Massimo Marraffa and Cristina Meini re-connect the psychology of identity with its philosophical roots in this study. They trace the contemporary problem of the self to John Locke and William James' foundational theories on personal identity. By integrating the philosophy of identity with empirical and neuropsychological research, Marraffa and Meini provide an original synthesis of multidisciplinary conceptions of the self. The Developmental Psychology of Personal Identity builds on Chomsky-inspired developmental psychology, Jean Piaget's constructivism, Lev Vygotskij's (...) sociocultural perspective on development and John Bowlby's attachment theory. In this theoretical framework, the book draws on the data of the psychological sciences to reconstruct the trajectory of the self as a 'Lockean person' (i.e., as morally responsible agent). The authors link the birth of self-consciousness through the body and emotions to the construction of a narrative self. Their combination of philosophy and cognitive sciences makes an important contribution to multiple disciplines concerned with personal identity. It provokes new routes to understanding identity and self, autobiographical memory, and personality. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Post-Traumatic Hermeneutics: Melancholia in the Wake of TraumaAngelika Rauch (bio)1Classical Analysis: Problems for Trauma TherapyAccording to the Journal of the American Psychoanalytical Association, American ego psychology has taken a leading role in debunking what it considers antiquated Freudian approaches to the study of trauma. As neutral observers and students of the facts, ego psychologists have purportedly reclaimed the study of trauma as the search for an objectifiable (...) traumatic event in the past, one that can be accessed as recovered memory, as a specimen of pathogenic development, or as cognitive and behavioral effects that point to an inaccessible implied memory buried in the psyche. Central to this revision of psychoanalytical trauma therapy is the dismissal of Nachträglichkeit as an antiquated and irrelevant concept. Harold P. Blum, for instance, writes in a recent article of JAPA that “‘deferred action’ is an ambiguous concept, a dubious, antiquated, theoretical legacy.” According to Blum, “deferred action overlooks the immediate and potentially powerful effects of preoedipal trauma and is dissociated from considerations of cumulative trauma and developmental disturbance.” [1155]. With respect to Freud’s case of the Wolf-Man, Blum states that “[d]eferred action emphasized traumatic events and memory rather than cumulative developmental effects of shock and strain trauma, and pathogenic object relationships.” Key to Blum’s view, then, is the assertion that “the concept of deferred action deterred consideration of real infantile experience and the complex overdetermination of pathogenesis through development” [1156]. Blum apparently takes the side of those who like to argue that trauma is more real than imagined. Whereas oedipal trauma is an imaginary or illusory trauma, preoedipal trauma is comprehensible as real shock and, as such, is empirically true. This is an idea that is very compatible with “recovered memory” therapy, a subject that has become controversial in recent debates about child abuse and recovered memory syndrome.In contrast, Arnold H. Modell in Other Times, Other Realities points out that “[t]he concept of Nachträglichkeit is virtually unknown among American psychoanalysts. This may be due in part to Strachey’s faulty translation; but this idea is also inconsistent with the belief in an orderly hierarchical psychic development such as that envisioned by ego psychologists.” [3]. In other words, Freudian Nachträglichkeit violates the principles of space and time assumed by empirical scientists whose conceptions are founded on the causality of such principles as stimulus/response. It is here, of course, that ego psychology’s treatment of trauma would come into conflict not only with Freudian analysis, including its French Freudian variants, but with the kind of trauma studies being conducted by the contributors to Cathy Caruth’s Trauma: Explorations in Memory. They include Bessel [End Page 111] van der Kolk, Onno van der Hart, Shoshana Felman, Dori Laub, Robert Lifton, and, of course, Cathy Caruth herself.Emphasis on the reality of traumatic shock (as abuse, stress, accident, and so on), however important it may be, loses sight of a hermeneutical dimension of psychoanalytic therapy that Caruth and her contributors emphasize: the question of how meanings are associated or bound to the understanding of life’s events. My own clinical approach to psychoanalysis favors the introduction of an even stronger hermeneutical perspective that is sensitive to the kinds of issues raised by philosophers like Dilthey, Heidegger, Benjamin, and Gadamer, for whom the question of experience is not reducible to restricted understandings of stimulus/response, nor—as in the case of Caruth (for example, in Unclaimed Experience)—to the privileging of language as a formal (that is, literary) construct. Rather, I am interested in emphasizing a hermeneutics of the therapeutic encounter within which questions of language, culture, history, and behavior are situated. With respect to trauma therapy, I will introduce a number of well-known analytical contributions even as I take the following statement of Arnold Modell’s as my point of departure:The analyst or therapist becomes an unwitting collaborator in the recreation of the past, while still retaining a proximity to present time. The therapist becomes the person with whom one can reexperience trauma within a new context or experience for the first time what has been absent in the past. Affects belonging to... (shrink)

