an airport felt impossible. Had the concussion made her—like the stereotype of the tortured artist—more creative but less able to function in society? Or was there something else at play? What makes a person creative, anyway?

In The Key to Creativity, Østby takes readers on a deep-dive into why we are creative and what conditions must be present in order for us to make our best work: whether that be a painting, a piece of writing, or simply a good email. Using characters from Alice in Wonderlandfor inspiration, Østby investigates why we have ideas that seemingly come out of nowhere, like the Cheshire Cat, and how we can quiet our inner critic, like the rule-obsessed Queen of Hearts. Along the way, she speaks with artists of all stripes and interviews psychiatrists and neurologists who specialize in understanding what happens in the brain when we are at our most creative. She discovers that having a tortured and lonely existence isn't necessarily conducive to producing great art—and that being able to complete a task, on time, and according to your and others' expectations, is as important as being able to think outside the box.

Østby soon learns that she needs to make changes in her own life to recover from her brain injury and to give structure and life to her ideas. This engaging and groundbreaking book debunks the myth that you need to be a genius in order to be an artist or inventor. All you need is an idea and the tools to make your creative dream come true.

A Personal Growth Journal to Build Effective Habits  

“If you follow this simple process, I promise that you will see positive changes in your relationships and find a higher level of personal satisfaction in your life.” ―Sean Covey, author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Teens

#1 New Release in Strategic Business Planning

How do you manage your time and stay organized? Whether you’re struggling to stay motivated or are looking for new high-performance habits, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Guided Journal offers journal prompts, worksheets, and exercises to help you accomplish all your short and long term goals. 

Goal setting just got easier. When The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People was released as a card deck, audiences approached Stephen R. Covey’s time-tested principles in a whole new way. Now, this companion journal gives readers a chance to craft inspiration into action. Its concise format is accessible and easy to stick with. Each habit is broken down into a weekly format inspiring both beginners and seasoned 7 Habits readers to get motivated, build confidence, and boost inspiration and personal growth.

Cultivate success, skill, and self-growth. Featuring thought-provoking prompts, worksheets, and self-development quotes that teach you how to achieve your goals, this is the ultimate guided self-growth journal.

Inside, find: 

• Journaling prompts for self-discovery and to build confidence and self esteem
• Worksheets for strategic time management and deeper learning of the 7 Habits 
• Self-motivation tips, exercises, and challenges for optimal goal achievement

If you enjoyed books like The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, The 52 Lists Project, or The High Performance Planner, you’ll love The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People Guided Journal. 

Flip the Script on Failure

By exploring your subconscious patterns of response to failure, Faceplant brings a fresh new mindset to life's tripping hazards. It's time to edit your story and let the adventure begin. Discover tools to define new patterns for yourself, create fresh opportunities for engaging in life, and support others as they navigate the gravity of their failures.

Dr. Melisa Buie is a problem-solver, lean leader and thought-challenger with 30+ years of experience in industry, government and academia. She can often be found hunting opportunities for improvement in manufacturing or playing with data.

Keeley Hurley is a squirrel-herding multipotentialite who has spent her career in the laser industry, always striving to leave the role, people, company, and industry better than she found it.

Noël Kreidler is an Associate Director of Career Development at the Santa Clara University Career Center and has 30+ years of work experience in talent acquisition, human resources, and career services.

Recent crises—whether policy-induced (e.g., family separation at the Mexico/U.S. border) or natural disaster-related (e.g., hurricanes in Florida and North Carolina and wildfires in California)—have galvanized the attention of the U.S. and international public on the plight of children who endure these traumatic events. The sheer enormity of such wrenching events tend to overshadow the trauma endured by many children whose everyday life circumstances fall short of affording them a safe, stable, and nurturing environment.

At the national level, three rounds of data collection spanning January 2008 through April 2014 constituted the National Survey of Children’s Exposure to Violence (NatSCEV) that—according to Finkelhor, Turner, Shattuck, and Hambly (2013) in reporting on the 2011 round—assessed “a wide range of childhood victimizations” (pp. 614-615). Among many other findings, Finkelor et al. concluded that “overall, 57.7% of the children and youth had experienced or witnessed at least 1 to 5 aggregate exposures (assaults and bullying, sexual victimization, maltreatment by a caregiver, property victimization, or witnessing victimization) in the year before this survey” (p. 619). According to the recent re-visiting of NatSCEV II by Turner et al. (2017), “almost 1 in 4 children and adolescents ages 5-15 in the United States lived in family environments with only modest levels of safety, stability, and nurturance, while about 1 in 15 had consistently low levels across multiple domains” (p. 8).

Adverse childhood events (ACEs) have both immediate and long-term impacts on children’s health and well-being (Banyard, Hambly, & Grych, 2017; Bowen, Jarrett, Stahl, Forrester, & Valmaggia, 2018; Walker & Walsh, 2015). Children do not shed their entanglement with ACEs at the schoolroom door. To highlight just one study, Jimenez, Wade, Lin, Morrow, & Reichman (2016) conducted a secondary analysis of a national urban birth cohort and found that experiencing ACEs in early childhood was “associated with below-average, teacher-reported academic and literacy skills and [more] behavior problems in kindergarten” (p. 1).

Leading scholars attempting to illuminate the developing trends in explaining and understanding the role that affect plays in justice and vice versa. The book comes at a particular fitting time as it is recognized that justice is in the eye of the beholder, but, unfortunately clear theoretical perspectives have not been clearly outlined yet. This book addresses this need by presenting a variety of perspectives advocating the further integration between both fields and how this may be achieved. Moreover, the book also provides a discussion of what we know as yet and where this integrative field should be going. The book is divided in three parts discussing the nature of justice and affect, justice, morality and affect, and justice and affect at work.

The market for this book is students, researchers in social psychology, organizational behavior and management, behavioral economics, philosophy, and other related social sciences fields. Graduate students and upper level undergraduates can make use of the book as a supplementary text.

This book comes as part of a broader project the editor is developing aiming critically to articulate some theoretical and methodological issues of cultural psychology with the research and practical work of psychologists with Amerindian peoples. As such, the project – of which the present book is part – concerns to a meta-theoretical reflection aiming to bring in new theoretical-methodological and ethical reflections to Cultural Psychology. From this meta-theoretical reflection we have been developing the notion of dialogical multiplication as it implies the diversification (differentiation and dedifferentiation) of semiotic trajectories in interethnic boundaries.

This book is a result of a major research project in Switzerland that brings together the fields of Education and Socio-Cultural Psychology. It is focused on how culture is involved in very concrete educational practices. The reader is invited to follow the research group in a Swiss technical college that trains young people in precision mechanics during a period of major technological change: the arrival of automated manufacturing systems. This transition in the trade is an opportunity to explore the educational and psychological challenges of vocational training from a perspective inspired by activity theory and the consideration of social interactions and semiotic or other technical mediations as crucial to the formation of professional identities and competencies.

What are the most appropriate settings for learning? There is no simple answer to this question. What can lead a pupil to become engaged, even if this is within a school, with all the seriousness of a future professional? Under which conditions is an internship in a company genuinely formative?

Is it necessary to possess the most recent technologies in order to offer high quality training? What do we know about the relation between doing and knowing in the construction of new competences? How can it be planned and informed to become an object of reflection and make sense in the eyes of the learner? Dealing with such qustions, this study explores new working hypotheses on the manner in which the young experience their training and on the significant role for them of professional specialization.

The book will be designed primarily for graduate students (or advanced undergraduates) who are learning psychometrics, as well as professionals in the field who need a reference for use in their practice. We would assume that users have some basic knowledge of using SPSS to read data and conduct basic analyses (e.g., descriptive statistics, frequency distributions). In addition, the reader should be familiar with basic statistical concepts such as descriptive statistics (e.g., mean, median, variance, standard deviation), percentiles and the rudiments of hypothesis testing. They should also have a passing familiarity with issues in psychometrics such as reliability, validity and test/survey scoring. We will not assume any more than basic familiarity with these issues, and will devote a portion of each chapter (as well as the entire first chapter) to reviewing many of these basic ideas for those not familiar with them.

We envision the book as being useful either as a primary text for a course on applied measurement where SPSS is the main platform for instruction, or as a supplement to a more theoretical text. We also anticipate that readers working in government agencies responsible for testing and measurement issues at the local, state and national levels, and private testing, survey and market research companies, as well as faculty members needing a practical resource for psychometric practice will serve as a market for the book. In short, the readership would include graduate students, faculty members, data analysts and psychometricians responsible for analysis of survey response data, as well as educational and psychological assessments.

The goal of the book is to provide readers with the tools necessary for assessing the psychometric qualities of educational and psychological measures as well as surveys and questionnaires. Each chapter will cover an issue pertinent to psychometric and measurement practice, with an emphasis on application. Topics will be briefly discussed from a theoretical/technical perspective in order to provide the reader with the background necessary to correctly use and interpret the statistical analyses that will be presented subsequently. Readers will then be presented with examples illustrating a particular concept (e.g., reliability). These examples will include a discussion of the particular analysis, along with the SPSS code necessary to conduct them. The resulting output will then be discussed in detail, focusing on the interpretation of the results. Finally, examples of how these results might be written up will also be included in the text. It is hoped that this mixture of theory with examples of actual practice will serve the reader both as a pedagogical tool and as a reference work.

To our knowledge, no book outlining psychometric practice using commonly available software such as SPSS currently exists. Given that many practitioners in academia, government and private industry use SPSS for statistical analyses of testing data, we believe that our book will fill an important niche in the market. It will contain very practical information regarding how to conduct a wide variety of psychometric analyses, along with tips on interpretation of results and the appropriate format for reporting these results. We believe that it will prove useful to individuals in educational measurement, psychometrics, and survey and market research.

Our text will add to the literature by providing users with a single reference containing the major ideas in applied psychometrics with instructions and examples for conducting the analyses in SPSS. In addition, we will provide original macros for estimating a variety of statistics and conducting analyses common in educational and psychological measurement.

This volume provides an overview of recent research on child development in Japan. Sixteen contributions from leading psychologists cover such topics as the development of manga (comic book) literacy, the study of mathematics in school, and the effects of job- related temporary father absence.

Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) has received considerable educational, research, medical and media attention the past ten years. Yet the condition was first described more than a hundred years ago. Due to the disorder being confused with childhood schizophrenia, there was a lack of definitive attention by special educators, medical professionals and mental health clinicians to advance parameters related to: causes; prevalence; identification and diagnosis; education and treatment. Positively, this confusion changed starting in the 1980s with the clarification of the differences between these disorders with the 1980 publication of the' Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders' (DSM-III). Soon after, the 1990 federal legislation 'Individuals with Disabilities Education Act' recognized the disorder as a disability category eligible for special education services. Both of these events lead to an explosion of information related to: finding causes; accurate identification and diagnosis; best educational practices; and social, emotional, and behavioral treatments.

Even with this explosion in the body of knowledge concerned with this disorder, much more needs to be learned and discovered. The successful use of this body of knowledge requires that accurate information be provided to educators, parents, clinicians, medical professionals, and mental health professionals to counter misinformation that exists among the general public, educators and clinical professionals.

This is the primary purpose of 'Autism Spectrum Disorders: Inclusive Community for the 21st Century'. The chapters are written by researchers, clinicians, business professionals, and university professors who have an extensive knowledge of ASD. The contents of the book are an excellent reference for special education teachers, school psychologists, practicing mental health clinicians, and parents and family members of children and adults with ASD.

The birth of the social sciences and specifically of sociology begets some open questions, among which the debate on altruism and the concept of social solidarity. The term altruism was firstly used by Auguste Comte. It is one of the few terms born within the scientific field that will enter the common language roughly maintaining the same meaning. For the positivist Comte, altruism represented the powerful impulse to the intellectual and moral development of humanity to which we must strive as a future state. The term commonly means all those actions whose benefits fall on others and not on the agent (actor). In short, for Comte, altruism means "to live for others" (vivre pour autrui).

