Psychology

This book explores the interdisciplinary pathways that leading environmental psychologists have taken to become educators, researchers, consultants, and professionals in this highly applied and growing field. Environmental psychology examines the transactions between people and the built and natural settings in which they inhabit. Despite this broad scope, few direct avenues to careers in environmental psychology exist, and students must forge varied and individualized routes to becoming scholars and practitioners in this important area of study.
The aim of the book is to serve as an inspiring supplemental resource for students who wish to know more about how leading thinkers established themselves as environmental psychologists. In each chapter, the author describes their inspirations, decisions about undergraduate and graduate courses, particular schools, and professional connections that have made a difference to their careers in environmental psychology. Many undergraduate students are disappointed with the lack of a clear path to becoming an environmental psychologist. A strong need exists for a resource like this book for students (and for others who may be looking to add to their careers) to understand how to gain experience and credentials in the field in different ways. Readers may also be bolstered in their attitude about choosing a niche field like environmental psychology and decide to stick with it if they read the success stories published in this book by leading thinkers who have taken varied and atypical approaches to becoming a professional environmental psychologist.
The book’s chapters are organized in a manner that shows readers how one may come from many different backgrounds and integrate environmental psychology into their education or professional realm. Part I contains chapters in which authors write about how they approached environmental psychology from architecture, urban planning, and geography, while Part II includes chapters from authors who found environmental psychology via cognitive psychology, clinical practice, and neuroscience. Part III has chapters from authors writing from the health sciences and social ecology, while Part IV contains chapters by authors inspired to become environmental psychologists through a general appreciation of nature and eco-conscious living in a variety of settings. Those who find a way to make environmental psychology part of their career are often very passionate individuals who are keen to describe their pathway to doing what they love with the hope that others will follow. This book is likely to advance that outcome

Carsten C. Schermuly explores why people grant power to a few sometime authoritarian leaders and how power psychologically transforms those who hold it. Drawing on research, he shows how power can distort judgement, empathy and behaviour, and argues for understanding its mechanisms to use it more responsibly through better structures, selection and psychological empowerment.

Carsten C. Schermuly explores why people grant power to a few sometime authoritarian leaders and how power psychologically transforms those who hold it. Drawing on research, he shows how power can distort judgement, empathy and behaviour, and argues for understanding its mechanisms to use it more responsibly through better structures, selection and psychological empowerment.

A unique, post-pandemic-era anthology that blends creative and critical works to redefine nostalgia studies through a culturally expansive and interdisciplinary lens

The edited collection titled Reverberating Past: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on the Art of Nostalgia is an interdisciplinary anthology that bridges the artistic and academic realms, exploring the concept of nostalgia through both personal and collective lenses. The volume is divided into two parts: the first part features poetry and short stories that capture the emotional resonance of past experiences, while the second one presents scholarly articles that delve into the multifaceted nature of nostalgia across disciplines such as literature, film, history, and psychology.

The book emphasizes how contemporary artifacts, a term used in a metaphorical way, serve as vessels for nostalgic experiences, shaping our understanding of the past and its influence on the present. The preface frames nostalgia as a subtle force that transforms ordinary moments such as scents, light, and the sheen of old photographs into a living archive of identity. The introduction by Barbara Gabriella Renzi and Goutam Majhi takes Marcel Proust’s madeleine as a touchstone for involuntary memory and traces the concept back to Johannes Hofer’s seventeenth century medicalization of homesickness, while Homer’s Odysseus models a far older and existential longing for home. An opening reflection shows nostalgia working as a present tense instrument of perception that binds personal memory to collective history, and the stated purpose situates the book at the crossroads of art and scholarship, where poems, stories, and essays perform nostalgia as both aesthetic practice and emotional condition. A typology of nostalgic artifacts then distinguishes tangible carriers of memory such as recipe cards, albums, and uniforms from intangible ones such as songs, atmospheres, and absences, stressing how both kinds shift meaning across time and move between the individual and the communal.

Part I (Creative Composition) renders nostalgia in poetry and short fiction. Benedetto Ghielmi’s Torn Silences and Tears of Asphalt juxtapose silence and noise, city and forest, exposing modern alienation while still searching for empathy. Lucia Cristiana Cesarano’s Words treats language as the last refuge where love and memory endure. Immacolata Rosso’s paired poems, Stolen Sky and Gray in Ten Shades, trace a cycle from connection to solitude and back toward hope. Guido Oldani’s Once widens the lens to a planetary elegy in which ecological and human decline intertwine.

The short stories deepen this spectrum. Jean Portante’s Scents of Childhood returns to Differdange and Nonna Aquila, using smell as a Proustian bridge until the past no longer translates. Cinzia Pierantonelli’s Ostalgie and My Hidden African Malaise intertwines a father’s colonial nostalgia for Eritrea and Ethiopia with the daughter’s East Berlin experience, crystallized in a chipped cobalt cup. Samoylenko and Shramko’s A Short Random Dialogue about Nostalgia playfully interrogates the very nature of nostalgia. Gabriele Gëzim Kaci’s Uncle Killed the Cockroach stages a family’s deliberate return to ritual, embodying Frijda’s bittersweet emotion and Boym’s distinction between restorative and reflective nostalgia.