In order to develop sophisticated models of the core domains of knowledge that support complex cognitive processing in infants and children, developmental psychologists have mapped out the content of these knowledge domains. This research strategy may provide a blueprint for advancing research on adult cognitive processing. I illustrate this suggestion with examples from analogical reasoning and decision making.

Some 2300 years ago, Hellenic Philosophy had already produced some rather sophisticated theories of human psychological functioning as well as most of the broad theoretical controversies which characterize the contemporary psychological stage. Democritus, for example, had put forth a theory of thinking and action which emphasized the physiological components of the person and looked to immediate environmental antecedents as explanations for what we did. Plato, by contrast, insisted upon the formal rule-governed characteristics of human thinking as basic to intellect and (...) denied the possibility that these could be acquired piecemeal through experience with environmental events. Nor would he accept the relevance of physiological descriptions for answering psychological questions. The following centuries have witnessed both the intensification of these controversies and their proliferation into new scientific and societal spheres, as intellectual fashions have favored now one and then another theoretic orientation. A resolution to many such controversies was proposed by Aristotle in the course of formulating his developmental and teleological doctrine of Man, and the logic of this mode of resolution still has great relevance today for the evaluation of psychological theories. In Aristotle's account, a new approach to the concept of causality evolved, an approach that paid special attention to how the term "causes" should be applied to biological events. Moreover, this approach to causality was highly successful in integrating biological phenomena with an understanding of the nature of causes for psychological phenomena. The explication of this account demonstrated that "why" explanations and "how" explanations of action could and should be used concurrently and also demonstrated that many psychological controversies were based on pseudo-issues. This approach, and particularly its relevance to developmental psychology, will be outlined here. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

This paper critically examines the prevalence of age comparison studies in developmental psychology. It argues that many such studies, which aim to determine when children acquire adult-like abilities, lack clear theoretical justification. The critique is framed within broader discussions of research priorities in psychology, drawing parallels to past trends in neuroscience where initial fascination with brain localization gave way to more theoretically driven research. Questioning the value of studies motivated primarily by publication rather than theoretical advancement, the (...) paper advocates for a shift towards research that addresses fundamental questions about developmental mechanisms. Implications for research design and the future direction of developmental psychology are discussed. (shrink)

Presents major topics of developmental psychology from the perspective of philosophy. The areas covered include the status of developmental explanation, perceptual development, ego development and issues in stage theory.

Emotion theories based on research with adults must be able to accommodate developmental data if they are to be deemed satisfactory accounts of human emotion. Inspired in part by theory and research on adult emotion, developmentalists have investigated emotion-related processes including affect elicitation, internal and overtly observable emotion responding, emotion regulation, and understanding emotion in others. Many developmental studies parallel investigations conducted with adults. In this article, we review current theories of emotional development as well as research related (...) to the several aspects of emotion designated above. Beyond providing an overview of the field, we hope to encourage greater cross-fertilization and research collaboration between developmental psychologists and scholars who focus on adult emotion. (shrink)

Experimental research is reviewed which suggests that rational framing effects influence young children's social activities according to a logic of interdependence. However, young children are unlikely to possess some of the elaborate cognitive skills argued in the Target Article to be prerequisite for rational framing effects. Understanding rational framing effects requires understanding their ontogenetic origins.