The centrality of altruism as part of the reflections of social sciences can be found in many classic authors. Durkheim, for example, explains the foundations of social solidarity in modern society precisely through the opposition between altruism and egoism and defines its implications in the book Le Suicide in 1897, also identifying what will later become the main typology of suicide by contrasting altruistic suicide with egoistic suicide. Likewise, both Weber and Marx, while not using the term altruism as such, refer to it indirectly. The former, when describing the ethics of love for the charismatic authority as opposed to legal and rational authority, the latter, when corroborating his polemics against Christian charity.

The interest in altruism as an object of study of social sciences, however, is progressively waning - especially in Europe. From the second half of the last century, theoretical and empirical studies show the indifference of social scientists towards this object, except for the Russian-American sociologist Sorokin, who in 1949 founded the Harvard Research Center in Creative Altruism. In recent years, however, the topic seems to take renewed vigor, especially in the United States with the birth in 2012 of the section "Altruism, Morality & Social Solidarity" within the American Sociological Association. It considered these three aspects as a single field of disciplinary specialization, since they are significantly dependent on socio-cultural reality. This is the situation in the United States. In Europe, there is a renewed interest in studies on altruism, especially in French-language sociology, above all starting from the numerous contributions to reading and re-reading work on Marcel Mauss's on gift of 1925, and in following the anti-utilitarian movement and studies of the school of social representations of Moscovici, which leads to the definition of the elementary forms of altruism.

The book aims to analyze the concept of altruism starting from classical philosophy up to the systems of ideas of contemporaneity, considering the approaches and authors of reference in an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary way. The representations of altruism and egoism in contemporary society are constantly changing, following the transformations of society itself. Having abandoned the idea that the factors leading to altruism or egoism lay only in human nature, we find them in people’s conduct, freedom, relationships, their associative forms and society. The attention is thus turned to two elements of the daily life of individuals: culture and social relations. The book tries, therefore, through the meso-theories developed in recent decades, which study the relationships between life-world and social system, to describe the links between altruism, egoism, culture and social relations. We will pay particular attention to the relationality of individuals, in an attempt to overcome the dichotomy altruism/egoism by reading some aspects little considered by previous studies - or contemplated only indirectly or marginally. The ultimate goal is to highlight how positive actions are necessary for the contemporary society and how social sciences must go back and study positive socio-cultural actions and phenomena, not only negative, as a way to promote them for the well-being of the society.

The research reported in this book is unapologetically Meadian. While the work of George Herbert Mead has been of widespread significance, and his name is often cited, there are in fact few empirical studies that have sought to rigorously instantiate his ideas. This is in part because his theory is abstruse and in part because there have been so many divergent interpretations of his theory. The point of departure for the present research is a novel interpretation of Mead. Mead’s core problematic, I argue, is how to explain self-reflection, and his answer to this is the theory of the social act. The present research is an attempt to instantiate this reading.

This book puts to rest any glorification of postmodernist belief in the local nature of knowledge and context specificity of human cultural acts as a part of the image of fragmented human lives. Human beings are differentiated and hierarchically integrated wholes who regulate their own organization by cultural means. This conceptual deathblow to postmodernist ideologies is done here without denying the reality of context specificity. In fact, all the evidence in this book shows that each and every moment in the touring act is context bound, and hence unique. Yet there is generality operating upon—and creating—that uniqueness. The author’s careful development of theoretical insights George Herbert Mead reached in his self-dialogues almost a century ago is a new step in the development of cultural psychology as a Wissenschaft aiming at making sense of the human conditions in its generic ways. This itself is an exploring act—one that the social sciences need very much at our present time of abundance of fragmented bits and pieces of information about “the others” that lead us to search for our own unified selves through invention of new ways for touring.

Behavioral scientists are increasingly involved in international work through cross cultural research, conference presentations, and faculty exchanges. Psychology and social work NGOs work at the United Nations, both on providing professional consultation on timely issues, as well as advocating to promote human rights and sustainable development. Although this work at the United Nations is an important arena for behavioral scientists, this has been barely covered in the academic literature.

'What are growing roles of psychology and the behavioral sciences at the United Nations today?' This first-ever volume brings together over 20 authors--both key experts and student interns--to answer this question. As the United Nations pursues its 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for the year 2030, behavioral scientists now occupy increasingly diverse roles to pursue evidence-based answers for these 17 timely SDGs.

This panoramic yet concise 230-page volume is designed for students and professionals in the behavioral sciences, psychology and social work to provide state-of-the-art information on how behavioral scientists are addressing diverse global issues today. Each chapter offers a concise overview of a topic, including a glossary of current concepts, and citations to current research.

How are behavioral scientists increasingly involved to advise global decision-makers in the United Nations and elsewhere?

In 2020, the Psychology Coalition at the United Nations (PCUN) launched a bold new series of books, describing how evidence- based behavioral research is increasingly used by United Nations and other decision-makers, to address global issues. These issues reflect the UN’s 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) for 2030—such as health, poverty, education, peace, gender equality, and climate change.

This PCUN volume brings together 34 experts in 14 concise chapters, to focus on diverse issues in mental, spiritual, and social health (detailed below). The chapters are co-authored by leading global experts as well as 'rising star' students from many nations--offering readers a concise overview of each topic, a glossary of key terms, study questions, and bibliography. This volume is suitable as a textbook for diverse courses in psychology, social work, cross-cultural and international studies.

This book Beyond the Mind: Cultural Dynamics of the Psyche is unusual in the content and it the format. That’s why it requires an unusual look. It has to do with a man, an intellectual journey and with uncountable travels across the world over the last two decades.

This man is Jaan Valsiner and here you will read of his restless effort of elaborating ideas while going in different places as invited keynote. This book is mainly about his intellectual trajectory, which touches several places and several and interconnected topics.

This book is about the “minutes” of his “bigger” and well organize works and also it is a collection of only apparently fragmented texts (mainly keynote lectures, unpublished or rejected papers) where the readers will see the “step- by-step” elaboration over the years of new ideas, theories, models and even schemas (which Jaan likes very much—maybe especially as he claims basic inability to draw anything).

Filipino Americans have a long and rich history with and within the United States, and they are currently the second largest Asian group in the country. However, very little is known about how their historical and contemporary relationship with America may shape their psychological experiences. The most insidious psychological consequence of their historical and contemporary experiences is colonial mentality or internalized oppression. Some common manifestations of this phenomenon are described below:

• Skin-whitening products are used often by Filipinos in the Philippines to make their skins lighter. Skin whitening clinics and businesses are popular in the Philippines as well. The "beautiful" people such as actors and other celebrities endorse these skin-whitening procedures. Children are told to stay away from the sun so they do not get "too dark." Many Filipinos also regard anything "imported" to be more special than anything "local" or made in the Philippines.
• In the United States, many Filipino Americans make fun of "fresh-off-the-boats" (FOBs) or those who speak English with Filipino accents. Many Filipino Americans try to dilute their "Filipino-ness" by saying that they are mixed with some other races. Also, many Filipino Americans regard Filipinos in the Philippines, and pretty much everything about the Philippines, to be of "lower class" and those of the "third world.

The historical and contemporary reasons for why Filipino / Americans display these attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors - often referred to as colonial mentality - are explored in Brown Skin, White Minds. This book is a peer-reviewed publication that integrates knowledge from multiple scholarly and scientific disciplines to identify the past and current catalysts for such self-denigrating attitudes and behaviors. It takes the reader from indigenous Tao culture, Spanish and American colonialism, colonial mentality or internalized oppression along with its implications on Kapwa, identity, and mental health, to decolonization in the clinical, community, and research settings.

This book is intended for the entire community - teachers, researchers, students, and service providers interested in or who are working with Filipinos and Filipino Americans, or those who are interested in the psychological consequences of colonialism and oppression. This book may serve as a tool for remembering the past and as a tool for awakening to address the present.

Biographical ruptures and their repairs: Cultural transitions in development represents the efforts of bridging theoretical, methodological, and practice oriented issues revolving around the notion of biographical ruptures and their repairs. The aim is to bring novel understandings from cultural psychological perspectives to the debate of what it means to be a developing human being in an ever changing world.

Contrary to mainstream psychology ruptures and repairs are here not necessarily understood as a personal experience, which must be overcome through various coping strategies. Rather, ruptures are understood as experiences, which necessarily emerge out of the complex interrelatedness of intra-psychological, inter-personal, and societal processes. Moving along these different levels of analysis, each of the 13 chapters of this book contributes to the general cultural psychological understanding of ruptures from their own particular standpoint. The notion of ruptures and their repairs are discussed from such differing standpoints such as classical developmental psychological theories and challenges to such developmental approaches. They are discussed in relation to racial interpellations using the documentary method and social representations theory. On the object level ruptures are pointed out within popular music videos and from a Ganzheitspsychological approach and others.

The current book thus does not only represent a conglomerate of various theoretical, methodological, or practice oriented approaches to ruptures and their repairs, each adding with their own expertise to a better understand of the phenomenon in its whole. It also demonstrated a lively debate between leading specialists and practitioners from different disciplines and countries. Theoretical and methodological issues, as well as ethical and moral ones, are each discussed from their own cultural psychological viewpoint. This book will interest practitioners, scientists and students or anyone who is interested in biographical rupture and their repairs from a cultural psychological, developmental, social psychological or psychotherapeutic viewpoint.

The fourth book in the UN book series Behavioral Science in the Global Arena is entitled Children Around the World: The Future of Our Earth continues the focus on issues of major international importance. This book is based on these three principles 1) Focus on most important pressing issues, 2) is multidiscipline with authors who are psychologists, social workers, medical doctors, and NGO leaders, and 3) Chapters are co-authored by well-known experts and new professionals or graduate students.

Children were chosen as the focus as over 30% of the people in our world are children. This book looks at major macro trends affecting children as well as interventions that have been used to address problems that children face. Topics that are addressed include the UN Convention on Children, Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs) that support children, and development issues like pre and post-natal health, family systems, gender roles, and puberty/adolescent issues. Attention is given to major risk factors and challenges such as sex trafficking, child labor, street children, protecting children in congregate care, and violence against children in the home, in institutions, and in the community. This book closes with a look at the most serious future challenges for children including literacy, migration, and mental health issues.

This book is designed for faculty and students, as well as professionals who want to learn more about the type and severity of problems affecting children as well as positive interventions that have been used to address these problems.

In the 'Pocket Money Project,' researchers from four countries, Japan, Korea, China, and Vietnam collaborated and studied how children in those four countries were involved with money, combining various research methods and approaches. What our project tries to present throughout this book is that money is not only just a tool of exchange in the context of the market economy; but, it also serves as a tool to mediate human relationships in individual cultures; and the tool is used and mediated by norms. The structure of the norms differs among cultures, and the same action has different meanings; thus, when the structure of norms in a culture is identified, the meaning of an action in the culture becomes clear.

The research practice of 'the Cultural Psychology of Differences' does not aim to create inventories of static differences. When a researcher, who is also a member of a specific culture, witnesses common behavior (cultural practices) among the others belonging to a different culture, the researcher is surprised, and, at the same time, reflects on his or her own common behavior (cultural practices); by doing so, mutual understanding and empathy are deepened, and this is exactly what 'the Cultural Psychology of Differences' aims to do. Culture of the others appears dynamically, swaying ourselves; theorizing such a process is the task of our 'Cultural Psychology of Differences'.

We believe this practice of understanding different cultures will provide a practical prescription for mutual understanding through tensions and surprise not only for psychology but also for members of the countries that historically and constantly have had strained relationships. 'Cultural Psychology of Differences' is the ideal that cultural psychology to study the relationships between mind and culture should be pursued in the future.

Cogito, ergo sum. ('I think, therefore I am.') When Descartes quipped this, he erroneously split thinking from feeling. He assumed thoughts emerge from a substance other than feeling. This is a historic tragedy, and it is unnecessary. It brings us to a risky end-game. When we attempt to meld preconceived thought with evoked feelings, we come to the craft of 'spin doctors.' Instead, there is a natural path for connecting thinking and feeling. It involves emotional reflection at the time that understandings are created.

