New Ideas In Psychology Research Articles

About the same thing in a different way: wording and experienced emotions in the understanding of official letters

Abstract Reading official letters and being able to react to them appropriately is part of the daily life of every adult in many countries. Although the history of the plain language movement dates to the past century, it is only now that efforts are being made in Poland to adapt official documents to their audience. In this paper, we describe the results of a study (N = 685) in which we examined how particular linguistic forms and text structure affect the reception of an official-looking text – comprehension as well as emotions experienced, trust in the office, feelings of helplessness in the situation of reading the writing, and many other variables. Based on Imbir’s (2016, New Ideas in Psychology, 43, 39–49), two-system theory of emotions, we aim to examine how emotions – triggered by these complex stimuli – affect their processing. We hope that the results of our interdisciplinary research will answer the questions and hypotheses posed by researchers and find application in the reforms currently underway. We believe that by linking findings from cognitive psychology, the psychology of emotions and linguistics, we will also expand knowledge in the broad discussion on overcoming barriers between administrative offices and target audiences.

The manipulation of task constraints and the effect on creative performance of youth soccer players

Creativity is a popular topic that has been increasingly researched over the years. Recently, creativity is suggested as a relational concept (Zahno & Hossner, 2020). This conceptualization implies that creativity is not solely an individual ability. By contrast, creative actions emerge in the athlete’s search to adapt to task and environmental constraints (Orth et al., 2017; Withagen & van der Kamp, 2018). Manipulating task constraints that serve to increase variability might, therefore, evoke creative actions. Such manipulations in soccer are often conducted in training situations with small sided games. This was recently shown with a numerical assessment of creative actions comparing small sided soccer games (SSGs) with 11v11 matches in elite adult soccer players (Caso & van der Kamp, 2020). They found that players performed more actions, a broader action repertoire and more creative actions in smaller formats (5v5, 6v6 and 7v7) than in an 11v11 format. The purely quantitative method of Caso & van der Kamp (2020), however, uses an arbitrarily 5% benchmark for originality. More importantly, although subjective, the coaches opinions are not meaningless and should not be neglected.
 Our research examined whether the latter task manipulation also increased the action repertoire and creative performance of elite youth soccer players (O11-O13). A numerical method was introduced, assessing creative performances as a frequency of the action types emerging in an environment. A notational video-analysis identified all (not-) functional actions. Next, a threshold defined whether the action was original. This threshold has been determined with expert coaches ranking action types following the procedure of the consensual assessment technique (CAT; Amabile, 1996). If the action was both original and functional, then it was defined a creative action. The data consisted of 293 minutes small sided game (4v4) and 263 minutes regular sided game (11v11). Results indicated that small sided games hold relative more actions, more functional action and more creative actions compared with regular sided games. This is in line with previous studies, that small sided games induce more variation of actions which increase the possible emergence of creative actions (Orth et al., 2017).
 References
 Amabile, T. M., Amabile, T. M., Collins, M. A., Conti, R., Phillips, E., Picariello, M., Ruscio, J., & Whitney, D. (1996). Creativity in Context: Update to The Social Psychology of Creativity (1st ed.). Routledge.
 Caso, S., & van der Kamp, J. (2020). Variability and creativity in small-sided conditioned games among elite soccer players. Psychology of Sport and Exercise, 48, Article 101645. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2019.101645
 Orth, D., van der Kamp, J., Memmert, D., & Savelsbergh, G. J. P. (2017). Creative motor actions as emerging from movement variability. Frontiers in Psychology, 8, Article 1903. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01903
 Withagen, R., & van der Kamp, J. (2018). An ecological approach to creativity in making. New Ideas in Psychology,49, 1–6. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.newideapsych.2017.11.002
 Zahno, S., & Hossner, E.-J. (2020). On the issue of ceveloping creative players in team sports: A systematic review and critique from a functional perspective. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, Article 575475. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.575475

The Gestation of German Biology: Philosophy and Physiology from Stahl to Schelling

From Leibniz and Georg Ernst Stahl to Albrecht von Haller, Germans of the eighteenth century calved off an experimental physiology from medicine and made this research a centerpiece of their new model university, first under Haller at Göttingen, then under von Humboldt at Berlin. Haller made Göttingen the most important center for the advancement of Enlightenment science in Germany, but that is not where Johann Herder went looking for new ideas in psychology, turning instead to France, avidly studying Condillac and Diderot, and meeting the latter in Paris in 1769. Herder wanted to use French psychology in his theory of how the history of art recapitulates the development of the senses. To work out his ideas he found it necessary to ignore Kant's careful distinction between life and matter. Kant made life an inexplicable boundary for mechanical explanation, though with Herder it became the key concept for interpreting nature. That all the forces in the physical world are held to express one organizing, integrating vital principle is what excited Goethe about Herder's work and provoked the Naturphilosophie that Schelling invented at this time in close collaboration with Goethe.