Interdisciplinary efforts from developmental psychology, phenomenology, and philosophy of mind, have studied the rudiments of social cognition and conceptualized distinct forms of intersubjective communication and interaction at human early life.Interaction theoristsconsiderprimary intersubjectivitya non-mentalist, pre-theoretical, non-conceptual sort of processes that ground a certain level of communication and understanding, and provide support to higher-level cognitive skills. We argue the study of human/neurorobot interaction consists in a unique opportunity to deepen understanding of underlying mechanisms in social cognition through synthetic modeling, while (...) allowing to examine a second person experiential (2PP) access to intersubjectivity in embodied dyadic interaction. Concretely, we propose the study of primary intersubjectivity as a 2PP experience characterized by predictive engagement, where perception, cognition, and action are accounted for an hermeneutic circle in dyadic interaction. From our interpretation of the concept ofactive inferenceinfree-energy principletheory, we propose an open-source methodology namedneural robotics library(NRL) for experimental human/neurorobot interaction, wherein a demonstration program namedvirtual Cartesian robot(VCBot) provides an opportunity to experience the aforementioned embodied interaction to general audiences. Lastly, through a study case, we discuss some ways human-robot primary intersubjectivity can contribute to cognitive science research, such as to the fields of developmental psychology, educational technology, and cognitive rehabilitation. (shrink)

In this article we focus on how the language of developmental psychology shapes our conceptualisations and understandings of childrearing and of the parent-child relationship. By analysing some examples of contemporary research, policy and popular literature on parenting and parenting support in the UK and Flanders, we explore some of the ways in which normative assumptions about parenthood and upbringing are imported into these areas through the language of developmental psychology. We go on to address the particular (...) attraction of developmental psychology in the field of parenting and upbringing within our current cultural context. Drawing on the work of (among others) Zygmunt Bauman, we will show how developmental psychology, as one of the instruments that contributes to a breaking down of our existential condition into a series of well-defined, and thus apparently manageable, tasks and categories, displaces rather than confronts the possibly limitless depth of the enormity of the reality of ‘being a parent’. (shrink)

Developmental psychology should play an essential constraining role in developmental cognitive neuroscience. Theories of neural development must account explicitly for the early emergence of knowledge and abilities in infants and young children documented in developmental research. Especially in need of explanation at the neural level is the early emergence of meta-representation.

The article surveys Lauren Berlant’s ideas concerning the emotional functioning of the human being in the context of neoliberal capitalism and argues for their limitation resulting from Berlant’s focus on the society-ideology axis while overlooking the significance of the early bonds in the development of one’s emotional regulation. Contrary to the multiple Marxist interpretations of culture, Berlant emphasizes that politics is effective by shaping human fantasies of desire rather than merely producing ideology. In the case of the United States this (...) mechanism mainly refers to creating a collective hope for a “good life”, which is carried on within the paradigm of the Weberian protestant ethics: through hard work, perseverance and self-reliance, that is according to the myth of the American dream. Simultaneously, authors working within the field of developmental psychology demonstrate the key significance of human early attachments for the shaping of one’s self-trust and emotional balance, which enables a more critical attitude towards the cultural norms of happiness and makes it possible to find satisfaction not through responding to the fantasies generated by culture, but through relationships with other empirically existing human beings. The article thus maintains that works by psychologists such as Donald Woods Winnicott, John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth fill in a significant void in Berlant’s writings and give hope for an overcoming of the “cruel optimism” impasse. (shrink)

Gilead et al.'s theory presupposes that traversing temporal, spatial, social, and hypothetical distances are largely interchangeable acts of mental travel that co-occur in human ontogeny. Yet, this claim is at odds with recent developmental data suggesting that children's reasoning is differentially affected by the dimension which they must traverse, and that different representational abilities underlie travel across different dimensions.

This chapter presents a conception of understanding where understanding emerges out of the joint experience of conversation. On this conception, understanding requires more than the pre-reflective acquisition of shared social meanings – a conception of understanding historically highlighted by existential phenomenologists. Beyond this, it requires what occurs in genuine conversation, namely, that one put one’s pre-reflective social meanings at risk in the process of critical self-reflection. Drawing from the hermeneutic phenomenology of Hans-Georg Gadamer, I argue that conversation is that joint (...) experience that gives rise to such critical self-reflection and that it is conversation’s play-structure in particular that makes it a source of understanding in this sense. (shrink)