This book draws attention to a form of dialogue which is called design dialogue. Design dialogue constructs new meaning from the bottom up. Individuals construct new meanings through individual thinking. In design dialogue, meaning results from group thinking. Group thinking is not as simple as thinking individually while being present within a group. The design process results in a series of co-constructed learning artifacts which, ultimately, constitute a new understanding. The process is concurrently emotional and cognitive, and melding emotion and cognition is achievable with effective design dialogue methods.

The first chapter introduces emotion as the catalyst for considering questions, persisting in reflection, and concluding a cycle of thought. This chapter fills in gaps with the treatment of emotion and cognition. The second chapter lays out the sequence of observation-taking, sensemaking, meaning-making, and perspective-taking that are essential steps in thinking. Frameworks for thinking in educational traditions focus not so much on the neurological mechanics of the thought process but rather on the overall internalization of a 'way' of understanding things. A third chapter presents a methodology for managing a design dialogue. Group facilitators generally invent and modify their own approaches for leading design projects. This chapter presents a codified approach that offers an advantage of supporting continuous improvement of complex design management methodology. And the final chapter considers the emergence of a sapient group-mind through the agency of design dialogue. This conjectured group-mind is considered in the context of the civic infrastructure that is needed to sustain the continual growth of the human superorganism structure.

As humanity has moved from tribes, to cities, to institutions, and now to globally connected networks, each leap forward has been accompanied by profound changes in social practices and belief systems. Recent findings from the field of cognitive science have confirmed a suspicion that we have long held about each other. Individual thinking is biased and flawed. Inclusive and democratically managed discussion, deliberation and design all help to identify and dampen flawed understandings. The individual mind, an essential ingredient in the human spirit, is now, as a matter of practical necessity, bending to the wisdom of a well-informed group mind. The speed and strength of newly emerging social forces and evolving civic trends point to the conclusion that we are on the threshold for a new way of being. This book seeks to evoke reflection on how we can start communicating in a way that prepares us for life in that new future.

Traditional work on child development is often based on notions of an individual and decontextualized child. This volume involves a contribution to the rethinking of development: it presents a number of situated studies where children’s perspectives are documented through their interaction with others in situated practices, in family life and school and across social contexts.

This volume offers a toolkit for analyzing children’s perspectives and participation over time. In prior work, the interview has often been seen as the cardinal method – or the only method – for studying children’s perspectives. This anthology includes vignettes and case studies, with descriptions of children’s actions in situated activity settings as well as illustrative transcripts from video-recorded social interaction. It opens up toward a broader view of ‘development’ in that it documents how children’s and youths’ perspectives and agency can be studied through their ways of interacting (or not interacting) in everyday life. One aspect of this is their verbal and nonverbal participation in family life and the social landscape of schools. Another feature is that it involves several chapters that problematize ‘impaired practices’ and dilemmas in the teaching of children with dysfunctions. The book as a whole is rich in empirical ethnographic examples that highlight life trajectories in and across social contexts.

Moreover, it features interview data and narratives that include children’s and youths’ own reflections on their lives and experiences of the social demands of family and school. This includes their own thoughts on being or becoming members of local communities.

The faking of personality tests in a selection context has been perceived as somewhat of a nuisance variable, and largely ignored, or glossed over by the academic literature. Instead of examining the phenomenon many researchers have ignored its existence, or trivialized the impact of faking on personality measurement. The present volume is a much needed, timely corrective to this attitude. In a wide range of chapters representing different philosophical and empirical approaches, the assembled authors demonstrate the courage to tackle this important and difficult topic head-on, as it deserves to be. The writers of these chapters identify two critical concerns with faking. First, if people fake their responses to personality tests, the resulting scores and the inferences drawn from them might become invalid. For example, people who fake their responses by describing themselves as diligent and prompt might earn better conscientiousness scores, and therefore be hired for jobs requiring this trait that in fact they might not perform satisfactorily. Second, the dishonesty of the faker might itself be a problem, separate from its effect on a particular score. Someone who lies on a pre-employment test might also lie about the hours he or she works, or how much cash is in the till at the end of the shift. Worse, these two problems might exacerbate each other: a dishonest applicant might get higher scores on the traits the employer desires through his or her lying, whereas the compulsively honest applicant might get low scores as an ironic penalty for being honest. Outcomes like these harm employers and applicants alike.

The more one delves into the complexities of faking, as the authors of the chapters in this volume do so thoroughly and so well, the more one will recognize that this seemingly specialized topic ties directly to more general issues in psychology. One of these is test validity. The bottom-line question about any test score, faked or not, is whether it will predict the behaviors and outcomes that it is designed to predict. As Johnson and Hogan point out in their chapter, the behavior of someone faking a test is a subset of the behavior of the person in his or her entire life, and the critical research question concerns the degree to which and manner in which behavior in one domain generalizes to behavior in other domains. This observation illuminates the fact that the topic of faking is also a key part of understanding the relationship between personality and behavior. The central goal of theoretical psychology is to understand why people do the things they do. The central goal of applied psychology is to predict what someone will do in the future. Both of these goals come together in the study of applicant faking.

Inner Speech is an increasingly relevant object of study in psychology research. In recent decades, interest in the study of inner language has even transcended the psychological sciences and has become an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary study phenomenon. Philosophers, anthropologists, psychologists, educators, and neuroscientists have joined efforts to learn more about this everyday experience inherent in human nature. Specifically, in psychology, the study of Inner Speech has been taken up by cognitive psychologists, cultural psychologists, developmental psychologists, clinical psychologists, and educational psychologists who have ventured into the study of this intimate experience of "talking to ourselves" in silence. This book is a compilation of work on Inner Speech that has been carried out by the research team of the Cognition & Culture Laboratory (C&C Lab) of the Institute of SocioEmotional Well-being (IBEM) of the Faculty of Psychology of the Universidad del Desarrollo, Chile, for more than a decade.

Throughout this book, readers will be able to approach the phenomenon of Inner Speech both at a theoretical-conceptual level and will also be able to learn about some strategies for its empirical exploration. It’s worth mentioning that the works presented in this book constitute only a personal collection of theoretical elaborations and methodological approaches to Inner speech, and not the full spectrum of currently existing research on Inner Speech. The objective of this compilation of articles is to position our line of research and present, in an organized manner, the evolution of our exploration of the phenomenon to the international research program on Inner Speech. More than closing a stage, our mission is to show the progress that we have developed for more than a decade regarding the study of Inner Speech, hoping in this way to open new questions, dialogues and methodological challenges in the international academic community.

This text looks at how the study of play has gained attention and concerns about play in young children have emerged. Ten chapters examine the understanding of play and its theories, play in school, pre-school and theories of pretence, mental representation and humour development.

The book is divided into three parts. In Part I, basic conceptual and theoretical issues concerning communication and metacommunication are presented. Part II continues the coverage with the issues of communication and metacommunication. Those are extended as each chapter puts forward new insights and contextualizes them within the realms of teaching– learning processes, early adaptation to nursery school contexts, and of the analysis of processes occurring at a particular dimension of human development (gender identity). Part III provides further conceptual and theoretical elaborations on the phenomena from the unique viewpoints of scholars with diverse backgrounds, which definitely furnish scientific discussion over the issue with fresh and productive ideas. Throughout the chapters, the reader is supplied with empirical projects conducted in different research laboratories, each study granting novel illustrations of methodological approaches to analyze the complexities of communication and metacommunication processes and their relevant constitutive roles in specific contexts.

Counseling Individuals with Eating Disorders: An Intersectional Approach was written to provide mental health professionals and students of counseling, medicine, psychology, social work, and other helping professions, with useful information and suggestions for their work with individuals with eating disorders. The chapter authors rely on an intersectional understanding of the human experience and specifically focus on how individuals with various intersecting identities experience, understand, and seek support for their disorders. We are so grateful to the diverse group of authors who collectively contributed their professional expertise to create this culturally-centered, engaging, and interdisciplinary resource. We strongly believe that our book fills a unique gap in the currently available texts that address these issues because case examples are included that are embedded in a specific sociocultural context. It is important to note that, although a range of illnesses are represented, the book is not comprehensive. Each chapter has great practical significance and utility for mental health practitioners as well as students in training. Chapters focus on general topics such as intersectionality and ethics, counseling individuals with specific eating disorders, counseling special populations, and counseling parents. Each of the disorder-specific chapters in the book begins with a description of the disorder, research regarding prevalence rates across diverse groups, and evidence-based treatments. Most chapters include an extended case vignette that highlights considerations relevant to a client’s intersectional identity. Readers are provided with an analysis of the vignette from the perspective of a theoretical approach or approaches supported by empirical research. Chapters conclude with future directions for treatment, research, theory, and policy, as well as four to five questions for discussion.

Continuous activity and high job demands surround corporate environments. These demands are considered to be key triggers for workers’ stress-related symptoms and poor health. It has been estimated by the American Institute of Stress (AIS) that US$ 300 billion/year are spent on conditions related to excessive stress levels. Of course, occupational stressors are an unavoidable part of working life. Experienced stress has helped us to survive for thousands of years and keeps us vigilant under critical situations. Of course, too much experienced stress can lead to serious psychological and physical health problems. This book is devoted to examining important issues related to coping with and preventing elevated occupational stress. This book also examines individual differences and organizational cultures that might exacerbate or mitigate experienced stress.

If we consider all choices available, it is better to prevent than to treat. Prevention can be primary, when we prevent the stress-generating situation from occurring; secondary, when we provide alternatives to minimize the damage caused by the problem and tertiary, which involves containing losses that have occurred to prevent them from becoming more serious. This book on stress prevention and coping with stress is intended to assist occupational health professionals and academics to improve their abilities to help employees managing stress, but it also can be helpful for individual workers as they learn to better handle stressors at work. The research findings and views presented by these well-respected leaders in stress research provide tools for those currently experiencing workplace stress and supplies information concerning how stress can be prevented before it occurs.

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.

This book is perhaps the first systematic treatment of politics from the perspective of cultural psychology. Politics is a complex that psychology usually fails to understand— as it assumes a position in society that attempts to be free of politics itself. Politics is associated both with an everyday practice, and the dynamics of globalization; with the way group conflicts, ideologies, social representations and identities, are lived and co-constructed by social actors. The authors of the book address these issues through their research grounded in different parts of the world, on democracy and political order, the social representation of power, gender studies, the use of metaphors and symbolic power in political discourse, social identities and methodological questions. The book will be used by social and political psychologists but is also of interest to the other social sciences: political scientists, sociologists, anthropologists, educationalists, and it is at a level where sophisticated lay public would be able to appreciate its coverage. Its use in upperlevel college teaching is possible, and expected at graduate/postgraduate levels.

Cross-Cultural Psychology: Why Culture Matters addresses both established and very recent research in cultural and comparative cross-cultural psychology. The book is written by Professor Krum Krumov of Sofia University in Bulgaria and Professor Knud S. Larsen from Oregon State University. The authors are long-term colleagues with extensive research experience in cultural, cross-cultural and international settings.

The book starts with a discussion of the tentative nature of cultural information given the forces of globalization and communication integration. Weighing these issues still permits for some powerful conclusions about differences that matter as well as human universals based on our communalities. The reader is also provided with a through grounding in relevant research approaches and critical thinking that provides the basis for an evaluation of the research literature.

Further, the book reports on what we know about the origin of culture, especially the forces of cultural transmission and the evidence for socio-cultural evolution. The impact of culture and psychology on human development is contrasted and evaluated. A chapter on language stresses the importance of evolutionary forces and the relationship to socio-culture. In turn that discussion sets the stage for reporting the relevant research on cognition that yields information on the impact of genetics, but also the affect of cultural evolution.

