Intersection Of Psychology Research Articles

Political psychology.

Political psychology is a dynamic field of research that offers a unique blend of approaches and methods in the social and cognitive sciences. Political psychologists explore the interactions between macrolevel political structures and microlevel factors such as decision-making processes, motivations, and perceptions. In this article, we provide a broad overview of the field, beginning with a brief history of political psychology research and a summary of the primary methodological approaches in the field. We then give a more detailed account of research on ideology and social justice, two topics experiencing a resurgence of interest in current political psychology. Finally, we cover research on political persuasion and voting behavior. By summarizing these major areas of political psychology research, we hope to highlight the wide variety of theoretical and methodological approaches of cognitive scientists working at the intersection of psychology and political science. WIREs Cogn Sci 2014, 5:373-385. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1293 For further resources related to this article, please visit the WIREs website. The authors have declared no conflicts of interest for this article.

Is it inevitable that societies exploit useful technologies?

Is it inevitable that societies exploit useful technologies?

The Poet's Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry, 1830-1870 by Gregory Tate (review)

Reviewed by: The Poet's Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry, 1830-1870 by Gregory Tate Lindsy Lawrence (bio) Gregory Tate , The Poet's Mind: The Psychology of Victorian Poetry, 1830-1870, Oxford English Monographs (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), pp. xi + 201, $110/£60 cloth. Gregory Tate's investigation of the ways Victorian poets explored the embodied mind is a finely constructed analysis of the intersection of psychology and poetics. Moving chronologically from the late 1820s through the end of the 1870s, Tate traces the various ways Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Arthur Clough, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and the spasmodic poets fashioned the embodied mind. This study contributes to the field by more fully exploring the ways in which Victorian poets contemplated the mind's processes, physical sensations, and emotive effects. Drawing from the work of Philip Davis on intellectual culture and Isobel Armstrong on poetic theory, Tate argues for the influence of associationist psychology on Victorian poetics—in terms of both content and form. His methodology includes close reading of selected works by the poets in question as well as consideration of the work of nineteenth-century thinkers and writers on associationist psychology, physiology, evolution, and poetics. Of particular interest to readers of VPR will be Tate's use of periodical poetry reviews from a range of journals, including the Athenaeum, Edinburgh Review, Examiner, London Quarterly Review, North British Review, Monthly Repository, and Westminster Review. While this is not a work devoted to periodical study, Tate does more than merely mine the periodical record. The first chapter analyzing Tennyson's and Browning's early works, in particular, uses contemporary periodical reviews to establish how both poets and reviewers drew from Romantic discourse on poetic feeling and early associationist psychology. [End Page 572] Tate also demonstrates how these poets were influenced by the emerging science of psychology through careful attention to print history. In his later chapters on Tennyson, Browning, and Eliot, Tate uses the contents of these writers' libraries to support his claims about their use of psychological theory. This evidence is most compelling in the chapter on Browning's epic psychology in The Ring and the Book. Tate notes two physiological psychology books in the Brownings' collection—Julius Althaus's The Functions of the Brain (1884) and James John Garth Wilkinson's The Human Body and Its Connexion with Man (1851)—arguing that Browning "was aware of the tenets of physiological psychology" (167). While it is an argument of correlation, his later suggestion—that Browning also would have been familiar with James Hinton's two articles on psychology and the physical processes of the brain, published in the Cornhill in 1862, and later George Henry Lewes's "The Heart and the Brain," published in the Fortnightly Review in 1865—is supported by convincing biographical evidence. Browning was asked in March 1862 to edit the Cornhill, and he wrote to Isabella Blagden in August 1865 praising the first installment of Anthony Trollope's The Belton Estate, which appeared in the same issue as Lewes's article. The strength of this evidence adds weight to Tate's close reading of Browning's poem. Overall, this work elegantly explores the intersection of nineteenth-century poetics and psychology. Lindsy Lawrence University of Arkansas, Fort Smith Lindsy Lawrence Lindsy Lawrence is Assistant Professor of English, Rhetoric, and Writing at the University of Arkansas-Fort Smith. She teaches a variety of courses on nineteenth-century British literature, with special attention to publication history, gender roles, and the conventions of serial fiction. She is currently working on a book manuscript examining how domestic serials functioned as part of the editorial voice of the nineteenth-century family literary magazine. She is co-director of the Periodical Poetry Index. Copyright © 2013 The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals

Berguer, Rochedieu: Flournoy's Legacy in the Genevan School of the Psychology of Religion

In 1891 Thέodore Flournoy (1854-1920) became the first Professor of Psychology to be appointed at the University of Geneva, and his teaching regularly included references to religion. His successor, Georges Berguer, who taught psychology of religion, began as privat-docent in 1910 and received a full professorship in Religious Psychology and the History of Religion in 1928. French-speaking Switzerland is one of the rare places in the world where psychology of religion has been taught continuously since the very beginning of the 20th century. The aim of this article is to shed light on this tradition and especially on Georges Berguer (retired in 1944) and Edmond Rochedieu (retired in 1965) who succeeded Flournoy. This historical enterprise concludes with some reflections on the role of the psychology of religion at the intersection of psychology and the study of religions.

Measuring the Complexity of the Law: The United States Code

Einstein’s razor, a corollary of Ockham’s razor, is often paraphrased as follows: make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler. This rule of thumb describes the challenge that designers of a legal system face — to craft simple laws that produce desired ends, but not to pursue simplicity so far as to undermine those ends. Complexity, simplicity’s inverse, taxes cognition and increases the likelihood of suboptimal decisions. In addition, unnecessary legal complexity can drive a misallocation of human capital toward comprehending and complying with legal rules and away from other productive ends.While many scholars have offered descriptive accounts or theoretical models of legal complexity, empirical research to date has been limited to simple measures of size, such as the number of pages in a bill. No extant research rigorously applies a meaningful model to real data. As a consequence, we have no reliable means to determine whether a new bill, regulation, order, or precedent substantially effects legal complexity.In this paper, we address this need by developing a proposed empirical framework for measuring relative legal complexity. This framework is based on “knowledge acquisition,” an approach at the intersection of psychology and computer science, which can take into account the structure, language, and interdependence of law. We then demonstrate the descriptive value of this framework by applying it to the U.S. Code’s Titles, scoring and ranking them by their relative complexity. Our framework is flexible, intuitive, and transparent, and we offer this approach as a first step in developing a practical methodology for assessing legal complexity.

Globalization, Psychology, and Social Issues Research:An Introduction and Conceptual Framework

This manuscript provides an introduction to the JSI special issue on The Intersection of Psychology and Globalization. We provide both theoretical and applied rationale for why the discipline of psychology would be well served by entering into the academic discourse on globalization. We present a multifaceted definition of globalization and review extant social science research on globalization that speaks to the psychological implications of globalization. We also discuss Bronfrenbrenner's ecological model as an appropriate theoretical framework to link individual health, behavior and attitudes to macro socioeconomic processes. With this as a backdrop we introduce each of the manuscripts in this special issue with a focus on their specific contributions to developing a theoretical and empirical foundation for understanding and responding to the relationship between psychology and globalization.

Efficient coding and the neural representation of value

To survive in a dynamic environment, an organism must be able to effectively learn, store, and recall the expected benefits and costs of potential actions. The nature of the valuation and decision processes is thus of fundamental interest to researchers at the intersection of psychology, neuroscience, and economics. Although normative theories of choice have outlined the theoretical structure of these valuations, recent experiments have begun to reveal how value is instantiated in the activity of neurons and neural circuits. Here, we review the various forms of value coding that have been observed in different brain systems and examine the implications of these value representations for both neural circuits and behavior. In particular, we focus on emerging evidence that value coding in a number of brain areas is context dependent, varying as a function of both the current choice set and previously experienced values. Similar contextual modulation occurs widely in the sensory system, and efficient coding principles derived in the sensory domain suggest a new framework for understanding the neural coding of value.