This article provides a broad outline of a hermeneutic unity of psychology, by way of a reply to Martin's comment . It is argued that the metaphysical and ontological impasses that concern Martin may occur because of two reasons &emdash; genuine incomparability or the lack of motivation on the part of potential interlocutors. We argue that neither of these reasons necessarily precludes the dialogue and evaluation called for under this hermeneutic approach. We then show how a proper understanding of (...) dialogue, as well as a group of psychologists to facilitate this dialogue &emdash; theoretical psychologists &emdash; are keys to a coherent and unified, yet pluralistic and responsive psychology. (shrink)

The paper presented here is an attempt at casting human development as a semiotic-material phenomenon which reflects power relations and includes uncertainty. On the ground of post-structuralist approaches, development is considered here as a performative concept, which does not represent but creates realities. Emphasis is put on the notions of ‘mediation’, ‘translation’ and ‘materiality’ in everyday practices of students and teachers in a concrete school setting, where I conducted ethnographical research for one school year. The analysis of discursive research material (...) of teachers’ discussions and interviews with students proves the developmental discourse to be interrelated to teachers’ and students’ positioning in the school; the developmental discourse orders ongoing interaction and enables students and teachers to perform the past and witness the future in a way which corresponds with dominant values and state social/educational policies. By translating a variety of events into a line moving from the past to the future as well as by materializing this line as diagrams and other semiotic-material objects, development becomes a technology of the self of (late) modernity which implies power relations and supports the maintenance of the modern order. On these grounds, a relational approach to development is suggested, which raises methodological and political issues. (shrink)

While Dubourg and Baumard argue that predisposition toward exploration draws us to fictional environments, they fail to answer their titular question: “Why Imaginary Worlds?” Research in pretend play, psychological distancing, and theatre shows that being “imaginary” (i.e., any type of unreal, rather than only fantastically unreal) makes exploration of any fictional world profoundly different than that of real-life unfamiliar environments.

This article extends Lemieux’s concern for the interdisciplinary tension between philosophy and sociology to the intradisciplinary tension within psychology between approaches to the study of children focusing on universal principles and approaches adopting a contextual lens. This tension arises both in how development is defined and in the methods chosen for its study. This tension is exemplified in terms of the recent American preoccupation with the Word Gap (WG), a supposed difference of 30 million words heard by socioeconomically diverse (...) children by the age of 4 that is blamed for educational disparities throughout the school years. The article discusses the political implications of WG discourse as it gives rise to the erasure of language practices of diverse Americans and obscures the role that the educational system plays in fostering a ‘one-size-fits-all’ instructional model. The article concludes with a discussion of attempts to combat the deficit model that the WG discourse reproduces. (shrink)

ArgumentThis paper contributes to inquiries into scientific personae by employing a rhetorical approach. It analyzes the persuasive strategies of Judith Rich Harris in The Nurture Assumption: Why Children Turn Out the Way They Do. Rhetorical analysis of Harris' self-fashioning in this remarkable best-seller and the reactions of the press to her persona demonstrates the resilience of specific archaic cultural repertoires for constructing scientific identities. While historical studies investigate how repertoires for scientific self-fashioning evolve through time, rhetoric reveals how identity models (...) from an earlier age may be appropriated in the present. (shrink)

Evolutionary psychologists claim that the mind contains “hundreds or thousands” of “genetically specified” modules, which are evolutionary adaptations for their cognitive functions. We argue that, while the adult human mind/brain typically contains a degree of modularization, its “modules” are neither genetically specified nor evolutionary adaptations. Rather, they result from the brain’s developmental plasticity, which allows environmental task demands a large role in shaping the brain’s information-processing structures. The brain’s developmental plasticity is our fundamental psychological adaptation, and the “modules” (...) that result from it are adaptive responses to local conditions, not past evolutionary environments. If different individuals share common environ- ments, however, they may develop similar “modules,” and this process can mimic the development of genetically specified modules in the evolutionary psychologist’s sense. (shrink)

