Psychological Agency Research Articles

The Psychological Contract and Career Agency of Young Scientists in the Entrepreneurial University

This study examines employee agency in psychological contracts by exploring how young scientists proactively shape their careers in response to unmet expectations induced by academic entrepreneuria...

Mothers' reading skills and child survival in Nigeria: Examining the relevance of mothers' decision-making power

Mothers' literacy skills are emerging as a key determinant of children's health and survival in low-income contexts, with emphasis on the cognitive and psychological agency that literacy skills provide. This work has clearly established a strong association between mothers' reading skills—a key subcomponent of broader literacy and language skills—and child mortality. However, this relatively nascent literature has not yet considered how broader social structures condition the process. In Nigeria and in sub-Saharan Africa more broadly, gender-based social inequality constrains many mothers' decision-making power over children's health matters; this structural feature may condition the association between mothers' reading skills and child mortality. This paper uses data from the 2003 Nigerian Demographic and Health Survey (N = 12,076) to test the conditionality of the relationship between mothers' reading skills and child survival on mothers' decision-making power, highlighting how structural realities should factor more heavily into this individual-action-oriented literature. Among Nigerian children whose mothers have decision-making power, mothers' reading skills convey a 27 percent lower risk of child mortality; however, for children whose mothers lack decision-making power, mothers' reading skills do not yield a significant survival advantage. Overall, these findings support the need for future work to further analyze how broader social structures condition the benefits of mothers' reading skills for children's health.

South African literature in the time of AIDS

The political response to the crisis of HIV/AIDS in South Africa has been notoriously slow and chequered during the late 1990s and early 2000s. A sustained literary response, alert to the impact of the disease has been even slower, although this gathered pace by the mid-2000s in South Africa. This article investigates a number of these significant literary representations in relation to the understanding of HIV/AIDS in the South African public sphere. It focuses upon the ways in which representations of HIV/AIDS raise semiotic and political complexities, the problem of granting or denying sympathy, issues of literature’s attention to silences and differences, especially regarding those who have been culturally marginalized, and the ways in which HIV/AIDS is linked to changing representations of gender in South Africa. It seeks to demonstrate that, no longer constructing HIV/AIDS sufferers as dying subjects for whom nothing can be done, these literary narratives engineer a symbolic reorganization of subjectivity in the public sphere. Literary representations form part of a body of texts that are exhorting more transparency in public debate, demonstrating ways in which people can take greater responsibility for their health, and representing ordinary citizens as subjects with social, political, and psychological power and agency to alter their “life roles”. The article examines the ways in which this symbolic reorganization of subjectivity not only reflects but also projects a change in socio-medical power relations within South African society. Building a social responsibility, imagining new forms of citizenship, and creating new spaces for social justice, such literary narratives demonstrate a narrative transition from a depressed, debilitating doom to a new defiant defence; and in so doing, contribute to a transformative intervention in the public discourse of HIV/AIDS.

Theorizing Relational Agency

Gergen's conception of human agency as a relational phenomenon and its adequacy to the tasks of psychological description and explanation are examined. A contrasting view is discussed that shows how psychologically capable agency can be rendered intelligible only by attending to its developmental emergence in historically established sociocultural contexts. It is argued that an elaborated developmental account is necessary to comprehend how psychological agency, once it has emerged, is a unique form of relational being capable of transcending its biophysical and sociocultural origins. From this perspective, agentive personhood is not simply “a social performance,” but rather, an active structuring of existence.

Situated Experience: Psychological Agency, Meaning, and Morality in Worldly Contexts

This article formulates a post-Cartesian perspective on psychology agency. The author proposes a theory of situated agency that overcomes the exclusive association of agency with either the isolated and autonomous individual mind or with the structures and contexts in which the person exists. Using an approach grounded in social theory and philosophical hermeneutics, the author suggests that agency is generated through dialogical engagement and embedded in social, cultural, and biological contexts. Agency is located neither strictly in the individual nor in contexts, but in the intersubjective, generative space of affect, imagination, and cognition. In developing a clinically relevant theory of situated agency, the article draws on the ideas of Anthony Giddens, Martin Heidegger, and Hans-Georg Gadamer.