A distinct contribution is the evaluation of human happiness and emotions. The book demonstrates tangible relationships to both the universal expressions of emotions, but also the impact of cultural values on well-being. A consideration of personality theory follows in the systematic and progressive discourse in the book. Research is reported on Western, Eastern and Indigenous conceptualizations and research approaches. The discussion on the self is considered next and the authors evaluate cultural, social and comparative cross-cultural dimensions.

Finally, a discussion of sex and gender follows as associated with salient cross-cultural dimensions. The book concludes with a discussion of the affect of cultural values in organizational behavior and a consideration of the relationship between culture and human health.

This book explores how psychoanalysis can enrich and complement sociocultural psychology. It presents theoretical integrations of psychoanalytical notions in the sociocultural framework, analyzes the historical similarities, if not intricacies, of the two fields, and presents papers that have tried to apply an enriched theoretical framework in developmental and clinical empirical work. The first section presents editors' theoretical proposition for an integration of one particular stream of psychoanalysis within sociocultural psychology, which emphasizes both the dialogical and the semiotic nature of psychological dynamics. The second section pursues this theoretical dialogue through a historical perspective. The third section pursues the implications of this parallel reasoning. It invites researchers that propose further syntheses between some strands of psychoanalysis and approaches within social and cultural psychology. The contributions collected in this section show how sociocultural psychology and psychoanalysis can complement each other, when it comes to tracing the emergence of meaning in actual interactive settings.

Showing historical common roots, epistemological similarities, and theoretical complementarities, this book intends to suggests how the encounter and reciprocal contamination between cultural psychology and psychoanalysis could provide innovative theoretical and methodological syntheses. Through the various contributions three directions of development emerge as particularly promising for psychological science. Firstly, the semiotic conceptualization of affects, emerging from several of the contributors, appears to be a significant step ahead in the understanding of the dynamics of sense-making. A second promising direction of development concerns methodology. The reader will find several invitations to rethink the way of analyzing the phenomena of sense-making. Finally, the volume highlights how the connection between theory and practice in psychology is not a mere matter of application. Rather, the psychological intervention could be – needs to be – a theoretical object for cultural psychology, as it already is for psychoanalysis. At the same time, the intervention could be a fertile domain where a psychological practice endowed with reflexive capability generates new theoretical constructions.

The interventions have ranged between benevolent exchanges to powerful influences as well as military domination. Although interpersonal and group influence has been an important domain of study in Social Psychology, we propose to take a fresh look at these phenomena from the specific orientations provided by the discipline of Cultural Psychology.

In this perspective, meaning making processes becomes a key for understanding the everyday experiences of the receivers and agents of intervention.

In this volume, we see how attending to meaning-making processes becomes crucial when researching or intervening within cultural encounters and global everyday life.

It is through listening to the foreign other, to attend to their immediate experiences, as well as exploring how meaning may be mediated and co-constructed by them in everyday life through organizational structures, informal peer network, traditional rituals or symbols, that collaboration can be created and sustained.

Cultural Psychology of Recursivity illustrates how recursivity, often neglected in the social sciences, can be an important concept for illuminating meaning-making processes. Recusrivity is a fascinating though abstract concept with a wide array of often incompatible definitions. Rooted in mathematics and linguistics, this book brings recursion and recursive processes to the foreground of psychological processes. One unifying claim among the diverse chapters in this book is that recursion and recursive processes are at the core of complex social and psychological processes. Recursion is bound up with the notion of re-turning, re-examining, re-flecting and circling back, and these processes allow for human beings to simultaneously distance themselves from the here-and-now settings (by imaging the past and future) while being immersed in them. The objective of this book is not simply to celebrate the complexity of human living, but to extend the notion of recursion, recursivity and recursive processes into the realm of social and psychological processes beyond the arenas in which these ideas have currently thrived.

Cultural Psychology of Recursivity shows that in spite of the difficulty in defining recursivity, self-referencing (looping), transformation (generativity), complexity, and holism constitute its core characteristics and provide the basis for which authors in this book explore and elaborate this concept. Still, each contribution has its own unique take on recursivity and how it is applied to their phenomenon of investigation. Chapters in this book examine how recursive processes are related to and basic aspects of play and ritual, imitation, identity exploration, managing stigma, and commemorative practices. This book is intended for psychologists, sociologists, and mathematicians. Use of the book in post-graduate and graduate level of university teaching is expected in seminar format teaching occasions.

As envisaged by Robert A. LeVine many years ago, the human development indicators have improved in many societies as income, healthcare and educational opportunities have been enlarged. Global transformations have led to significant decline in extreme poverty and an increase in working class and middle class families around the world in the emerging economies throughout Africa and Asia. As the technological and global influences continue to challenge the dominant narrative in academic psychology, conflated with WEIRD data assumptions, interdisciplinary research will continue to increase in value and scope, where LeVine’s classical approach in psychological anthropology, combined with psychoanalysis, developmental psychology, demography, language or area research and population studies, offers a path forward. The essays collected here in addition to honoring LeVine’s work, hold out the promise of a real convergence between psychology and anthropology or the development of a psychosocial science -- a confluence between positivism and relativism, empiricism and ethnography, and social sciences and human sciences. The scientific search for universal laws and the ever expanding search for cultural meanings in the diverse communities around the world must continue simultaneously and in conjunction with the transnational or global challenges we face today.

Hybridity fostered by interdisciplinary researchers has stood the test of time as the social sciences have gradually outgrown the monolithic ways of looking at the world. The project of a psychosocial science represented by the work of Robert A. LeVine at the intersection of psychology, anthropology, demography, child development and psychoanalysis maps out some of the challenges of a hybrid discipline. Hybridity impacts not only the humanities and social sciences, but physical sciences in genetics and genomics, or applied disciplines like biotechnology and life sciences. Thus, it is important that we not lose sight of LeVine’s spirit of interdisciplinary research. Advocates for universalism, the psychologists or behavioral scientists pursuing universal laws of human nature, must collaborate with the growing number of relativistic scientists – anthropologists, sociologists, or cultural studies experts -- searching for local meanings in small-scale village communities. There will be a confluence of social and human sciences, or what C.P. Snow, the English literary critic called the ‘two cultures’ of the scientific revolution – the sciences and humanities.

This book brings in the focus on the borders between different contexts that need to be crossed, in the process of education.

Despite the considerable efforts of various groups of researchers all over the World, it does not seem that traditional educational psychology has succeeded in illuminating the complex issues involved in the schoolfamily relationship. From a methodological perspective, there is no satisfactory explanation of the connection between representations and actual practice in educational contexts.

Crossing Boundaries is an invitation to cultural psychology of educational processes to overcome the limits of existing educational psychology.

Eemphasizing social locomotion and the dynamic processes, the book try to capture the ambiguous richness of the transit from one context to another, of the symbolic perspective that accompanies the dialogue between family and school, of practices regulating the interstitial space between these different social systems.

How family and school fill, occupy, circulate, avoid or strategically use this space in between? What discourses and practices saturate this Border Zone and/or cross from one side to the other?

Crossing Boundaries gathers contributions with the clear aim of documenting and analysing what happens at points of contact between family culture and scholastic/educational culture from the perspective of everyday life.

This book is in itself an attempt to cross the border between the "theorizing on the borders" (and how “the outside world” and “the others” are perceived from a certain point of view) and “the practices" that characterize the school-home interaction.

Cultural Psychology is a radical new look in psychology that studies how persons and social-cultural worlds mutually constitute one another. With the increase of globalization and multicultural exchanges, cultural psychology becomes the psychological science for the 21st century. Encounters with others fundamentally transform the way we understand ourselves. No longer can we ignore questions about how our cultural traditions, practices, beliefs, artifacts and other people constitute how we approach, understand, imagine and remember the world. The Niels Bohr Professorship Lectures in Cultural Psychology series aims to highlight and develop new ideas that advance our understanding of these issues.

This first volume in the series features an address by Prof. Jaan Valsiner, which is followed by ten commentary chapters and his response to them. In his lecture, Valsiner explores what Niels Bohr’s revolutionary principle of ‘complementarity’ can contribute to the development of a cultural psychology that takes time, semiotics, and human feeling seriously. Commentators further discuss how complementarity can act as an epistemology for psychology; a number of new methodological strategies for incorporating culture and time into investigations; and what cultural psychology can contribute to our understanding of imagination, art, language and self-other relations.

This book is about caring for elderly persons in the 21th century. It shows that care has many facets and is influenced by many factors. Central topics of this book thus include the relation between the person depending on care and the care giver(s), the impacts of caregiving on the family and the larger social context, as well as socio-cultural and political aspects underlying the growing need for and the practice of formal and informal care. It is evident that care as a real-life phenomenon of our time needs the co-operation of multiple disciplines to better understand, describe, explain and modify phenomena of elder care. Such a need for cross- disciplinary research is even more urgent given the increasing population aging and the impending gaps between demand and supply of care. The present book is dedicated to this approach and provides a first substantive integration of knowledge from geropsychology, other gerosciences, and cultural psychologies by a multi-disciplinary cast of internationally renowned authors. Cultural psychology emerged as a valuable partner of the gerosciences by contributing essentially to a deeper understanding of the relevant issues. Reading of this book provides the reader—researcher or practitioner—with new insights of where the problems of advancing age take our caring tasks in our 21st century societies and it opens many new directions for further work in the field. Finally and above all, this book is also a strong plea for solidarity between generations in family and society in a rapidly changing globalized world.

In our current digital era, imagination and the cultural and material conditions by which it is developed are more crucially than ever implicated in the experienced adversities and contradictions of drug use. The technological changes of society underscore the need for rethinking dominant understandings which portray addiction as an immediate and even mindless relation between a person and a substance or behavior, only minimally affected by subjective significance and historical alterations of everyday life. Indeed, from ancient mythology to our modern times drugs have been part of our cultural history. Understandings and practices of their uses have developed through cultural ideas and cultural-material conditions like traditions, rituals and routines. Today, the omnipresence of digital media in everyday life is massively changing and expanding such cultural and material conditions.

Digital media equip people with associations between drugs and an incredible abundance of images, ideas, facts, fiction, narratives, plots, soundtracks, characters, and much more, and thereby expanding their imaginable potentials for providing answers to biographical questions. People and potential drug use become connected in novel and labyrinthine ways through digital communities and arrangements of everyday life. And digital media are part of and transform the cultural-material practices in which activities and experiences of intoxication actually take place. In the book, all these details are extensively analyzed empirically based on qualitative data on the lives of a number of young, Danish people who were undergoing treatment for drug-related problems at the time of the research. An underlying premise of the entire work is that addiction may be seen as a more extreme expression of how the technological developments in our contemporary world more generally speaking magnify the contradictory implications of imagination for modern living.

Over the recent years, psychological research into the significance of the human capacity to imagine for how people deal with and live their lives has received growing attention. Yet, the complex involvement of imagination in actual living and consequently the theoretical cruxes this engenders continue to amaze and surprise research and researchers. This book also contributes to these theoretical ambitions with a substantial work on the concept of imagination. It primarily suggests that a critical discussion of how imagining is essentially a contradictory process in everyday life and how it is always grounded in the agency of material aspects, ranging anywhere from mundane artifacts over mediated content to advanced technologies, is ultimately what makes the scientific study of imagination relevant to understanding and intervening in the dilemmas and crises of modern life and society.

The book will primarily interest scholars of social psychology of everyday life, scholars working conceptually and empirically on imagination, scholars of social studies of media, materiality and technology, and researchers or practitioners working with addictions.

This book takes stories of learning relationships from popular films, television programmes and literature, and uses them as a catalyst for beginners and experts alike to reflect critically on their own mentoring and coaching practice. How realistic are our expectations of personal change, and to what extent is the flourishing self-help market responsible for this? What, if any, are the moral responsibilities of executive mentors and coaches, when it comes to global corporate wrongdoing? What should constitute ‘truth’ and ‘knowledge’ in a world in which ambiguity and doubt can appear more effective weapons of survival? What can Pinocchio, The Matrix, Star Wars or The Sopranos tell us about any of this?