In this paper, we first extract from Susan Carey’s seminal account of the origin of concepts a notion of rationality, which is applicable to human infants and non-human animals; significantly different from the notions of rationality prevalent in behavioral ecology and yet, like these notions, amenable to empirical testing; conceptually more fundamental than the latter notions. Relatedly, this notion underlies a proto-conceptuality ascribable, by a key component of Carey’s account, to human infants and non-human animals. Based on a Kantian-inspired analysis (...) of fully-fledged conceptuality and the type of rationality underlying it, we then show the profound difference between the type of rationality extracted from Carey’s account and the rationality of human adults; related fundamental differences between the types of conceptual representation that these types of rationality respectively ground. By showing this, we highlight fundamental aspects of conceptual representations that are missing from Carey’s account of the origin of concepts. Based on this, we finally argue that, as ingenious and explanatorily valuable as Carey’s account of the origin of concepts is, it is only a partial account of this origin. (shrink)

Machine generated contents note: 1. Introducing persons and the psychology of personhood Jack Martin and Mark H. Bickhard; Part I. Philosophical, Conceptual Perspectives: 2. The person concept and the ontology of persons Michael A. Tissaw; 3. Achieving personhood: the perspective of hermeneutic phenomenology Charles Guignon; Part II. Historical Perspectives: 4. Historical psychology of persons: categories and practice Kurt Danziger; 5. Persons and historical ontology Jeff Sugarman; 6. Critical personalism: on its tenets, its historical obscurity, and its future prospects (...) James T. Lamiell; Part III. Social-Developmental Perspectives: 7. Conceiving of self and others as persons: evolution and development John Barresi, Chris Moore and Raymond Martin; 8. Position exchange theory and personhood: moving between positions and perspectives within physical, sociocultural and psychological space and time Jack Martin and Alex Gillespie; 9. The emergent ontology of persons Mark H. Bickhard; 10. Theorising personhood for the world in transition and change: reflections from a transformative activist stance on human development Anna Stetsenko; Part IV. Narrative Perspectives: 11. Identity and narrative as root metaphors of personhood Amia Lieblich and Ruthellen Josselson; 12. Storied persons: the double triad of narrative identity Mark Freeman. (shrink)

Adulthood is usually defined as the period of human development in which the physical development, cognitive development, and psychosocial development of women and men slow and reach their highest level. Although scholars strive to build consistent theories, the description of the developmentally highest level differs between countries and cultures due to economic factors and sociocultural factors. After presenting some basic concepts of adulthood from different cultures, this entry continues with a psychological definition of adulthood, a discussion of characteristics of maturity, (...) and brief descriptions of various theories about what constitutes adulthood. It ends with suggestions for the direction of future discussions on adulthood. (shrink)

Stochastic developmental variation is an additional important source of variance – beyond genes and environment – that should be included in considering how our innate psychological predispositions may interact with environment and experience, in a culture-dependent manner, to ultimately shape patterns of human behaviour.

Carrying out analyzes of qualitative master's and doctoral research continues to be a great difficulty for researchers in training. Thus, in this writing I present an itinerary for documental studies of public policies, scientific and literary texts, based on the Ricoeurian hermeneutics of discourse, text and ideology, based on two works by the philosopher, several articles to validate the interpretive procedure; and the dialogue with contributions from the gestalt clinical discourse, as the main application of the proposal is in (...) the field of Psychology and health studies. In the script I present a dynamic structure composed of three interconnected steps: identification; b) general and specific structure; c) hermeneutics of discourse. As an illustration I apply the itinerary to a poetic text. I conclude that the script allows, in the work of interpretation, to establish the distance from belonging and to overcome the intention of what the author intended to say. (shrink)

When do children acquire a propositional attitude folk psychology or theory of mind? The orthodox answer to this central question of developmental ToM research had long been that around age 4 children begin to apply “belief” and other propositional attitude concepts. This orthodoxy has recently come under serious attack, though, from two sides: Scoffers complain that it over-estimates children’s early competence and claim that a proper understanding of propositional attitudes emerges only much later. Boosters criticize the orthodoxy for (...) underestimating early competence and claim that even infants ascribe beliefs. In this paper, the orthodoxy is defended on empirical grounds against these two kinds of attacks. On the basis of new evidence, not only can the two attacks safely be countered, but the orthodox claim can actually be strengthened, corroborated and refined: what emerges around age 4 is an explicit, unified, flexibly conceptual capacity to ascribe propositional attitudes. This unified conceptual capacity contrasts with the less sophisticated, less unified implicit forms of tracking simpler mental states present in ontogeny long before. This refined version of the orthodoxy can thus most plausibly be spelled out in some form of 2-systems-account of theory of mind. (shrink)

