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.

Enseñanzas que las personas cercanas a la muerte transmiten a médicos, enfermeras, religiosos y a sus propias familias.

Sobre la muerte y el morir, uno de los estudios psicológicos más famosos de finales del siglo XX, surgió de un seminario interdisciplinario que versaba sobre la muerte, originado y dirigido por la Dra. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.

En esta obra, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introdujo y exploró por primera vez las actualmente reconocidas etapas para lidiar con la muerte: negación, ira, negociación, depresión y aceptación.

A través de entrevistas y conversaciones, tendrás una mejor comprensión de cómo la muerte inminente afecta al paciente, a su familia y a los profesionales que lo atienden. La autora brinda esperanza, consuelo y tranquilidad a todos los involucrados.

La muerte forma parte de la vida, no podemos obviarlo. Encuentra en este libro las herramientas psicológicas que te ayudarán a integrarla en tu vida.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

Teachings that people near death transmit to doctors, nurses, clergy, and their own families.

On Death and Dying, one of the most famous psychological studies of the late 20th century, arose from an interdisciplinary seminar on death, initiated and directed by Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross.

In this work, Elisabeth Kübler-Ross introduced and explored for the first time the now-recognized stages of dealing with death: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.

Through interviews and conversations, you will gain a better understanding of how imminent death affects the patient, their family, and the professionals who care for them. The author provides hope, comfort, and reassurance to all involved.

Death is a part of life; we cannot ignore it. Find in this book the psychological tools that will help you integrate it into your life.

Los misterios de nuestra vida cotidiana resueltos por un neuropsicólogo.

Nuestra vida cotidiana está llena de situaciones que pueden tener una explicación neuropsicológica. Nos referimos a los olvidos involuntarios, los lapsus, las pasiones desbordadas, las fobias y manías e incluso las experiencias que se podrían calificar como «extrañas» (apariciones y alucinaciones). En este libro, Saúl Martínez-Horta ofrece una mirada científica para entender mejor cómo funciona nuestro cerebro.

ENGLISH DESCRIPTION

The mysteries of our daily lives solved by a neuropsychologist.

Our daily life is full of situations that can have a neuropsychological explanation. We refer to involuntary forgetfulness, slips, overwhelming passions, phobias and manias, and even experiences that could be described as "strange" (apparitions and hallucinations). In this book, Saúl Martínez-Horta offers a scientific perspective to better understand how our brain works.

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.

Discover why most attempts to fix teenagers fail and what to do about it

Anxiety, depression, self-harm, substance use disorders, and teen suicide—despite having more counselors, educators, experts, and medications than ever before, today's young people are said to be suffering from a mental health epidemic. Exploring a range of factors contributing to this wicked problem—from social media, overprotection, and environmental toxins to the erosion of connection—Kids These Days clearly identifies what works for raising happy and healthy youth, and what does not.

This essential guide is an unflinching examination of the failings of the mental health industry, and a call to action for adults to stand up against interference, harmful interventions, and ideologies negatively impacting our children. Both therapists, parents, and researchers, Will Dobud and Nevin Harper:

• Engage leading voices in adolescent well-being—mental health professionals, scientists, doctors, and parenting gurus—to discover why most attempts to fix teenagers fail
• Distill the last twenty years of research and clinical practice to identify the causes and potential cures for the growing youth mental health crisis
• Show how social connection, mastery, gratitude, and independence promote emotional and psychological resilience in the next generation.

It's time to stop labeling youth and recognize them as the heroes of their own stories. Whether as parents, guardians, therapists, educators, or other role models, we need to build trust and foster relationships while helping the young people in our lives negotiate the adventure of adolescence. Our kids are not broken. What really needs to change is the adults these days.

“Psychologist and sexologist Dania Schiftan says it is possible for ALL of us to achieve the Big O during penetrative sex—if we simply hone our skills.”—The Sun

This simple yet effective program empowers women with tools to explore their bodies, achieve better orgasms, and have more enjoyable sex.