An editorial overview

Now is an excellent time to be doing research at the intersection of psychology and law. In the last few years, both the legal system and the legal academic community have taken more and more interest in the empirical findings of cognitive and social psychologists. Much of this interest has been provoked by the large number of convicted people who have been exonerated by DNA evidence. Examination of their cases reveals that most are associated with one (or more) of the following problems: bad eyewitness testimony, a false confession, or flawed forensic evidence. These issues are ones that psychologists have been investigating for years. For those of you new to this area, we recommend Elizabeth Loftus’s foundational work on so many areas of memory, Gary Wells’s work on eyewitness identification, Saul Kassin’s work on false confessions, and Reid Hastie’s work on jury decision making. All have written for both psychological and legal audiences.

Critical Race Realism: Intersections of Psychology, Race, and Law. By Gregory S. Parks, Shayne Jones, and W. Jonathan Cardi, eds. New York: The New Press, 2008. Pp. 340. $60.00 cloth.

<i>Critical Race Realism: Intersections of Psychology, Race, and Law</i>. By Gregory S. Parks, Shayne Jones, and W. Jonathan Cardi, eds. New York: The New Press, 2008. Pp. 340. $60.00 cloth.

Cinéma et sciences du psychisme en 1900: la névrose, la paramnésie, la transe

In this article, conceived of in an epistemological perspective, film history and history of psychology intersect in order to show how subject models are circulating around 1900 which are impregnated with scientific culture and social modernity.These models have the special quality of being defined first in pathological terms because they result from a diagnosis of the evils caused by the new industrial and capitalist society. However, the position required by the cinematic apparatus produces a spectator who is described as a subject-machine with the particular psychophysiological states that precisely concern the neurotic, the paramnesiac and the sleepwalker. If our point is to show how close the (para)medical and cinematic subjects are, we will also try to see how far cinema interacts with phenomena related to urbanity and other developments of Western civilisation, the latter being considered as a transforming agent of the psychic apparatus.

Evolutionary forensic psychology: Darwinian foundations of crime and law

The field of forensic psychology explores the intersection of psychology and the law. The purpose of this book is to examine topics in the field using the powerful, multidisciplinary, conceptually integrated approach that the natural sciences have embraced for decades with great success. Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection is the meta-theoretical framework that unifies the field of biology. It unites research and understanding of the development, control, and organization of behavior. The study of humans, which includes all of the social sciences, is part of the field of biology. Darwin's theory provides a powerful meta-theoretical framework that can unify and energize forensic psychology, just as it has the biological sciences. Evolutionary processes undoubtedly shaped physiological characteristics to help solve problems of survival and reproduction. The lungs, for example, with their vast surface area and moist membranes are marvelous adaptions for extracting oxygen and releasing carbon dioxide. Natural selection is the only known process capable of shaping complex functional mechanisms. Just as it shaped physiological adaptations with specific problem-solving functions, it also shaped our thoughts and emotions to guide behaviors toward solving recurrent problems of survival and reproduction. With this logic, we can use knowledge of ancestral problems to guide our understanding of how the mind works. Evolutionary Forensic Psychology is a necessary step toward a unified and complete understanding of psychology and the law. It recognizes that crimes such as murder, non-lethal violence, rape, and theft are manifestations of evolutionarily recurrent selection when they gave individuals an advantage in competition for resources. Each of the chapters that comprise this volume has been selected to provide the first unified examination of important research contributions and future directions of Evolutionary Forensic Psychology.

Historical intersections of psychology, religion, and politics in national contexts.