Psycholinguistic theories of meaning have developed within a univocal, explanatory model of science which is concerned with the use of language rather than its creation. Such a model is insufficient to deal with the complex data of human discourse with its multiple domains in speech, writing, reading, and interpreting. While recognizing the necessity of univocal explanatory procedures in the analysis of meaning the hermeneutic circle of explanation and understanding demands that "interpretation" occupy both a preliminary and a posterior place within (...) a scientific procedure. Problems of the univocal procedure in the study of language development, thought processes, and content analyses are more adequately handled by a hermeneutic model, such as the one developed by Paul Ricoeur on the works of Freud. Freudian psychoanalysis while approximating this model tends to be univocal rather than plurivocal in its treatment of the role of symbols in the creation of meaning. A hermeneutic model would place the crucial emphasis on a dialectic of both suspicion and affirmation. (shrink)

Dan Zahavi, the editor of this collection, heads the Center for Subjectivity Research, at the University of Copenhagen. The essays reflect the interests of the Center and seek to address the following issue: To what extent can the current discussion of consciousness in mainstream cognitive science and analytical philosophy of mind profit from insights drawn from the investigations of subjectivity found in the Kantian and post-Kantian tradition as well as in the phenomenological and hermeneutical tradition. The contributions include some that (...) are philosophical, while others relate to issues in empirical science, such as psychopathology, cognitive neuroscience, and developmental psychology.Contributors include Andrew Brook, John Drummond, Shaun Gallagher, Arne Groen, Josef Parnas, Peter Poellner, Sonja Rinofner-Kreidl, Louis Sass, Dieter Teichert and Dan Zahavi. (shrink)

What kind mechanisms one deems central for the evolutionary process deeply influences one's understanding of the nature of organisms, including cognition. Reversely, adopting a certain approach to the nature of life and cognition and the relationship between them or between the organism and its environment should affect one's view of evolutionary theory. This paper explores this reciprocal relationship in more detail. In particular it argues that the view of living and cognitive systems, especially humans, as deeply integrated beings embedded in (...) and transformed by their genetic, epigenetic, behavioral, ecological, socio-cultural and cognitive-symbolic legacies calls for an extended evolutionary synthesis that goes beyond either a theory of genes juxtaposed against a theory of cultural evolution and or even more sophisticated theories of gene-culture coevolution and niche construction. Environments, particularly in the form of developmental environments, do not just select for variation, they also create new variation by influencing development through the reliable transmission of non-genetic but heritable information. This paper stresses particularly views of embodied, embedded, enacted and extended cognition, and their relationship to those aspects of extended inheritance that lie between genetic and cultural inheritance, the still gray area of epigenetic and behavioral inheritance systems that play a role in parental effect. These are the processes that can be regarded as transgenerational developmental plasticity and that I think can most fruitfully contribute to, and be investigated by, developmental psychology. (shrink)

Recent theoretical work in developmental psychology suggests that humans are predisposed to align their mental states with those of other individuals. One way this manifests is in cooperative communication ; that is, intentional communication aimed at aligning individuals’ mental states with respect to events in their shared environment. This idea has received strong empirical support. The purpose of this paper is to extend this account by proposing an integrative model of the biobehavioral dynamics of cooperative communication. Our formulation (...) is based on active inference. Active inference suggests that action-perception cycles operate to minimize uncertainty and optimize an individual’s internal model of the world. We propose that humans are characterized by an evolved adaptive prior belief that their mental states are aligned with, or similar to, those of conspecifics (i.e., that ‘we are the same sort of creature, inhabiting the same sort of niche’). The use of cooperative communication emerges as the principal means to gather evidence for this belief, allowing for the development of a shared narrative that is used to disambiguate interactants’ (hidden and inferred) mental states. Thus, by using cooperative communication, individuals effectively attune to a hermeneutic niche composed, in part, of others’ mental states; and, reciprocally, attune the niche to their own ends via epistemic niche construction. This means that niche construction enables features of the niche to encode precise, reliable cues about the deontic or shared value of certain action policies (e.g., the utility of using communicative constructions to disambiguate mental states, given expectations about shared prior beliefs). In turn, the alignment of mental states (prior beliefs) enables the emergence of a novel, contextualizing scale of cultural dynamics that encompasses the actions and mental states of the ensemble of interactants and their shared environment. The dynamics of this contextualizing layer of cultural organization feedback, across scales, to constrain the variability of the prior expectations of the individuals who constitute it. Our theory additionally builds upon the active inference literature by introducing a new set of neurobiologically plausible computational hypotheses for cooperative communication. We conclude with directions for future research. (shrink)