Personal Agency across Generations: Evolutionary Psychology or Religious Belief?

Although the authors of modern scientific psychology agreed on precious little, Freud and Jung both insisted that any complete science of psychology requires some way to explain the intergenerational inheritance of character traits or personal habits of mind and action. Yet neither they nor their heirs in contemporary philosophy, psychology or cognitive science have been able to provide a plausible conceptual framework, much less a mechanism to account for the conservation of forms of personal agency across multiple lives. Is there a role in contemporary philosophy and psychology for an intergenerational theory of human agency informed by the Buddhist theory of karma? This paper argues the affirmative case, offering both a current scientific reading of karma and a Buddhist scientific approach to the metaphysical and metapsychological problems caused by the divergence of modern science and religion in the West. The model of intergenerational agency I present here is based on a comparative study of ordinary language philosophy in ancient India and the contemporary West. Its premise is that most theories of moral development and psychological agency are limited by the insistence on a substantial or essential ground for the designation of a person or self. Ordinary language philosophy offers greater conceptual freedom because it accepts a distinctively human theory of self as a linguistic construction that refers to mind/body systems and elements in which there is no substantial or essential self. This conceptual freedom permits a model of human agency as an open system of linguistic reference that can be transmitted across generations in the course of language acquisition. Such a system is not merely discursive in that language serves to guide the social construction not just of discursive thinking but also of learned patterns of perception and action mastered together with language in the course of neuropsychological development. This model has implications for both Buddhist and Western worldview, popular and scientific, as well as for bioethics and the practice of psychotherapy.

Mixed agency in military psychology: Applying the American Psychological Association ethics code.

Mixed agency in military psychology: Applying the American Psychological Association ethics code.

Middle-Ground Theorizing, Realism, and Objectivity in Psychology

Held's (2007) critical analysis of the ontological and epistemological positions of theoretical psychologists whom she labels “middle-ground theorists” is examined, and her own positions concerning realism, truth, and objectivity in psychology are considered. Several key misinterpretations and misunderstandings are identified in Held's account, and her own theoretical framework is judged to be untenable with respect to the phenomena of psychology. In particular, Held's equation of interpretation with subjectivist anti-objectivism, her commitment to discourse-independent, universal claims to truth with respect to psychological phenomena, and her failure to grasp the nature of constitutive relations between psychological phenomena and the sociocultural practices in which they are embedded cloud her interpretations of the theoretical perspectives she attacks. She is thus prevented from perceiving the impossibility of achieving the kind of de-contextualized, psychological objectivism she desires as a basis for psychological agency.

Psychological Agency: Theory, Practice, and Culture

Psychological Agency: Theory, Practice, and Culture

Fundamentally Embodied

This article develops a post-Cartesian, embodied conception of psychological agency. In contrast to reductionist approaches to agency in traditional intrapsychic and interpersonal psychoanalytic models, I present psychological agency as a fundamentally embodied, affective, and contextualized process. As such, I maintain that the multidimensional nature of agency can only truly be captured from an interdisciplinary approach that draws equally psychoanalysis, phenomenological philosophy, and neuroscience.

Normativity without artifice

To ascribe a telos is to ascribe a norm or standard of performance. That fact underwrites the plausibility of, say, teleological theories of mind. Teleosemantics, for example, relies on the normative character of teleology to solve the problem of “intentional inexistence”: a misrepresentation is just a malfunction. If the teleological ascriptions of such theories to natural systems, e.g., the neurological structures of the brain, are to be literally true, then it must be literally true that norms can exist independent of intentional and psychological agency. Davies, for one, has argued that such norms are impossible within a naturalistic worldview. Consequently, teleological theories of mind, for example, cannot be literally true. I will show, however, that the truth conditions on normative statements do not presuppose intentional and psychological agency and, further, that a selectional regime is one naturalistic mechanism that satisfies those truth conditions. Norms, then, exist in the world independent of intentional and psychological agency.

Psychology's interpretive turn: the search for truth and agency in theoretical and philosophical psychology

The author skillfully crafts the argument that any philosophy of psychology that in principle precludes the possibility of objective psychological knowledge and truth also undermines an agency founded on rational interpretive grounds. An especially timely critique, as concerns about psychology's fragmentation mount and attempts at unification proliferate.