Various types of psychology have come into existence in and have been interacting with a plurality of contexts, contexts that have been radically varying in different states or nations. One important factor in the development of psychology has been the multiple relationships to the Christian religion, whether understood as an institution, a worldview, or a form of personal spirituality. The articles in this issue focus on the intertwinements between institutional religion and national political structures and on their influence on developing forms of psychology in four different national contexts: Spain, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Within these four settings, aspects of the ways in which varying forms of Christian religion coconstituted, facilitated, and shaped psychology, theoretically, practically, and institutionally, are examined. The formative power of the religions was not independent of the relationships between religion and political power, but rather mediated by these.

CRIME ALERT!

Crime alerts are meant to raise community awareness and identify individual criminal suspects; they are not expected to affect attitudes and beliefs toward the social group to which an individual suspect belongs. However, psychological principles of learning, categorization, and memory predict that what is learned about an instance can color perception of an entire category. At the intersection of psychology, criminal justice, sociology, and media studies, two experiments were conducted to test the effect that providing individual racial identity in crime alerts has on racial group stereotypes. In Experiment 1, participants visualized four scenarios involving Black or White would-be criminals. Results revealed that in the case where Black would-be criminals were made salient in memory, participants demonstrated significantly more negative implicit stereotypes toward Blacks as a group compared with a condition in which White would-be criminals were more salient in memory. In Experiment 2, participants read a written description of a crime scene with a suspect who was either depicted as White or Black, and then imagined the suspect. On both implicit and explicit measures of group stereotypes obtained afterward, participants who read about a Black criminal reported and revealed more anti-Black0pro-White stereotypes than did those who read about a White criminal. Crime alerts that mention racial identity, whatever their benefit, come with the burden of shifting stereotypes of social groups. In this context, the value of racial identification in crime alerts warrants reconsideration.

Clarification and Purpose of the Race-Based Traumatic Stress Injury Model

The author responds to the four reactions authored by Thompson-Miller and Feagin, Griffin, Speight, and Bryant-Davis in this issue. In responding, he clarifies the purpose of the model presented in his major contribution and adds information about the model's legal and forensic applications that he did not touch on with any detail. He also discusses the purpose of the use of “injury” to describe the harm of racism, the intersection of psychology and law, and how legal definitions are not useful in the effort to understand the mental health effects of racism. He further points out that both objective and subjective stressors are harmful since, where racism is concerned, there seems to be a tendency to discount subjective experience. Lastly, the author acknowledges points made by the reaction authors that extend and expand the model of race-based traumatic stress injury he presented.

Interrogation: Psychology & Ethics

This paper explores issues related to the intersection of psychology and the military, specifically, recent issues raised of psychologists and psychiatrists consulting various military operations in the interrogation of prisoners. The teams were coined Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCT) and their existence was revealed in 2004, by the international Red Cross.

Life cycle happiness and its sources: Intersections of psychology, economics, and demography

In the United States happiness rises slightly, on average, from ages 18 to midlife, and declines slowly thereafter. This pattern for the total population is the net result of disparate trends in the satisfaction people get from various life domains: their financial situation, family life, health, and work. The slight rise in happiness through midlife is due chiefly to growing satisfaction with one’s family life and work, which together more than offset decreasing satisfaction with health. Beyond midlife, happiness edges downward as a continuing decline in satisfaction with health is joined by diminishing satisfaction with one’s family situation and work; these negative trends are offset considerably, however, by a sizeable upturn in later life in people’s satisfaction with their financial situation. These findings come from an analysis of the United States General Social Surveys, using the demographer’s synthetic panel technique. They support neither the mainstream economics view that well-being depends only on one’s objective conditions nor the psychologists’ strong setpoint model in which adaptation to such conditions is rapid and complete. They are consistent with a “bottom up” model in which happiness is the net outcome of both objective and subjective factors in various life domains.