Storytelling and metaphor have become of increasing interest in research into leadership and learning. Here is a book which takes the idea of storytelling as a powerful aid to learning and change, and uses it to help practitioners and educators challenge their ideas on mentoring in an entertaining way, by asking themselves some of the difficult questions that these popular stories raise.

Cultural practices and artifacts, in their multiple and varied forms, are grounded on values, which are so deeply internalized by people that usually remain in the background, as taken-for-granted guides for interpretations and decisions in everyday life. Shaping individual moral horizons is at the core of socialization processes, through which older generations aim to disseminate their culturally established values to the new ones, making use of suggestions mainly implicit in daily experiences and interactions.

Despite the strength of these processes of cultural canalization, people find particular ways of positioning and interpreting social suggestions, drawing singular life trajectories and developing themselves as unique beings. This is truthful also in case of highly institutionalized settings like the military, in which people play in many forms an agentic role in their own development, being prepared to perform their professional duties in very complex and challenging activity contexts.

This book is an invitation to dive deeper into human experiences lived in the military through qualitative and in-depth approaches, observing their affective qualities, the meanings they acquire and how they shape individuals’ identities, fostering the development and try-out of specific ethical and moral values.

The present work can contribute to research and professional practice in fields related to human development, social processes, education and people management in the military, as well as in other institutional contexts, especially by highlighting the affective, meaningful and moral-ethical dimensions of cultural experiences.

This volume understands itself as an invitation to follow a fundamental shift in perspective, away from the self-contained ‘I’ of Western conventions, and towards a relational self, where development and change are contingent on otherness. In the framework of ‘Dialogical Self Theory’ (Hermans & Hermans-Konopka, 2010; Hermans & Gieser, 2012), it is precisely the forms of interaction and exchange with others and with the world that determine the course of the self’s development.

The volume hence addresses dialogical processes in human interaction from a psychological perspective, bringing together previously separate theoretical traditions about the ‘self’ and about ‘dialogue’ within the innovative framework of Dialogical Self Theory. The book is devoted to developmental questions, and so broaches one of the more difficult and challenging topics for models of a pluralist self: the question of how the dynamics of multiplicity emerge and change over time. This question is explored by addressing ontogenetic questions, directed at the emergence of the dialogical self in early infancy, as well as microgenetic questions, addressed to later developmental dynamics in adulthood. Additionally, development and change in a range of culture-specific settings and practices is also examined, including the practices of mothering, of migration and cross-cultural assimilation, and of ‘doing psychotherapy’.

This book is a landmark in contemporary cultural psychology. Ernest Boesch’s synthesis of ideas is the first comprehensive theory of culture in psychology since Wilhelm Wundt’s Völkerpsychologie of the first decades of the twentieth century. Cultural psychology of today is an attempt to advance the program of research that was charted out by Wundt—yet at times we are carefully avoiding direct recognition of such continuity. While Wundt’s experimental psychology has been hailed as the root for contemporary scientific psychology, the other side of his contribution— ethnographic analysis of folk traditions and higher psychological functions— has been largely discredited as something disconnected from the scientific realm. As an example of “soft” science—lacking the “hardness” of experimentation—it has been considered to be an esoteric hobby of the founding father of contemporary psychology. Of course that focus is profoundly wrong—the opposition “soft” versus “hard” just does not fit as a metalevel organizer of any science. Yet the rhetoric discounting the descriptive side of Wundt’s psychology is merely an act of social guidance of what psychologists do—not a way of creating knowledge.

Trust has a constituent role in human societies. It has been treated as a scientific topic in many disciplines. Yet, despite the fact that trust and distrust come to life primarily in human communication and through language, it has seldom been analyzed from a communicative or linguistic perspective. This is the theme of this path-breaking volume.

This volume contains 12 chapters, plus introduction and epilogue by the editors. They have been authored by leading specialists on trust in language and communication, coming from many disciplines and from different cultures and countries. Most of the authors share a conceptual basis in dialogical theories.

This book is a follow-up volume to two previous volumes on trust within cultural psychology, Trust and Distrust (Marková & Gillespie, 2008) and Trust and Conflict (Marková & Gillespie, 2012). It will be of interest to anyone seriously interested in trust in societies, and in trust and distrust as displayed in communication and language.

Some old ideas can become very new. This is the case of the notion of creativity in psychology. Traditionally conceptualized in the narrow framework of the amazing things poets, composers, painters, and scientists do, creativity research had reached an impassé in its efforts to locate creativity within the confines of personality characteristics.

This is the time for change. The New Look at creativity that is rooted within the sociocultural tradition in psychology and elaborated in the present book finds creativity in each and every moment of our everyday lives. We are creative when we move around in the streets, dance tango, fool around with our self-images while shopping for clothes, or resist pre-given recipes while cooking dinners. We are being creative even in our bedrooms where we perform the difficult tasks of falling asleep or waking up through arrays of sleep inducers and alarm clocks, not to speak of the time we spend in the very state of sleep. All our actions at night—ranging from what we later call nightmares--or dreams—are arenas of creativity even if we may barely remember what we have done.

The present monograph by Lene Tanggaard constitutes a powerful multi-pronged exposition of the New Look at Creativity. Its starting point is in the move to pay attention to the processes of acting in everyday life—rather than start from the classification of products of human actions into classes of “creative” versus “non-creative.”

The ubiquitous presence of imaginative work points at its importance among the higher mental functions. This collective volume discusses both the social relevance of imagination, that cannot be reduced to an inter-individual feature, and the cultural-historical conditions of imagining. The authors develop different theoretical and empirical works in which imagining, planning, anticipating, remembering and acting are put in relation with crucial moments of human existence, as early as birth and even after death. The proposal of this volume emerged during a “kitchen seminar” session at the III International Seminar of Cultural Psychology in Salvador da Bahia (Brazil, 2017). The debate revolved around the imaginative capability of human beings and the possibilities to investigate this phenomenon in a new key. The awareness that an innovative theoretical and empirical contribution was needed to the understanding of imaginative phenomena in everyday life led to the proposal of the book From Dream to Action: Imagination and (Im)Possible Futures. The book aims to talk to different audiences: psychologists, sociologists, artists, teachers and healthcare professionals, addressing a variety of life experiences - such as imagining alternative futures when facing a terminal illness, an adoption, a transplant waiting list, or the choice to give up your musical instrument - mobilize multiple dimensions of human psyche, from the basic emotions to the more sophisticated higher mental functions. The constant effort is to understand the psychological and sociocultural dynamics of each event, and to contribute to the understanding of human imagining in the area of semiotic-cultural psychology, dialoguing with contributions from all the human and social sciences.

People have long made invidious distinctions between individuals (e.g., the clean and the unclean, good and evil, black and white, sacred and profane, etc.) (Smith, 1996), and these distinctions affect the degree to which individuals experience prejudice, unfair discrimination, and oppression in organizations and society as a whole. As a result, there has been an increased interest in research on these distinctions and unfair discrimination in organizations. Despite this research, most of the studies have focused on only a subset of minorities including African Americans, women, older workers, and people with physical disabilities (Dipboye & Colella, 2005). A number of other minorities have been forgotten or neglected by organizational researchers including people with neurological or psychological disabilities, veterans, Native Americans, people with a criminal history, and those who come from low socioeconomic or poor backgrounds. Thus, the primary purposes of this issue of Research in HRM is to foster research on “Forgotten Minorities” or those who are members of groups that have been excluded from organizations and neglected by organizational research. In view of these arguments, this issue (a) presents a brief review of the organizational research on the exclusion and repudiation of people who are forgotten minorities, (b) offers directions for future research on these outgroup members, and (c) considers key implications for practice that can facilitate the inclusion of forgotten minorities in organizations.

The second volume of Annals of Cultural Psychology is dedicated to the affective nature of human social relationships with the environment. The chapters here included explore the historical, theoretical and practical dimensions of the concept of affectivating originally introduced by one of us (Valsiner, 1999), as a potential tool of inquiry into the affective-sensitive dimension of psychological life within a cultural-psychological framework. The concept of affectivating involves two psychological dimensions often undervalued or even obliterated from contemporary cultural psychology, namely the affective involvement and the agentivity of people in their social encounters.

Through several examples --‘feeling-at-home’, silence spaces and rituals, memorials, music and poetry, among others-- we show individual’s concrete actions in mundane everyday life aim to give an affective personal sense to the world around. This focuses on the primary affective nature of human meaning construction that guides the person in one’s continuing feeling-into-the-world.

At a theoretical level the notion of affectivation challenges contemporary Cultural Psychology to rescue subjectivity, not only symbolism. Affectivation propounds a return to the long, but partially forgotten, organismic tradition, represented in the history by thinkers like Wilhelm Dilthey, Jakob von Uexküll and Kurt Goldstein. Cultural psychology has to bring semiosis back to the vital background of human experience.

Cultural Psychology studies how persons and social-cultural worlds mutually constitute one another. It is premised on the idea that culture is within us—in every moment in which we live our human lives, in the meaningful worlds we have created ourselves. In this perspective, encounters with others fundamentally transform the way we understand ourselves. With the increase of globalization and multicultural exchanges, cultural psychology becomes the psychological science for the 21st century. No longer can we ignore questions about how our cultural traditions, practices, beliefs, artifacts and other people constitute how we approach, understand, imagine and remember the world. The Niels Bohr Professorship Lectures in Cultural Psychology series aims to highlight and develop new ideas that advance our understanding of these issues.

This second volume in the series features an address by Tania Zittoun and Alex Gillespie, which is followed by commentary chapters and their response to them. In their lecture, Zittoun and Gillespie propose a model of the relation between mind and society, specifically the way in which individuals develop and gain agency through society. They theorise and demonstrate a two-way interaction: bodies moving through society accumulate differentiated experiences, which become integrated at the level of mind, enabling psychological movement between experiences, which in turn mediates how people move through society. The model is illustrated with a longitudinal analysis of diaries written by a woman leading up to and through the Second World War. Commentators further elaborate on the issues of (1) context and history, (2) experience, time and movement, and (3) methodologies for cultural psychology.

Maximising self-concept is recognised as a critical goal in itself and a means to facilitate other desirable outcomes in a diversity of settings. The desire to feel positively about oneself and the benefits of this feeling on choice, planning, persistence, and subsequent accomplishments transcend traditional disciplinary barriers and are central to goals in many social policy areas. ‘International Advances in Self Research’ monograph series publishes scholarly works that primarily focus on self-concept research and pertain to a broad array of self-related constructs and processes including self-esteem, self-efficacy, identity, motivation, anxiety, self-attributions, self-regulated learning, and meta-cognition. The research focus of the monograph series includes theory underlying these constructs, their measurement, their relation to each other and to other constructs, their enhancement and their application in research and practice. Chapters address a wide cross-section of: settings participants and research areas This series has a special interest in self-concept theory and research in settings characterised by diversity, such as special education, linguistic diversity, socioeconomic and cultural diversity.

Cultural psychology is currently in a phase of rapid growth. Innovating Genesis is an example of how the most central aspect of any science and its methodology, undergoes revolutionary transformation. Yet in this book we see careful continuity with the past of the discipline. The orientation to study processes of emergence was well prepared by the Ganzheitspsychologie tradition in early twentieth century. If we all have learned something about the world since then it is the inevitable quality of the whole that transcends its parts. Scientists have tried to grasp the general notion of such wholes, yet recurrently regressing to the easy illusion that one can reduce the complexities of the in vivo events to the scrutinizes in vitro. By looking to the history of how holistic ideas might help our present investigations, this book demonstrates how contemporary science has something to learn from its own history.

The editors of this volume have managed to bring together a creative international team of scholars whom they have guided to be on target of the content matter of the book—innovating the genesis of the methods for the study of psychological emergence.

This book presents an integrative perspective on home or Heimat showing that it is much more than the place we were born or where we live. This book brings fresh theoretical and empirical perspectives on what home is and can be from different viewpoints.