Self—Reproach and Personal Responsibility

A confusion exists between the aims of psychotherapy of diminishing self—reproach, on the one hand, and increasing the experience of personal responsibility, on the other. In order to clarify this problem a distinction is made between moral responsibility, central to self—reproach, and psychological responsibility or agency. Self—reproach is shown to be inimical to the experience of psychological responsibility, with reference to psychotherapy of a case of severe obsessive self—reproach.

Creativity and Resilience in the African American Experience.

In this article I maintain that aspects of Rychlak's (1994) humanistic notion of psychological agency, particularly his view of human dialectical thinking capacity, can be used to show how African Americans have sustained their creativity and resilience in spite of the continually oppressive circumstances that have historically characterized their situation. To focus on dialectic thinking capacities is to emphasize the imaginative abilities of human beings. In this regard I show how humanistic psychologists and scholars in the humanities share a recognition of the active use of their imaginative faculties by African Americans. Applying such capacities to their historical circumstances has been essential to the ability of African Americans to develop their human qualities in spite of the obstacles placed in front of them.

Agency and Purpose in Narrative Therapy: Questioning the Postmodern Rejection of Metanarrative

Postmodern ideas have led to increased interest in narrative in the domains of both theology and psychotherapy. Narrative theology allows the concept of an intrinsic human telos, a divinely created purpose which constitutes the perfection of a human life. Socially constructed understandings of the institution of therapy, however, and postmodern ideological commitments regarding the nature of metanarratives, make it difficult for narrative therapists to consider this theological possibility. This paper will examine the concept of agency in narrative psychology and therapy, and the moral questions that exist at the boundaries of these disciplines, exploring the possible clinical significance of including a teleological assumption in their theoretical core.

Brief report: Construct validity of two identity status measures: the EIPQ and the EOM-EIS-II

The present study was designed to examine construct validity of two identity status measures, the Ego Identity Process Questionnaire (EIPQ; J. Adolescence 18 (1995) 179) and the Extended Objective Measure of Ego Identity Status II (EOM-EIS-II; J. Adolescent Res. 1 (1986) 183). Construct validity was operationalized in terms of how identity status classifications generated by the EIPQ and EOM-EIS related to a measure of psychological agency, the Multi-Measure Agentic Personality Scale (MAPS; J. Adolescence 20 (1997) 421). Results indicated that, for the most part, the agentic personality scales differentiated the EIPQ diffused and moratorium statuses from the foreclosed and achieved statuses, whereas the agentic personality scales differentiated the EOM-EIS-II achieved status from the other three statuses. The EIPQ is recommended as the preferred instrument for making contrasts between or among identity statuses, whereas the EOM-EIS-II is recommended when the objective is to consider continuous measures of the identity statuses.

The Existential Theory of Mind

The primary causal explanatory model for interpreting behavior, theory of mind, may have expanded into corridors of human cognition that have little to do with the context in which it evolved, questioning the suitability of domain-specific accounts of mind reading. Namely, philosophical–religious reasoning is a uniquely derived explanatory system anchored in intentionality that does not clearly involve behavior. The presence of an existential theory of mind (EToM) suggests that individuals perceive some nondescript or culturally elaborated (e.g., God) psychological agency as having encoded communicative intentions in the form of life events, similar to a person encoding communicative intentions in deictic gestures. The emergence of EToM is discussed from ontogenetic and phylogenetic perspectives; autism is examined to determine whether alternate core explanatory models (e.g., folk physics) are used by those with deficits in theory of mind to derive existential meaning.

Waging War for the Lord: Counterrevolutionary Ritual in Rural Western France, 1801-1906