Beginnings, Mass Murder, and Aftermath of the Holocaust: Where History and Psychology Intersect

Beginnings, Mass Murder, and Aftermath of the Holocaust: Where History and Psychology Intersect

Beginnings, Mass Murder, and Aftermath of the Holocaust: Where History and Psychology Intersect

1Kenyon College Beginnings, Mass Murder, and Aftermath of the Holocaust: Where History and Psychology Intersect NormanSolkoff Lanham, MDUniversity Press of America 2001376$65.00

Beginnings, Mass Murder, and Aftermath of the Holocaust: Where History and Psychology Intersect

Beginnings, Mass Murder, and Aftermath of the Holocaust: Where History and Psychology Intersect

Beginnings, Mass Murder, and Aftermath of the Holocaust: Where History and Psychology Intersect

NORMAN SOLKOFF: Beginnings, Mass Murder, and Aftermath of the Holocaust: Where History and Psychology Intersect. Lanham, NY: Oxford University Press of America, 2001, 357 pp., ISBN 0-7618-2028-0. This compelling book was inspired by a collaborative teaching effort between a historian and a psychologist. The historian, William Sheridan Allen writes in the foreword: I feel that the book should be an excellent resource for both college students and educated lay persons grappling with the major issues of the He is correct. His colleague, the psychologist Norman Solkoff, has written a masterful text filled with useful information concisely presented and eminently readable. Professor Solkoff offers commentary and insights from a psychological perspective that inform that complicated Jewish tragedy known as the Holocaust. The twelve chapters that comprise this book are cohesive and their organization is explained by the author (pp. 9-10). The chapter Authoritarianism and Conformity is an excellent review of studies relevant to human behavior, generally, but made explicit in the context of the history of Nazi Germany. The focus on the Holocaust enables Solkoff to illustrate how behavioral theories and dynamics manifested themselves in the behavior of Nazis, specifically, the German people, generally, and in the deep-- rooted anti-Semitism of most European countries. The first four chapters which include Anti-Semitism and Aggression and Violence provide the necessary background for a fascinating treatment of the succeeding discussion of Genocide: Euthanasia in Nazi Germany, Hitler, and Leading Nazis. The chapter on anti-Semitism was particularly unsettling. Solkoff describes how anti-Semitism fulfills psychological needs of anti-Semites. His considered overview, including how the defense mechanisms of externalization, projection, and displacement are utilized to identify and denigrate a particular victim group, shows a frighteningly close relationship to modern-day antiSemitism now spreading through the Islamic world. The similarities to pre-World War II European anti-Semitism are inescapable. It is interesting that Solkoff appears comfortable with psychodynamic terminology in explaining anti-Semitism, yet frequently dismisses psychoanalytic theory. However, he does so correctly because psychoanalysis failed to adapt its potentially useful constructs to the requirements of describing survivor trauma and to the psychotherapeutic treatment of Holocaust survivors. It is, therefore, no surprise that Bruno Bettelheim attracts Solkoff's attention in Surviving the Ghetto and Camps. Bettelheim's analytic observations as described in a 1943 article about his prewar incarceration in Dachau and Buchenwald, smeared every fellow prisoner with his biased interpretations, particularly that inmates regressed to an earlier and childlike state (p. 199). He asserted that it was every man for himself and ignored evidence that some inmates made heroic efforts to support one another. Bettelheim continued to pontificate on the coping behavior of camp inmates well into the 1970s, gradually obscuring the fact that he was not in death camps and contrary to eyewitness testimony from death-camp survivors like the authors Elie Wiesel and Primo Levi, and psychiatrists Viktor Frankl and Leo Eitinger. Regretfully, Solkoff is forced to return to Bettelheim again in his chapter on Complicity and Resistance because Bettelheim also spent his postwar years expounding on what Jews should have done to resist. Mostly, resistance proved the quickest path to a gruesome death and, of course, Bettelheim himself did not resist. As he wrote: [S]urvival was largely a matter of luck, of managing not to be killed (p. 201). And that was in a camp not yet committed to the murder of every inmate. Bettelheim's postwar Holocaust-related writings are of little value and have been discredited by a large number of far more credible survivors and authors, (Richard Pollak, Leo Eitinger, Ernst Federn to name but a few). …