Part II (Critical Essay) shifts to analysis across cultures and media. Laureano Corces’s Cuban and Puerto Rican Nostalgias: Where Another Place is Home traces a movement from Romantic patriotic yearning to diasporic self fashioning, with theater as a collective stage of memory. Sony Jalarajan Raj and Adith K. Suresh’s Sculpting in History: Nostalgic Structures in Indian Popular Culture shows how monuments like the Taj Mahal become emotional architectures in cinema, shaping regional and national identity. Rasmus Olsson’s Fashioning the Memories reads clothing phenomenologically as a vessel of lived time. Barbara Gabriella Renzi’s Digital Twins and Nostalgia examines simulated presence and the ethics of virtual remembrance. Goutam Majhi’s Revisiting Indian Festival Culture treats festivals as evolving sites of collective memory. Renzi returns in Roots and Reverie: Italian Women’s Literature Through a Migrant’s Eyes, linking nostalgia, gender, and migration. Debojoy Chanda’s Toward an Ethics of Fiction: Recuperating the Desire for Desire in M. G. Vassanji’s Nostalgia reframes nostalgia through Lacan, Derrida, and Levinas as an ethical mnemonic practice that resists exclusionary myths of origin. Closing the volume, Marketa Lepicovsky’s Going Down Memory Lane and Back Up Again synthesizes the concrete and the abstract, combining songs, photos, and scents with identity, time, and belonging, using psychological theory and computational language tools to show how nostalgia shapes thought, behavior, and well being.

A conceptual frame holds the collection together through two metaphors: nostalgia as mirror, reflecting the self through others’ words, and nostalgia as map, offering guidance across cultural, political, and technological terrains of memory. The closing gesture invites slow, dialogic reading where the reader’s own artifacts, objects, and atmospheres complete the circuit as they resonate with the poems, stories, and essays. Throughout, the volume insists that nostalgia is not escapism but a mode of knowing that links what was to what might be, turning private remnants into shared understanding across Jean Portante, Cinzia Pierantonelli, Samoylenko and Shramko, Gabriele Gëzim Kaci, Benedetto Ghielmi, Lucia Cristiana Cesarano, Immacolata Rosso, Guido Oldani, Laureano Corces, Sony Jalarajan Raj, Adith K. Suresh, Rasmus Olsson, Barbara Gabriella Renzi, Goutam Majhi, Debojoy Chanda, and Marketa Lepicovsky.

The Mind Economy is a bold and visionary exploration of the human psyche as a structured, dynamic economy. In this groundbreaking work, Professor Oliver Hoffmann proposes that memory is not simply a repository of past events but the foundational currency of our inner world—shaping identity, driving cognition, and fueling our emotional and mental processes.
Rooted in psychological theory, enriched by philosophical reflection, and sharpened through economic reasoning, this book introduces the concept of the “spirit system”—an integrated model that explains how narration, imagination, and memory will function as key exchange processes within the mental economy. Hoffmann reveals how memories are continuously reconstructed, assigned value, and traded in the form of thoughts, beliefs, and self-concepts. These processes define how individuals perceive themselves, relate to others, and make decisions in daily life.
The book also provides an in-depth introduction to “economic cognitive therapy,” a method that uses the principles of inner economization to increase mental efficiency, emotional resilience, and therapeutic effectiveness. Practical exercises and transformative techniques—such as imagination reconstruction and transcendental narration—offer powerful tools for personal development and healing. The inclusion of supportive practices like yoga, meditation, and aesthetic experience adds a deeply holistic dimension.
Rather than relying on mystical or esoteric language, The Mind Economy provides a clear, structured, and intellectually rich approach to understanding the self. It challenges conventional dualisms between inner and outer worlds and proposes that our economic systems may be reflections of internal mental structures, not the other way around.
This book is for readers who seek more than self-help—it is for thinkers, practitioners, and explorers of the human condition who want to understand how we constitute value, identity, and meaning from within. With depth, clarity, and vision, Hoffmann invites us to become better stewards of our inner resources—and to unlock the power of memory as the gateway to transformation.

The world is loaded with information. We enjoy immediate access to most of it through laptops, smartphones and the Internet. There is, however, a great deal of information that professionals cannot reach unless they talk to their clients, patients, job applicants and others. When the purpose is to obtain accurate, relevant and reliable information, no professional interpersonal encounter has been subjected to more systematic and critical research than police interviews of victims, witnesses and suspects of crime. Knowledge derived from this research has formed a novel, more effective way to gather information. The concept is known as Investigative Interviewing, and throughout Interviewing Techniques for Professionals, the authors demonstrate that research-based methodology is applicable and likely to advance professional interviews within a wide range of professions. Based on the extensive feedback the authors have received as advisors and trainers from a highly diverse group of clients and participants, including prosecutors, judges, journalists, investors, recruiters, physicians, researchers, NGOs, lawyers, HR employees, immigration- taxation- child protection- food and competition authorities, to name a few, it has become evident that the concept of Investigative Interviewing is of great utility value, far beyond police stations. 