The chapters invite the reader to face challenging questions of what we learn about Heimat, when it is taken from us, threatened, left on purpose or when we set out on the journey to find one. The chapters are written by psychologists throughout, but are expanded in perspective by comments from the groups of people featured in the chapters, who are thus given their own voice. The book concludes with a suggestion on how to unite all the different perspectives within a general model rooted in cultural psychology.

All in all, the reader of this volume gains an access to the most complex phenomenon of human existence—that of home. Impossible to define in terms of the scientific lore of psychology, intuitively understandable in everyday life, and basis for deep desires if the feeling of home is lost.

This book will be a rewarding read for professionals and students from cultural psychology, cultural and psychological anthropology, sociology, and related disciplines, asking the question of what home is and how individuals can be supported in finding it.

This book proposes a hermeneutic, phenomenological, and sociocultural route, illuminating new methodological approaches to study humorous actions through Vygotsky's proposal, which has been little explored and worked on from the developmental psychology approach, specifically the rules management Higher psychological process. Reading this text clarifies how humor is a mechanism for development and, at the same time, it is a source of creativity and novelty that emerges from the intersubjective matrix to the Cultural Psychology of development and Semiotic cultural constructivism.

The concept of intimacy puts forth important challenges to contemporary cultural psychology. Intimacy refers to a felt experience of interiority that although is intuitively comprehensible, does not have rigorously defined limits. Intimacy can refer to a content, an object, a person, ownership, or even a part of one’s own body.

A potentially problematic issue for cultural psychology is that acknowledging intimacy seems to bound the Self to areas disjointed from the social sphere. In a globalized world, we witness a developmental process where social life becomes sectioned, where people are involved in an identity search by foregrounding certain social roles. With this backdrop in mind, people redefine and rebuild their intimacy spaces and the ways they roam from these to the public and collective realm.

Exploring the current historical situation leads us to consider intimacy as culture in the making; certainly, in the way it manifests itself, but particularly in how we approach and understand it. The lived (experienced) dimension of intimacy becomes truly important, since it casts new light on what we mean by intimacy in different spheres of the self’s life, as well as life with others.

"How can psychology professors in the USA and other nations make their courses more international?" This question is addressed in this indispensable new sourcebook, co-authored by 73 contributors and editors from 21 countries.

In recent decades psychology has evolved from an American-dominated discipline to a much more global discipline. Preliminary estimates by Zoma and Gielen (2015) suggest that approximately 76%-78% of the world’s one million or so psychologists reside outside the U.S. However, most textbooks in the field continue to rely predominantly on research conducted in North America and Europe. Our book is intended to introduce psychology instructors to a variety of broad perspectives as well as specific suggestions that can support their efforts to internationalize their course offerings at both the undergraduate and graduate levels. In this way they can prepare their students to become more culturally sensitive and function more effectively as citizens and psychologists in the evolving globalized world. To achieve these ambitious goals the editors have assembled an international group of 73 distinguished contributors who, taken together, have taught and conducted research in all regions of the world.

The chapters in the book include both core areas of psychology and subdisciplines that represent rapidly expanding and internationally important areas such as cross-cultural psychology and the psychology of gender. The chapters cover key topics and areas included in the course offerings of psychology departments both in the United States and in other countries. In addition to a discussion of international perspectives relevant to a given area, all chapters include an annotated bibliography of pertinent books, articles, web-related materials, films, videos, and so on. Based on this information, both highly experienced and less experienced psychology instructors can add globally and culturally oriented dimensions to their respective courses. This is important because universities, departments, and accrediting agencies increasingly put pressure on instructors to broaden and internationalize their courses.

William Stern was an important German psychologist. What remains rather preserved from his scientific heritage is centered around the notion of intelligence and differential psychology. Yet, Stern’s scientific work is more complex than that. For instance, William Stern has laid the groundwork for a philosophical system – called critical personology – being a groundwork for the psychological sciences in general.

This book tries to restore and expand Stern’s philosophical ideas of critical personology while showing pathways how to apply this expansion to applied fields of psychology such as career counselling, psychological mediation, psychotherapy, personnel selection among many other domains of psychology. With the present book, critical personology can become a theoretical, methodological and interventional tool with which psychologists of various disciplines might work in their related fields.

As such, the book will be rewarding for multiple audiences. First, scholars of the history of psychology might use the insights of the book in order to acknowledge Stern’s forgotten theories such as about Stern’s notion of the unconscious. Second, psychologists being interested in a wholistic approach towards psychology will gain useful knowledge and tools how to better understand the complexity and dynamic of the person (especially the person’s needs, drives, motives and so forth). Third, applied psychologists can use the various frameworks in order to diversify their methodological and interventional knowledge and help people to better understand themselves as well as to adjust to their environments.

This installment in the series "Adolescence and Education", edited by Tim Urdan and Frank Pajares, focuses on International Perspectives of Adolescence.

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.

YIS has been thought as an annual series of volumes collecting contributes aimed at developing the integration of idiographic and nomothetic approaches in psychological and more in general social science. At the beginning, 3 years ago, we got an agreement with an Italian publisher (FGP - Firera Publishing Group) interested in the scientific project and therefore willing to help the start up of this scientific enterprise. After publishing the first volume (YIS 2008- yet published in 2009 - the Volume is freely available on the FPG's website) we have had many positive feedbacks and signals of interests, as well as several submissions, from many parts of the world . This has provided an acceleration of the following issues - Above all, this led us to realize that it was time to give an editorial collocation to YIS that can be more consistent with the interest it has raised and that can ulteriorly raise. FPG does not put constraint on this perspective, being aware and agreed of the necessity of a worldwide context for the YIS's development. Moreover, there are no constraints in the possibility of going on in using the label "YIS", starting from Volume 4 The Series addresses a quite large potential public - students and researchers interested to theoretical and methodological development of psychology and, more in general, social science. Persons engaged with qualitative, dynamic informed models of analysis will find YIS a precious tool as well as a context enabling to develop a worlwide network of practices and cultures of research. The first three volumes' TOC witness how large and constantly increasing is the interest around the scientific project.

Memory and learning are seen as mental phenomena and generally studied as brain processes, for example, within various branches of psychology and neuroscience. This book represents a rather different tack, based on sociocultural theory, cultural psychology and dialogism. Authors from many different disciplines and countries study memory and learning as practices adopted by people in different interactional and institutional contexts. Studies range from detailed analyses of situated activities to broad sociohistorical studies of cultural phenomena and collective memories such as national narratives and physical symbols for commemorating events and traditions. By focusing on how people engage in remembering and learning, this book provides a necessary complement to currently popular neuroscientific approaches.

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.

This book brings pragmatic theory and praxis into dialogue with contemporary psychodynamic ideas, practitioners, and clinical issues. Generally considered as a historical footnote to psychoanalysis, the chapters in this volume demonstrate pragmatism’s continued relevance for contemporary thought. Not only does pragmatism share many of the values and sensibilities of contemporary psychodynamics, its rich philosophical and theoretical emphasis on active meaning making and agentic being in the world complements and extends current thinking about the social nature of self and mind, how we occupy space in the world, non-linear development, and processes of communication.

Researchers with the Self-concept Enhancement and Learning Facilitation Research (SELF) Centre, U. of Western Sydney, introduce theoretical issues and research on the relationship of positive/self-handicapping self-concept to success/ failure in academic and other settings.

The volume revolves around the theme ‘inclusive oppositions’ in social sciences that address the issue of making of distinctions and create artificial dichotomies and dualistic view of society. It is set against the currents of systematic reduction of anthropodiversity and psychodiversity, which appears as a pathology of the current neo-liberalist and colonialist model of development. The volume is an attempt to overcome the colonial tendencies and forces to ‘standardize’ and ‘homogenize’ various categories and institutions in society by establishing structural relationality and intersectionality between the parts of the whole ecosystem where in the human and non-human intersect and interact.

The volume brings together a unique collaboration in the field of Cultural Psychology and offers the intellectual tools to grasp how a syncretic understanding of Identity and Culture unfolds, particularly in the key domain of gender. The chapters and commentaries uncover cultural dynamics and identity formation from a specific location, the region of Kerala in south-western India. The chapters and commentaries in this volume illustrates that Kerala is a cultural micro-cosmos, in which gender, identity, religion, ethnicity, caste, global market and tradition intersect to create complex and multiple subjects that do not fit in binary categorizations.

The compiled volume will be of great value to scholars, researchers and academicians in Social Sciences, particularly Cultural Psychology, Social Psychology, Sociology, Social Work, Political Science, Philosophy, Anthropology and Economics.

No Country For Black Men captures the plight and possibilities of what it means to be Black and male in the United States past and present. Through storytelling and sociological data analysis, the author weaves a powerful story about challenges and opportunities faced by Black males of all ages today. From mental health parity to disproportionality and myths about Black male sexuality, this body of work is bent on naming the persistent and historical challenges Black men are confronted with throughout their development. Each chapter is anchored in and punctuated by the author's personal experiences as an immigrant, a father, a husband and a scholar-practitioner. The mission of No Country For Black Men is to add to the scholarship and conversation among educators, mental health providers, religious leaders, and other service providers about ways to improve the academic, economic and health outcome for Black males in the United States.

This book brings to social scientists a new look at how human beings are striving towards understanding others-- and through that effort--making sense of themselves. It brings together researchers from all over the World who have suggested a set of new approaches to the basic research issue of how human beings are social beings, while being unique in their personal ways of being. Issues of social representation, communication, dialogical self, and human subjectivity are represented in this book. The book contributes to the contemporary epistemological and ethical debate about the question of otherness, and would be of interest to educationalists, sociologists, psychologists, and anthropologists. It is an invitation to the wide readership to join in this collective effort towards the construction of new conceptions about myselfothers relationships that allow for innovative understanding of various social practices and problem solving in society.

The book provides a new look at the everyday relationship between psychological processes and extraordinary aspects of ordinary phenomena. Why should we deal with ordinary things? People’s life is made of everyday practical, taken-for-granted things, such as driving a car, using money, listening music, etc. When you drive from home to workplace, you are migrating between contexts. Is this an empty space you are crossing, or the time you spend into the car is something meaningful?

In psychological terms, things have, at least, three levels of existence, a material, a symbolic and an affective one. The underlying idea is that the symbolic elaboration of everyday things is characterized by the transcendence of the particular object-sign, leading to the creation of more and more complex sign fields. These fields expand according to an inclusive logic up to dialogically and dialectically incorporate opposites (i.e. clean/dirty, transparent/opaque, hide/ show, join/divide, slow/fast, etc.). Even the meaning of “ordinary” and “extraordinary” follow such an inclusive logic: if you give a positive value to ordinary, extraordinary is rule-breaking; otherwise, if ordinary means trivial, extraordinary assumes a positive value. Besides, things are cultural artifacts mediating the experience of the world, the psychological processes and the construction of mind. Reflecting upon “things” is thus a more meaningful pathway to understand Psyche.

Venturing out of the laboratory into the wild of natural settings, it becomes untenable to locate memory strictly in the head. Instead, memory appears as a materially extended and socially distributed process, embedded within culture and history. This book explores the complex relations between practices of remembering and the settings in which they are enacted. It advances a novel set of concepts developed from ecological, cognitive, cultural and narrative currents in psychology and further afield to analyze (1) trajectories of autobiographical remembering, (2) the relation between individual and collective memory, (3) memory and cultural transmission, as well as (4) various methodological techniques to investigate memory in the wild.

What sparks a psychologist’s interest in a certain phenomenon? Is it a symptom, a syndrome, a treatment, the usual, the exceptional, the group, the individual? An epistemologist, for example, focuses on the group and delivers group results. The clinician has to focus on the patient, although the patient may be perceived as one of a group (e.g., all patients with the same disease). The patient usually focuses on the clinician, but can take other opinions into account; especially, when the clinician is not considered to be the only authority. These dynamics – observable in therapy as well as in research – are critically reflected in this book, not only highlighting differences, but also commonalities individuals share: They all filter information and concentrate on certain aspects according to their socialization. They all have different expectations and can, yet, all deal with the same objective. Communication and building relationships seem to be vital – this book aims to support this quest by moving from the universal to the particular.