Tribute to E. J. Capaldi: Celebration of a Psychological Scientist

Abstract E. J. (John) Capaldi (1928–2020) made numerous contributions to experimental psychology in his long career at the University of Texas at Austin and Purdue University. He was a pioneer in the area of animal learning and cognition, known for his sequential theory of partial reinforcement extinction effects. His research in this area and in memory and counting phenomena was conducted for the most part with rats running in straight alley mazes under various sequences of trial outcomes (e.g., reward, nonreward, variations in reward size). John's other interests included the sequential theory applied to Pavlovian conditioning, evolutionary theory, and psychology of science. More generally, John was a scientist to the core who served as a role model to those who knew him. His career centered on the values of science and rigorous critical thinking based in empirical data, coupled with a curiosity and openness to different and new ideas in psychology.

The Trauma of Disregard

The Trauma of Disregard

ПСИХОЛОГІЧНІ ОСОБЛИВОСТІ ПРОЯВУ СОРОМ’ЯЗЛИВОСТІ У ДІТЕЙ МОЛОДШОГО ДОШКІЛЬНОГО ВІКУ

У статті здійснено теоретичний аналіз проблеми прояву та розвитку сором’язливості у дітей молодшого дошкільного віку, експериментально проаналізовано психологічні детермінанти особистісної сором’язливості у 3-4 річному віці. Теоретичне дослідження продемонструвало, що сором’язливість є різносторонньою якістю особистості, яка зазвичай асоціюється із замкнутістю, невпевненістю, боязливістю, соромом. Дуже часто ранній прояв дитячої сором’язливості залишається непомітним та ототожнюється з інтровертованістю, несміливістю, тривожністю. Серед чинників появи особистісної сором’язливості у дитячому дошкільному віці називають недостатній розвиток комунікативних знань і вмінь, копіювання поведінки одного з членів сім’ї, поведінкову скутість, постійне відчуття тривоги, негативний образ власного «Я». Аналіз психологічних джерел дозволив виділити такі компоненти особистісної сором’язливості молодшого дошкільника: емоційно-оцінний, поведінковий і комунікативний. Ці складові активно розвиваються під час психофізіологічного дозрівання дитини та здійснюють взаємовплив на формування її самооцінки. Важливого значення у цей віковий період набуває також процес автономії, коли дитина починає робити перші самостійні кроки у дорослому світі, намагаючись продемонструвати особистісне «Я». Беззаперечного значення набуває й гармонійний емоційний розвиток молодшого дошкільника, під час якого формується емоційне самоставлення до себе, однолітків і дорослих, а негативний досвід взаємодії може слугувати основою майбутньої недовірливої поведінки дитини. Також варто зазначити, що психологічною особливістю особистісної сором’язливості у молодшому дошкільному віці є майбутня проєкція негативної оцінки оточення і переживання почуття дискомфорту в присутності сторонніх людей.

Gender and the senses of agency

This paper details the ways that gender structures our senses of agency on an enactive framework. While it is common to discuss how gender influences higher, narrative levels of cognition, as with the formulation of goals and in considerations about our identities, it is less clear how gender structures our more immediate, embodied processes, such as the minimal sense of agency. While enactivists often acknowledge that gender and other aspects of our socio-cultural situatedness shape our cognitive processes, there is little work on how this shaping takes place. In order to provide such an account, I will first look at the minimal and narrative senses of agency (Gallagher in New Ideas in Psychology, 30(1), 15–31, 2012), a distinction that draws from work on minimal and narrative selves (Zahavi 2010). Next I will explain the influence of the narrative sense of agency on the minimal sense of agency through work on intention-formation (Pacherie in Psyche, 13(1), 1–30, 2007). After a discussion of the role of gender in the narrative sense of agency, I’ll expand on work by Haslanger (2012) and Young (1990) to offer three ways in which gender influences the minimal sense of agency, showing the effect that gender has on how we perceive our possibilities for interaction in a phenomenologically immediate, pre-reflective manner.