In their effort to understand some phenomena, mechanisms, or relations between them, scientists observe reality and construct theories and models to explain their observations. The process is interactive: On the one hand, observations lead to formulating certain models and theories. On the other hand, models and theories direct scholars' observations, because they include conceptualizations of reality and also ideas how the observations should be made. Scientists, in fact, behave just like any human being and most of the animals: all create (...) representations and schemata concerning their living environments which then later on help them to behave in adaptive ways (Neisser 1976).Compared to everyday observations that .. (shrink)

"This book is addressed to the one who lives in a passionate quest for deepened awareness, who hungers to touch and taste human existence more intimately, who delights in the celebration of now." "In the era of the multiversity with its fragments of introverted expertise, it does sound absurdly ambitious to make an integrative attempt at synoptic reflection, seeking to conjoin disparate insights from developmental psychology, psychotherapy, ontology, epistemology, ethics, phenomenology, the fine arts, jurisprudence, linguistics, theology, hermeneutics, (...) liturgics, history, and the philosophy of history...Admittedly it is not because I am an expert in any or all of these fields, but instead a human being--a single, experiencing, time-bound, warm-bodied human being--that emboldens me to speak with any assurance about the human situation. More than most other academic bailiwicks, my own academic discipline (theological ethics) invites and demands such integrative reflection on man, culture, time, being and value, dysfunctional and constructive human behavior." "Our thesis: The structure of human awareness emerges directly out of man's temporal situation and his relation to being." (excerpts from the Introduction, by Thomas C. Oden). (shrink)

Considerable fragmentation, and awareness of it, have characterized the field of psychology since its inception. It is suggested that over the years, efforts to reduce uncertainty and overcome fragmentation in psychology have clustered around two broad, opposite strategies which might be termed "scientism" and "constructionism." The first wishes to rely on secure methods and controlled experimentation, the second on a postmodern acceptance of radical heterogeneity and "no truth through method." Some of the shortcomings of these strategies are discussed. (...) A hermeneutic approach centering on dialogue and the idea of social inquiry as a kind of ethical practice is outlined which, it is argued, might have success in incorporating some of the virtues and avoiding the pitfalls of other responses to the problem of fragmentation. (shrink)

Cesario's critiques and suggestions for redesigning social psychology experiments echo Dahl's call for developmental researchers to use experimental and naturalistic methods in a complementary manner for understanding children's development. We provide examples of how naturalistic observations can rectify Cesario's missing flaws for developmental studies investigating children's social biases and help researchers derive theories they can then experimentally test.

Currently, the coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic experienced by the international community has increased the usage frequency of borderless, highly personalized social media platforms of all age groups. Analyzing and modeling texts sent through social media online can reveal the characteristics of the psychological dynamic state and living conditions of social media users during the pandemic more extensively and comprehensively. This study selects the Sina Weibo platform, which is highly popular in China and analyzes the subjective well-being of Weibo users during (...) the COVID-19 pandemic in combination with the machine learning classification algorithm. The study first invokes the SWB classification model to classify the SWB level of original texts released by 1,322 Weibo active users during the COVID-19 pandemic and then combines the latent growth curve model and the latent growth mixture model to investigate the developmental trend and heterogeneity characteristics of the SWB of Weibo users after the COVID-19 outbreak. The results present a downward trend and then an upward trend of the SWB of Weibo users during the pandemic as a whole. There was a significant correlation between the initial state and the development rate of the SWB after the COVID-19 outbreak. LGMM results show that there were two heterogeneous classes of the SWB after the COVID-19 outbreak, and the development rate of the SWB of the two classes was significantly different. The larger class showed a slow growth, while the smaller class showed a rapid growth. Furthermore, the slope means across the two classes were significantly different. Therefore, the individuals with a higher growth rate of SWB exhibited stronger adaptability to the changes in their living environments. These results could help to formulate effective interventions on the mental health level of the public after the public health emergency outbreak. (shrink)