The volume represents the continuing of a the Yearbook of Idiographic Science project, born in 2009 and developed through an annual series of volumes collecting contributes aimed at developing the integration of idiographic and nomothetic approaches in psychology and more in general social science.

This year's YIS project received many positive feedbacks and signals of interest, as well as several submissions, from many parts of the world. This fifth volume directs attention to relevant and actual psycho-social phenomena as the development of identity in terms of self identity, social identity and local.

identity

The volume is directed to students, researchers and clinicians, interested in deepenig theoretical and methodological issues and improve clinical practices and research cultures.

This book offers a new approach to imagination which brings its emotional, social, cultural, contextual and existential characteristics to the fore. Fantasy and imagination are understood as the human capacity to distance oneself from the here-and-now situation in order to return to it with new possibilities. To do this we use social-cultural means (e.g. language, stories, art, images, etc.) to conceive of imaginary scenarios, some of which may become real.

Imagination is involved in every situation of our lives, though to different degrees. Sometimes this process can lead to concrete products (e.g., artistic works) that can be picked up and used by others for the purposes of their imagining. Imagination is not seen here as an isolated cognitive faculty but as the means by which people anticipate and constructively move towards an indeterminate future. It is in this process of living forward with the help of imagination that novelty appears and social change becomes possible.

This book offers a conceptual history of imagination, an array of theoretical approaches, imagination’s use in psychologist’s thinking and a number of new research areas. Its aim is to offer a re-enchantment of the concept of imagination and the discipline of psychology more generally.

Ivan P. Pavlov was a pioneering Russian physiologist whose influence on Russian psychology was politically emphasized in 1930s to 1950s. He was a brilliant experimenter who received 1904 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine for his work on the digestive system. Less is known about his epistemology of generalization that made it possible to study one individual for the sake of obtaining generalized knowledge. In this volume we analyze the major contributions of Pavlov from the standpoint of idiographic science, and demonstrate how generalizations in science are possible from single specimens.

This book, the first of a groundbreaking series, provides a solid theoretical and empirical grounding from the psychology of religion and spirituality to the emerging field of workplace spirituality. Leading researchers in the psychology of religion have contributed up-to-date reviews within their areas of expertise to help guide the emergence of this exciting new discipline.

Each chapter is written with the workplace researcher in mind. Not only is the relevant literature from the psychology of religion reviewed, but it is also made relevant to the workplace setting. The religious and spiritual aspects of such topics as meaning making, emotional resilience, sense of calling, coping with stress, occupational health and well-being, and leadership, among others are discussed within the context of work life. Surely researchers interested in workplace spirituality will keep this book, as well as others in the series, within arm’s reach for years to come.

This book is long awaited within the contemporarily creative field of cultural psychologies. It is a theoretical synthesis that is at the level of innovations that Sigmund Freud, James Mark Baldwin, William Stern, Kurt Lewin, Jean Piaget, Lev Vygotsky and Jan Smedslund have brought into psychology over the past century. Here we can observe a creative solution to integrating cultural psychology with the rich traditions of psychodynamic perspectives, without repeating the conceptual impasses in which many psychoanalytic perspectives have become caught.

This book presents procedures and research techniques that are based on critical perspectives of Psychology and Education. The content is characterized by innovations on the relationship between the researcher and the investigated context, and it problematizes different perspectives and approaches to the psychological phenomenon proposing new understandings of the subject, the world, the social and the field of investigation itself as a permanent dialectical movement. The book reports to Marxist-based perspectives - especially to Vygotsky's ideas and concepts. Therefore, it assumes the comprehension that in order to understand the phenomenon in its historical dimension it is necessary to put it into motion seeking to access the genesis of the manifestations evidenced at the moment of the investigation. That is, the historicity that characterizes the process of constitution of the human psyche can only be apprehended in its movement, thus, what matters is the process and not the product of its development. Nevertheless, apprehending phenomena in movement is a challenge for researchers interested in human processes within the scope of relationships or practices of professionals and/or subjects of various scenarios, which leads to the need to problematize the different moments of research and their dimension in the theoretical and practical fields. Which methodological techniques or procedures allow the apprehension of the meaning movement produced by the subjects in the investigated scenarios? To what extent does dialectical materialism derived from Marxism support the apprehension and analysis of research information of this nature? What other theoretical-methodological perspectives, related to Cultural-Historical Psychology, offer subsidies to these investigations? The theoretical perspectives based on the Social and Cultural analysis focus on the understandings of collective contexts precisely because of the subject view constituted in the inter-subjective relations that it undertakes - which adds even more complexity to the investigative processes. From this perspective, both the subject and other participants transform themselves during the investigation, such transformation needs to be permanently reflected and included in the research objectives and purposes, in order to follow the movement of the meanings in the expressed phenomenon.

Reflexivity is a category that is too appealing not to arouse interest. It is a concept largely diffused in several psychological domains, as well as associated with epistemological, theoretical, methodological and practical discussions. At the same time, it is a very polysemic notion, understood and used in many different ways.

If one approaches the notion and tries to identify the semantic boundaries of its usage, the seeming solidity of the term fades away, and a rather liquid semantic field emerges – a field where several interpretations coexist, being contingent to the context of the discussion in which they are implemented. This is the reason that makes the notion of reflexivity a prototypical example of the difficulties encountered by Psychology – and more in general social sciences –in the effort to define their own language. The term “reflexivity” - like many others the language of Psychology is full of – is used in daily life and thus its semantics is shaped by the pragmatic, contingent functions it serves in such communicational circumstances. The apparent – from afar - clearness of the concept does not concern its conceptual, epistemic status, but the capacity of the sign to contribute efficaciously to mediate and regulate the exchange.

The theoretical elaboration of the notion of reflexivity can be seen as one of the ways of performing the challenging task of developing an intentional language for Psychology. By working on such a notion one can realize that common sense lies at the core of psychological science and what it means to separate the former from the latter, so as to pursue the foundational task of developing Psychology as a theory-driven science.

“Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others” once remarked Winston Churchill. In this day and age this quotation resonates more than ever. This book explores democracy from the perspective of social and cultural psychology, highlighting the importance of the everyday basis of democratic practices. This approach takes us beyond the simple understanding of democracy in its institutional guise of free elections and public accountability, and towards a focus on group dynamics and personal characteristics of the democratic citizen, including their mentalities, habits and ways of relating to others. The book features discussions of the two-way street between democracy and dictatorship; conflicts within protests, ideology and public debate; and the psychological profile of a democratic citizen and its critique. While acknowledging the limitations of today’s democratic systems, this volume aims to re-invigorate democracy by bringing psychology to the table of current debates on social change and citizenship.

Increasingly, the importance of sleep is recognized as being on a par with diet and exercise as a key to good health and wellbeing; adequate, restful sleep is key to a healthy lifestyle. Sleep deprivation is associated with poor physical and mental health, including obesity, metabolic disturbances such as diabetes, inflammation, clinical depression, and cognitive impairments. In our youth, inadequate sleep impairs academic performance, is associated with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder-type symptoms and behaviors, and may exacerbate aggressive, disruptive behavior.

Youth with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) experience sleep disturbances at rates much higher than their peers in the general population, particularly insomnia. The resultant sleep deprivation in youth with ASD is associated with daytime behavior problems and parental stress. Fortunately, researchers and clinicians now recognize that sleep problems and ASD are closely linked. Since 2000, the number of research studies regarding this link has increased about 20-fold, and we have become aware that poor sleep can be a lifespan issue for individuals with ASD. Given this explosion in research, it is time for a textbook that synthesizes current knowledge, and is accessible to clinicians, researchers, educators, and administrators alike. This book fills that gap.

Jakob von Uexkull founded Umwelt research with a clear idea – that humans are not qualitatively different than other species. Umwelt, literally “outer-world”, is the study of the organism in relation to the world around it, as well as the meaning that the world holds for that organism. Thus the world is a truly subjective place.

While von Uexkull’s theory has entered into the social sciences via semiotics, and biology via ethology, the authors of these chapters go between and beyond these disciplines to examine everything from cells to spiders to humans and culture. The authors adopt the framework of Umwelt theory to examine unique aspects of the natural world by relating the inner world of the subject and the objects to which that organism attends.

Research on the Self relates to various phenomena including self-esteem, self-concept, self-verification, self-awareness, identity, self-efficacy, passion, self-determination, goals etc. that are predictive of optimal functioning and well-being. Such a research endeavor is consistent with the positive psychology movement focusing on the scientific study of what makes people psychologically healthy, happy, and satisfied in their lives, as well as on their strengths and virtues. The positive psychology movement cultivates a sensible approach to optimal human functioning and well-being in various life contexts. Chapters in this volume will illustrate some of the best of the research on the interplay between the self and positive psychology, to show the potential of this research for transforming our societies.

SELF – Driving Positive Psychology and Well-being thus provides a unique insight into self and its fundamental role for well-being. This volume is intended to develop both theoretical and methodological ideas and to present empirical evidence of various phenomenon important for well -being. The scope of the volume is thus very broad, and provides a framework for the development of the chapter as authors see most appropriate.

The introduction of the psychological construct of self-efficacy is widely acknowledged as one of the most important developments in the history of psychology. Today, it is simply not possible to explain phenomena such as human motivation, learning, self-regulation, and accomplishment without discussing the role played by self-efficacy beliefs. In this, the fifth volume of our series on adolescence and education, we focus on the self-efficacy beliefs of adolescents. We are proud and fortunate to be able to bring together the most prominent voices in the study of self-efficacy, including that of the Father of Social Cognitive Theory and of self-efficacy, Professor Albert Bandura. It is our hope, and our expectation, that this volume will become required reading for all students and scholars in the areas of adolescence and of motivation and, of course, for all who play a pivotal role in the education and care of youth.

This book offers twelve chapters organized into three major sections that address occupational stress and quality of working life. The authors are an internationally renowned team of scholar-research-practitioners who are grounded in applied science and clinical practice. Section 1 includes five chapters that address the organizational and individual costs of occupational stress. The costs are humanitarian and economic; both human suffering and financial burdens are important. Section 2 includes three chapters that focus on ways to mitigate the negative effects of occupational stress.

We must help those who are suffering but we must do more by preventing distress where we can and building on positive, strength factors where possible. Section 3 includes four chapters that examine and expand our understanding of work life quality. Work life quality is so important because of the effects it has on workers and leaders, as well as the spillover impact into families and communities.

These twelve chapters, highlight both core knowledge and new developments within the rapidly growing field of research on stress and the quality of working life. We believe this information can help to raise awareness of the causes and costs of occupational stress and poor quality of working life. Further, this should provide a challenge, some incentive, and renewed insight for organizations in Brazil and elsewhere to begin thinking about and acting in ways that lead to a less stressful environment for their workforce.

Researcher Race: Social Constructions in the Research Process is designed to expose the role of researcher race in social science research. This book highlights the interaction of researcher and participant race in shaping data that is collected. Researcher Race makes the researcher’s position visible via interview excerpts from a qualitative study in order to deconstruct researcher race effects in research. The book includes passages from a qualitative research study with a sample of 20 Black-identified and 20 White-identified participants, as well as a Black researcher and a White researcher. Selections of data from across different researcher-participant racial dyads illustrate how issues of researcher race can arise in research settings.

Researcher Race presents the history of racial bias and maltreatment in research. A review of cultural competency theory as it pertains to research is discussed. An overview of narrative research methodology that is used in this study is also provided. Chapters focused on the research data include an exploration of participants’ preferences for researcher race; the significance of off-script researcher comments during an interview; and the narratives of traumatic racism among Black and White participants. In the concluding chapter, the book expands conversations about researcher race to consider intersecting aspects of identity in researcher-participant interactions, as well as directions for future research and training.

This book can serve as a guide for researchers, as well as students of research, culture, and diversity. Researcher Race: Social Constructions in the Research Process is a valuable tool for researchers interested in expanding awareness of race, oppression, and methodology.