The pressure to perform and conclude creates working environments vulnerable to errors related to decision making. These challenges are not unique to the police. Unfortunate consequences directly related to poor interviewing can be of a social, financial and human nature. Without professional interviewing techniques, including a methodology that stimulates open mindedness, physicians, head-hunters, intelligence personnel, finance analytics, journalists and others run the risk of confirming their premature assumptions. In worst case scenarios, resulting in deaths caused by wrong treatment, refugees are deported only to face torture or executions, bankruptcy and so on

The techniques presented by the authors were specifically developed to guide interviewers through a mental and practical process that will allow them to remain open-minded to all possibilities, mitigating problems associated with premature decisions. A growing body of research shows with consensus that interviews conducted by professionals without theoretical knowledge and a methodological approach can, at worst, lead to self-fulfilling prophecies, where the interviewer only succeeds in extracting information that confirms his or her premature conceptions, opinions or assumptions. Besides providing the reader with a methodology that stimulates open-mindedness, Interviewing Techniques for Professionals will provide the reader with question techniques developed to test the interviewer`s preconceptions. It will also provide an understanding of what kind of questions reveal the most information; which questions should be asked first; which questions ought to be avoided; how questions should be presented; and, in particular, which interpersonal communication principles stimulate rapport and mitigate communication breakdowns.

‘Psychoanalytic Mythologies’ presents a collection of essays on the theme of what it is to be a human subject in a culture permeated by psychoanalytic imagery. The author disturbs the strongly-held belief of those in thrall to psychoanalysis that it is universally true, and this thesis forms the recurrent motif that binds these essays together. Instead he argues that psychoanalysis functions as something that is only ever locally true. These arguments are elaborated upon in a range of contexts, from night clubs, garages and trains to theme parks, magic circles and yoga, and the different strands are distilled into a cohesive thesis in the definitive final essay ‘Psychoanalytic Myth Today’.

The essays presented here were initially published in scattered newsletters and journals, and were written intermittently in a period stretching back over ten years. Ian Parker has written widely in this area, and these lively and innovative essays taken together form a searing manifesto against the accepted dogmas of psychoanalysis.

‘Psychoanalytic Mythologies’ presents a collection of essays on the theme of what it is to be a human subject in a culture permeated by psychoanalytic imagery. The author disturbs the strongly-held belief of those in thrall to psychoanalysis that it is universally true, and this thesis forms the recurrent motif that binds these essays together. Instead he argues that psychoanalysis functions as something that is only ever locally true. These arguments are elaborated upon in a range of contexts, from night clubs, garages and trains to theme parks, magic circles and yoga, and the different strands are distilled into a cohesive thesis in the definitive final essay ‘Psychoanalytic Myth Today’.

The essays presented here were initially published in scattered newsletters and journals, and were written intermittently in a period stretching back over ten years. Ian Parker has written widely in this area, and these lively and innovative essays taken together form a searing manifesto against the accepted dogmas of psychoanalysis.

The Unspoken Morality of Childhood: Family, Friendship, Self-Esteem and the Wisdom of the Everyday reflects the thoughts of a senior ethicist. Each essay begins with a homey essay about the kind of everyday event that happens to everyone and then proceeds to discuss the ethical issues raised by such an event. The manuscript is interdisciplinary, located at the intersection of ethics, political psychology, moral psychology, philosophy, and political science/political theory. It uses stories to teach ethics and falls in the virtue ethics approach to ethics, making it perfect as a supplementary text for introductory courses to philosophy, moral psychology and political theory.

The manuscript discusses complex ethical concepts such as identity, agency, self-esteem, forgiveness, relations with our parents, dealing with loss, the moral imagination, and a wide range of other issues that people confront every day.

One of the essays, “Walnut”, tells a story about the author’s visiting her grandparents in a small, Midwestern town. This is turned into a discussion of the need for roots, how children formulate their sense of self, and how politicians like Donald Trump can turn the love of family and nostalgia for the past into a vicious tool in politics in which clever politicians exploit fears of foreigners and people who are “not like us.” Another essay describes a tired mother reading a piece of science fiction late at night, given to her by one of her children. A story by Olivia Butler asks why a black woman should be interested in science fiction and shows the value of the moral imagination, as science fiction reveals how those who can imagine alternate realities can then alert us to new possibilities, and better worlds. As Robert Kennedy was wont to ask: Some see the world as it is, and ask why. I imagine the world as it could be, and ask why not? The essay uses this prompt to discuss the importance of the moral imagination and the ability some have to conceptualize their way out of a dilemma that can plague others.