Introduction Long Live Jesus! Long Live France! We promise it in this holy place, We will uphold our belief: Christ is King, Christ is God! Christ is King, Christ is God! ... That which the Church teaches us, We affirm it just the same, That in order for Jesus to triumph and reign, We will fight until the death .... May we be able to see all of France Under the flag of the Sacred Heart And repeating, happy and proud Jesus Christ reigns! He is the victor!1 In the course of their pilgrimage to the grotto of Lourdes in 1877 Catholics from the Diocese of Nantes sang these lyrics-much to the chagrin of police authorities, who seized a copy of the hymnal for their own safekeeping. The police probably procured the hymnal because the words were politically explosive on several counts. The allusions to Christ as a monarch, the admonition that one must fight for Jesus until the death, and the mention of a flag bearing the Sacred Heart of Jesus were all likely propellants for civil unrest. Such lyrics are relevant to the contemporary observer, but not merely because they reveal one-time political strife; just as significantly, they illustrate the character of Catholicism practiced in this region of France during the nineteenth century. Indeed, the words exemplify how the militancy and defiance that had characterized the counterrevolutionary struggles in the west during the 1790's became an integral part of religious ritual, including the singing of hymns, in the region during the concordatory period.2 That there was an inextricable link between the Counterrevolution and religion in certain sectors of western France during the nineteenth century is by no means a new historical revelation; for almost a century scholars have examined this relationship and, accordingly, have utilized different frameworks to interpret it.3 Andre Siegfried, for example, discussed the clerical character of the west and concluded that peasant deference to the clergy and large landowners was central to the formation of conservative political opinion during the early Third Republic.4 Many years later Paul Bois examined the department of the Sarthe, where much of the Chouannerie unfolded, and argued that economic relationships between the rural and urban sectors of the department shaped not only political opinions, but religious comportment as well.5 Most recently, Jean-Clement Martin has tried to explain the counterrevolutionary quality of religion in the west in terms of collective memory. For Martin the link between religion and civil war was indicative of the region's penchant not only to remember counterrevolution, but to make such remembrance a component of its identity.6 All of these have contributed to an understanding of the Catholic-counterrevolution connection; yet an argument can be made that explaining religious belief and practice in terms of political, economic, sociological, or even mnemonic phenomena is far from adequate. Although clearly influenced by outside social, economic, and cultural factors, religion is an independent variable that can take on its own logic and momentum. Simply put, religious activity cannot be reduced to a mere epiphenomenon of political, socio-economic, or psychological agency.7 Similar to the studies of Siegfried, Bois, and Martin, this article will consider the character of Catholicism in a counterrevolutionary region of western France during the nineteenth century. But as opposed to previous studies, this article emphasizes that religiously inspired activity cannot be fully understood without penetrating the spiritual logic of the actors involved. Thus if we seek a deeper understanding of the link between counterrevolution and Catholicism in the region, we must grasp the religious rationale of those who forged it. This study also presupposes that such rationale is nowhere more apparent than in the standardized, symbolic, and performative activities of religion commonly known as ritual. …

Individuality in Cultural Context

In recent decades social science writing has given renewed attention to the notion of the self in human functioning. One tradition in social science writing has emphasized the importance of sociocultural influences on self-development, and some theorists seem to argue that such factors are primary in understanding the sense of individuality. This paper takes issue with the strong statement of this `social constructionist' view. While it is true that the content of personhood is fashioned in social context and varies across cultures, irreducible processes of individual human psychological agency also contribute to the development and functioning of the person. The universal capacity for `dialectical' thinking is discussed here as one such process. The importance of individual agency is highlighted in an example from a `sociocentrically' organized society. Both social and individual psychological perspectives are necessary to obtain a better grasp of the complexity of individuality.

Dimensions of the Male Gender Role: A Confirmatory Analysis in Men and Women

As researchers become more interested instudying the influences of the male gender role onpeople's physical and psychological well-being, measuresof several male role domains have been created,including psychological agency, traditional attitudestowards men, and masculine gender role stress (MGRS).These measures of the male gender role, however,typically have been constructed and validated using only samples of men. This restriction introducesquestions about the reliability and validity of theseinstruments in samples of women, leading to problemswhen generalizing findings to this group. The present study addressed these issues by examining thefactor structure, factor correlations, and latent meansof these three male role measures for a sample of mostlyCaucasian men and women, using multiple group confirmatory factor analytic techniques.Results showed only the dimensionality of the agenticpersonality traits differed significantly for men andwomen. The interrelationships among and latent means of agency, attitudes, and MGRS differed by sex.These findings demonstrate the utility of the currentconceptualization of sex and gender; in other words,that gender is not totally determined by sexand that men and women internalize many of the samegender cues, but differentially endorse them to varyingdegrees.