This book was developed for the 2005 International Stress Management Association Conference in Brazil. The original book was recently published in Portuguese, but because of the popularity of the topics and the world-renowned stress scholars who contributed chapters, we are very pleased to have the opportunity to publish this work in English. A book on the subject is intended to be an additional tool containing information on stress and ways of dealing with pressures and demands, because we know that the level of stress will continue to increase. We believe that only through information—and here you will be able to find the experience and opinion of some of the greatest and best professionals of the world in this field—people will manage to live better and more balanced lives. This is what ISMA-BR wishes and hopes for. Have a good reading. This volume provides a series of comprehensive summaries of what is now a fast-growing literature aimed at understanding the causes, effects, and prevention of stress in the workplace. It begins with three chapters on different sources of stress at work, ranging from organizational factors to attributes of workers themselves.

Research on the self relates to various phenomena including self-esteem, self-concept, self-verification, self-awareness, identity, self-efficacy, passion, self-determination, and goals. Moreover, research on self is multidisciplinary and of interest to a broad range of areas, such as education, economics, (social) psychology, neuro sciences, motivation, physical activity and behavior sciences, philosophy, and learning sciences. Chapters in this volume will illustrate some of the best of the research within these disciplines examining different aspects of self from various perspectives. A feature of this volume is that we will explore not only positive aspects of high perceived levels of self-determination and competence or self-concept on achievement, motivation and wellbeing, but also the dark side of an uncertain and negative self on identity and wellbeing. We learn from this that the self is a dynamic and powerful, yet fragile and highly amenable construct that needs self-care and constant reassurance.

SELF – A Multidisciplinary Concept thus highlights the broad application of self-research and its diversity. This volume is intended to develop both theoretical and methodological ideas and to present empirical evidence of various disciplines and applications dealing with self. The scope of this seventh volume of the International Advances in Self Research series, started in 2000 by Herbert W. Marsh, Dennis M. McInerney, and Rhonda G. Craven, is thus very broad. Keeping within the tradition of the series, this volume will highlight the applicability of a multitude of empirical approaches and methods to self-research. We also aimed to maintain a balance between discussing theoretical research in SELF and deriving implications for effective practice. This volume thus includes chapters covering self-related topics within an educational, social, emotional, psychological, physiological, managerial, and health context.

This volume deals with a wealth of issues related to self, from the overarching theoretical perspective of Bandura and his careful and thorough analysis of the agentic self, highlighting the complexities of our multiple selves acting in an integrated, holistic, and dynamic fashion, to the engaging and novel treatment of self concept as a rope by John Hattie. From many of the chapters we see the utility value of the social cognitive theory and self-determination theory frameworks for interpreting self-processes and how these processes might drive engagement in learning. In particular we see how autonomy support, self-regulation, self-efficacy, and self-regulation are part and parcel of self-processes intimately involved as individuals work out their futures and possible selves. Entwined with these processes are the development of identity, resilience, and a sense of well-being. The BFLPE and bullying chapters provide two examples of self-processes in operation in the school context.

What can we take from this? Self-processes are complex, differentiated,and yet coordinated. By focusing on the agentic self we consider the whole person-picture as a rich, integrated, and dynamic tapestry and by focusing on differentiated self elements such as self-regulation, self-determination, self-concept, and self-efficacy, we are able to examine, in more detail, some of the individual threads of the tapestry and the roles they play in the integrated self. Overall, we learn that self-processes are dynamic and are fundamental to enabling human potential.

The first volume of the Yearbook of Idiographic Science (YIS) was published on 2009. In a nutshell, the idea at the grounds of the YIS project is that idiography and nomothetic are not juxtaposed logics and that the science cannot but be both nomothetic - in the aim - and idiographic - in the modes. About thirteen years later, the sense and the direction of the YIS project envisaged in the first volume’s introduction - together with the difficulties to pursue it - are still alive and valid. Thus, to both celebrate the milestone of the tenth issue and to plan the future, we asked to some colleagues, almost all contributors of previous volumes, to discuss what idiographic science means today, and what can mean tomorrow.

The works they have generously provided are very instructive - each of them pictures a peculiar perspective on idiography that enables to recognize old and new challenges, thus paving the way to innovative ideas and directions.

This monograph reviews cognitive and neuroscience studies of the relations between timing of both neural and behavioral events and human experience. The historical roots of these discussions are traced to the beginning of modern psychology. In the beginning of experimental psychology in Leibzig, Wundt worked on how elements of sensation relate to consciousness. In later development of psychology, the timing of conscious and unconscious processing of information, the timing of events in learning including language learning, mental speed and intelligence, and the speed of cognition vis-à-vis emotion are all crucial questions.

Systematic consideration of neural times is complementary to conventional neuroscience research, such as the Blue Brain Project focusing on neural structure. The discussion of neural times in the literature tends to be fragmented, incidental to whatever is the subject matter. This book attempts to treat neural times in the whole range of basic psychological processes more systematically, and shows how they are germane to the understanding of many cognitive and behavioral phenomena. Neural times are related to the evolutionary development of the brain and the human experience. A crucial dynamic in the interaction of evolutionarily older and newer regions of the brain depends on timing. The interaction of the generally faster unconscious processes, including emotions, and more deliberate processes results in greater variation of experiences and behaviors which is central to free will and adaptive for humankind as a whole.

This monograph is intended for senior undergraduates, graduate students, and professionals interested in an in-depth look at the role of timing of neural and behavioral processes in affecting human experience. It is not a textbook as such. It is a complementary resource for students of cognitive psychology, learning, and evolutionary psychology.

Putting subjectivity back in psychology and in social sciences is the aim of this volume. Subjectivity is a core psychological dimension but frequently forgotten. Without a full understanding of the uniqueness of each human life our understanding of psychological life fails to reach its aim. This book explores precisely the field of subjectivity, offering the reader different and innovative views on this challenging theme. This book is an asset for all those interested in understanding how the mind operates as a subjectifying process and how this subjectifying mind is simultaneously the product and the content of feeling an unique and unrepeatable subjective life.

By bringing together renowned and emergent experts in the field, it provides a fresh new look on the human mind. The reader will find thought-provoking and challenging contributions of 26 different scholars, from 10 countries. It covers a wide range of perspectives and approaches, such as dialogical perspectives, cultural psychology approaches, developmental psychology, feminist perspectives, semiotics, and anthropology.

This volume will be very much recommended for all sorts of scholars and students in social and human sciences interested in the human mind and in subjectivity. It will be adequate for different levels of teaching, from undergraduate to master courses. It also meant to be understood for all readers interested in the topic.

Theory Driving Research: New wave perspectives on self-processes and human development provides a unique insight into self-processes from varied theoretical perspectives. The chapters in this volume develop avant-garde theoretical ideas to drive future, cutting-edge, empirical research and together, in one collected volume, make a valuable contribution to scholarly literature on self-processes. Among the themes covered are resurrecting the “I-self”, a re-look at the dichotomy between the I-self, and the Me-self based on James's analysis, the actualization of human potential, naturalizing and contextualizing the self, hypo-egoic states, personal proficiency networks, competition and performance relationships, achievement motivations, passion and optimal functioning in society, competence and self-worth threat, new interpretations of expectancy-value research, methodological advances in BFLPE research and multilevel models of student achievement motivation. This monograph, the fourth in the International Advances in Self Research monograph series, provides wealth of information on new theorizing and provides a platform for generating the next wave of research designed to understand the fundamental role self-processes play in human development.

Cultural psychology explores the mutual constitution of persons-minds and socialcultural worlds. It aims to be both transdisciplinary and international in its approach, and to develop theoretical models that remain faithful to people’s lived experiences.

This volume further advances these objectives through an exploration of core concepts (especially, normativity, liminality, and resistance), cultural psychology’s foundations in philosophy, and the translation of theory into a methodology for investigating distinctly human ways of relating to the world.

The Forum that led to this volume was the thirteenth in an on-going annual series sponsored by the Applied Psychology Center (APC) at Kent State University. The resources and programs of the APC allowed for the prominent clinicians and scholars to attend the meeting and interact informally in the picturesque and relaxing atmosphere of the Inn at Honey Run in the heart of the Amish area of Northeast Ohio. This environment nurtured interaction among the participants for three days and permitted all to leave the Forum with ideas well beyond those presented in the text. We are grateful to the APC for facilitating this endeavor. The editors would especially like to acknowledge the on-going contribution of Kathy Floody, without whose help neither the Forum nor this book would exist. Kathy arranged for every detail of the Forum, from transportation plans, rooms, food, and drink, to scheduling of papers, discussions, and tours of the local area. Kathy compulsively reviewed all chapters for references, errors, and oversights and maintained a positive disposition and encouraging demeanor throughout the process. The success of the Forum was as much Kathy’s doing, as it was the responsibility of the scholars who participated.

The dynamics of trust and distrust are central to understanding modern society. These dynamics are evident at all levels of society, from the child’s relation to caregivers to the individual’s relation to the state, and they span from taken for granted trusting relationships to highly reflective and negotiated contractual interactions. The collection of papers in this book questions the diverse ways in which the concept of trust has been previously used, and advances a coherent theorisation of the socio-cultural dynamics of trust and distrust. In this volume, trust and distrust are analysed in relation to lay knowledge and situated in historical, cultural and interactional contexts.

The contexts analysed include witch-hunting during the Reformation, China before and after the move to capitalism, building close personal relationships in South Korea, the representation of political corruption in Brazil, tourists bargaining for souvenirs in the Himalaya, disclosing being HIV+ in India, the historical shaping of trust in Portugal, and the role of trust and distrust in the economic development of the Baltic States. Throughout these analyses, and in associated commentaries and theoretical chapters, the focus is upon the cultural and social constitution of trust and distrust.

What drives someone to commit the unthinkable? Paul E. Mullen, one of the world’s pre-eminent forensic psychiatrists, examines the complex workings of the lone multiple murderer – a spectre haunting modern societies.

With unflinching clarity, Mullen draws on his decades assessing massacre perpetrators first-hand, bringing readers into a dark landscape populated both by killers who attained the ugly fame they had sought as well as lesser-known but equally chilling cases.

Mullen illuminates the troubling patterns that unite these murderers, such as obsessive rage; personal grievance; fascination with weapons; and yearning for infamy. Their actions are ultimately rooted in their desire for personal destruction, often culminating in suicide. He also considers the impact of media sensationalism on the killers’ grandiose fantasies, often inspiring copycat violence, and proposes steps toward better threat assessment and identification of warning signs.

Challenging myths around madness and violence, Mullen reveals the unsettling truth: lone mass killers are not incomprehensible monsters, but deeply disturbed people shaped by knowable forces that, when properly understood, can be countered effectively.

This is an edited (introduced and annotated) book by the Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky who belongs to the most well-known social scientists of the previous century and whose body of writings still serves as a source of inspiration for present-day researchers in psychology, education, linguistics, and so on. The book had not been translated into any language and was virtually unknown to the scientific community, because it is extremely hard to find a copy of the original. The book will cause excitement among those familiar with Vygotsky’s writings, because it deals with an aspect of his life and work that is little known, notably his involvement with child studies or, as it is also known, pedology (paidology, paedology). Child studies was a new discipline launched by the American G. Stanley Hall which aimed to offer a comprehensive study of the child including psychological, educational, medical, and social aspects. The discipline enjoyed a brief popularity in the US and Europe until WW 1 and continued its existence in the USSR until 1936 when it was forbidden. The book gives a unique insight into Russian and Soviet pedology and will be interesting to anyone interested in developmental and general psychology, education, and the social history of these disciplines. As the book requires virtually no previous knowledge it can be read with profit by both undergraduate and graduate students and professors. An additional asset for those specifically interested in Vygotsky’s theorizing is that it shows a whole new light on the social-historical and political background of his ideas. The book is introduced by an essay that explains the historical embeddedness of Vygotsky’s ideas and the footnotes and list of brief biographies of key figures make it particularly easy to understand the book’s content and context.