Just like with anything else in life, if you want to get better at sex, you need to practice. And if you want to understand the female orgasm, you need to start by understanding the female body. In Coming Soon, sexologist and psychotherapist Dania Schiftan shares her ten-step program for women to increase sexual responsiveness and deepen their awareness of their body’s sensations, leading to more satisfying orgasms through penetration, the ability to control when and how to orgasm, and more empowering sex with a partner. Throughout the book, Schiftan imparts real client stories to show how readers can talk with their partners and incorporate her tips into their own sex lives.

Orgasms often provoke questions. With her ten-step plan, Schiftan brings light to the dark and shows how to have more fun with sex—and your own body—at your fingertips.

2020 NAUTILUS BOOK AWARD: GOLD IN PSYCHOLOGY
FOREWORD REVIEWS 2019 BOOK OF THE YEAR AWARDS FINALIST IN BOTH THE RELIGION AND SELF-HELP CATEGORIES

Our past does not simply disappear. The painful history of our ancestors and their rich cultural wisdom intertwine within us to create the patterns of our future. Even when past trauma remains unspoken or has long been forgotten, it becomes part of us and our children—a legacy of both strength and woundedness that shapes our lives.

In this book, Tirzah Firestone brings to life the profound impact of protracted historical trauma through the compelling narratives of Israeli terror victims, Holocaust survivors, and those whose lives were marred by racial persecution and displacement. The tragic story of Firestone’s own family lays the groundwork for these revealing testimonies of recovery, forgiveness, and moral leadership. Throughout, Firestone interweaves their voices with neuroscientific and psychological findings, as well as relevant and inspiring Jewish teachings.

Seven principles emerge from these wise narratives—powerful prescriptive tools that speak to anyone dealing with the effects of past injury. At the broadest level, these principles are directives for staying morally awake in a world rife with terror.

“Psychologist and sexologist Dania Schiftan says it is possible for ALL of us to achieve the Big O during penetrative sex—if we simply hone our skills.”—The Sun

This simple yet effective program empowers women with tools to explore their bodies, achieve better orgasms, and have more enjoyable sex.

Just like with anything else in life, if you want to get better at sex, you need to practice. And if you want to understand the female orgasm, you need to start by understanding the female body. In Coming Soon, sexologist and psychotherapist Dania Schiftan shares her ten-step program for women to increase sexual responsiveness and deepen their awareness of their body’s sensations, leading to more satisfying orgasms through penetration, the ability to control when and how to orgasm, and more empowering sex with a partner. Throughout the book, Schiftan imparts real client stories to show how readers can talk with their partners and incorporate her tips into their own sex lives.

Orgasms often provoke questions. With her ten-step plan, Schiftan brings light to the dark and shows how to have more fun with sex—and your own body—at your fingertips.

Readers of Stolen Focus and Quiet will appreciate this wide-ranging and passionate investigation into creativity: Why and when it strikes us, and how to transform workplaces, classrooms, and societies for creativity to flourish.

After a cycling crash leaves her head spinning, journalist Hilde Østby finds herself suddenly bursting with creative energy—which makes her wonder: What’s the secret to human creativity? Where do ideas come from? And most importantly: in a society that praises productivity and pace, how can we nurture, rather than suppress, our creative impulses?

Using Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland as her inspiration, Østby takes readers tumbling down the rabbit hole of ideas. The Key to Creativity features:

• Interviews with powerhouse creatives—like journalist Michael Pollan, novelist Maja Lunde, and artist Tracey Emin—and decodings of their creative regimens.
• The cultural history and science behind our “aha” moments, our inner critics, and our idle thoughts.
• Information on how to foster your creative potential: Østby shares how we can cultivate more creativity in our lives through prioritizing daydreaming and valuing productivity less.

With the charm of Alice exploring Wonderland and meeting its curious inhabitants, The Key to Creativity invites us to imagine a world where daydreaming is encouraged and even our strangest ideas have value.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

What do we really mean when we make embarrassing mistakes in conversation? Is there such a thing as inadvertent insult or a slip of the tongue? Exploring outside influences and the connections to our dream world, Dr. Robert Haskell guides us through the fascinating terrain of the unconscious, showing how our minds use feelings, sounds, and language to simultaneously hide and reveal what we secretly think and feel. Filled with intriguing and amusing illustrations from every day life, Deep Listening provides the key to unlocking the real feelings and meanings behind our interactions with family, friends, and co-workers.

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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.

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.