Suggests that because life course narratives change over time, they generate competing accounts of the same events. The attempt to adjudicate between accounts is an empirical hermeneutic enterprise that parallels current issues in the social sciences. The problem of retrospective reevaluation is explored from the perspective of cognitive psychology and psychoanalysis. Insights gained from them are applied to the problem as conceptualized by philosophy, drawing on the similarity of retrospective reevaluation to conceptions of time. This approach is used to (...) understand a life history. 2012 APA, all rights reserved). (shrink)

Based on two workshops held February 1990 in New York and March 1990 in San Francisco. Following the presentation and discussion of three clinical case histories, psychotherapists James F. Masterson, Marian Tolpin, and Peter E. Sifneos compare and contrast developmental, self, and object relations.

This article presents a developmental ecological approach to the emergence and development of metaphor in children, based on the ecological psychology tradition following the work of J.J. Gibson, and its extension into developmental research and theory, as developed by E.J. Gibson and others. This framework suggests that a basic compatibility and meaningfulness exists between the knower and the known, based on the direct perception of affordances. To build an ecological understanding of metaphor we need to clarify how (...) this metaphysical ground plays out in acts of knowing that involve metaphor. In this endeavor, it is important to understand the ontogenesis of novel insightful metaphors and the role of perception. Developmental ecological psychology has repeatedly shown that infants can perceive meta-modal invariants that specify persistence of qualities. Early metaphors are consequences of the process in which invariants over naturally occurring kinds are perceived. Thus, novel metaphor production is an act of situated and experience-dependent perceiving and acting in the ecological world of socially shared meanings. Examples from previous experimental and qualitative research are reviewed to substantiate theoretical claims. (shrink)

The emerging discipline of evolutionary developmental biology has opened up many new lines of investigation into morphological evolution. Here I explore how two of the core theoretical concepts in ‘evo-devo’ – modularity and homology – apply to evolutionary psychology. I distinguish three sorts of module – developmental, functional and mental modules and argue that mental modules need only be ‘virtual’ functional modules. Evolutionary psychologists have argued that separate mental modules are solutions to separate evolutionary problems. I argue (...) that the structure of developmental modules in an organism helps determine what counts as a separate evolutionary problem for that organism. I suggest that homology as an organizing principle for research in evolutionary psychology, has been severely neglected in favor of analogy (adaptive function). I consider some arguments suggesting that determining homology is less epistemically demanding than determining adaptive function and argue that psychological categories defined by homology are, in fact, more suitable objects of psychological – and particularly neuropsychological – investigation than categories defined by analogy. (shrink)

As Hecht points out, finding unequivocal evidence for phylogenetic knowledge structures is problematic, if not impossible. But if phylogeny could be dropped, then internalization starts to resemble the “theory theory” approaches of developmental psychology. For example, an appreciation of falling objects leads to a very strong bias that could be regarded as internalized knowledge acquired during ontogeny. [Hecht; Shepard].

Representational momentum is a well-known phenomenon that occurs when a moving object vanishes suddenly and the memory of its final or vanishing position is displaced forward in the direction of its motion. Many studies have shown evidence of various perceptual and cognitive characteristics of RM in various daily aspects, sports, development, and aging. Here we examined the longitudinal developmental changes in the displacement magnitudes of RM among younger and older nursery school children for pointing and judging tasks. In our (...) experiments, the children were asked to point at by their finger and judge the spatial location of the vanishing point of a moving stimulus. Our results showed that the mean magnitudes of RM significantly decreased from 5- to 6-year-old children for the pointing and judging tasks, although the mean magnitude of RM was significantly greater in the 5-year-old children for the pointing task but not for the judging task. We further examined the developmental changes in RM for a wide range of ages based on data from the present study and our previous study. This ad hoc examination showed that the magnitude of RM was significantly greater in 5-year-old children than in adults for the pointing and judging tasks. Our findings suggest that the magnitude of RM was significantly greater in young children than in adults and significantly decreased in young children through adults for the pointing and judging tasks. (shrink)