Ecological meaning, linguistic meaning, and interactivity

Abstract Human language is extraordinarily meaningful. Well-spoken or well-written passages can evoke our deepest emotions and elicit all manner of conscious and subconscious reactions. This is usually taken to be an insurmountable explanatory challenge for ecological approaches to cognitive science, the primary tools of which concern coordination dynamics in organism-environment systems. Recent work (Pattee, H. H. & J. Rączaszek-Leonardi 2012. Laws, Language, and Life. Dordrecht: Springer) has made headway in describing the meaningfulness of linguistic units — the kind of meaning that we perceive as mediated by specific symbols — within an ecological framework, by building an account based on Howard Pattee’s conceptualization of symbols as physical, replicable, historically-selected constraints on the dynamics of self-organizing systems (Pattee, H. H. 1969. How does a molecule become a message?. Developmental Biology 3(supplemental). 1016; Pattee, H. H. 1972. Laws and constraints, symbols and languages. In C. H. Waddington (ed.), Towards a Theoretical Biology, 248–258. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). In order to propose an “interactivity-based” approach to linguistic meaning, this paper takes the following steps: first, it rejects the view of linguistic meaning as fully independent from organism-environment interactions, as exemplified by formal approaches in philosophical semantics. Second, it presents a cutting-edge example of an ecological approach to symbols, namely Joanna Rączaszek-Leonardi’s (Rączaszek-Leonardi, J. 2009. Symbols as constraints: The structuring role of dynamics and self-organization in natural language. Pragmatics and Cognition 17(3). 653–676. DOI:10.1075/pandc.17.3.09ras; Rączaszek-Leonardi, J. 2016. How does a word become a message? An illustration on a developmental time-scale. New Ideas in Psychology 42, Supplement C: 46–55. DOI:10.1016/j.newideapsych.2015.08.001) version of Pattee’s symbols-as-constraints model. Third, it reviews and critiques a recent attempt (Rączaszek-Leonardi, J., I. Nomikou, K. J. Rohlfing & T. W. Deacon. 2018. Language development from an ecological perspective: Ecologically valid ways to abstract symbols. Ecological Psychology 30(1). 39–73) to integrate the symbols-as-constraints model with Terrence Deacon, T. W. 1997. The Symbolic Species. New York: W. W. Norton and Company; Deacon, T. W. 2011. The symbol concept. In M. Tallerman & K. R. Gibson (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Language Evolution, 393–405. Oxford: Oxford University Press) semiotic view of symbols, arguing that the properties ascribed to linguistic symbols, both by Deacon and very widely throughout the cognitive sciences, are not properties of individual instances of linguistic action. Rather, they belong to a particular mode of description that draws generalizations across the phenomenological experience of many language users. Finally, it lays out the core components of a novel “interactivity-based” approach to linguistic meaning. On this view, human beings engage in constant, hyper-flexible entrainment and enskillment that produces tremendous perceptual sensitivity to vocal and acoustic patterns. This sensitivity enables us to coordinate our in-the-moment behavior with large-scale behavioral patterns within a larger population, and to compare our own actions to those large-scale patterns. Thus, the most important contribution made by an interactivity-based approach is that it accounts adequately for the role played by population-level behavioral patterns in the control of short-timescale, here-and-now linguistic actions. In so doing, it offers the grounds for an ecological account of rich linguistic meaning.

Pilot Study of Mental Flexibility brain networks

Pilot Study of Mental Flexibility brain networks

Do small dual-task costs reflect ideomotor compatibility or the absence of crosstalk?

Dual-task costs can be greatly reduced or even eliminated when both tasks use highly-compatible S-R associations. According to Greenwald (Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 30, 632-636, 2003), this occurs because the appropriate response can be accessed without engaging performance-limiting response selection processes, a proposal consistent with the embodied cognition framework in that it suggests that stimuli can automatically activate motor codes (e.g., Pezzulo et al., New Ideas in Psychology, 31(3), 270-290, 2013). To test this account, we reversed the stimulus-response mappings for one or both tasks so that some participants had to "do the opposite" of what they perceived. In these reversed conditions, stimuli resembled the environmental outcome of the alternative (incorrect) response. Nonetheless, reversed tasks were performed without costs even when paired with an unreversed task. This finding suggests that the separation of the central codes across tasks (e.g., Wickens, 1984) is more critical than the specific S-R relationships; dual-task costs can be avoided when the tasks engage distinct modality-based systems.

“A Big Piece of News”: Théodule Ribot and the Founding of the Revue Philosophique de la France et de l'Etranger

This paper describes the founding of the Revue Philosophique de la France et de l'Étranger by Théodule Ribot (1839-1916) in 1876. Like the English journal Mind, which was launched the same year, this journal introduced the new scientific psychology to France. Its founding increased Ribot's scientific credibility in psychology and led him to be regarded as the most distinguished French specialist in the field. First, we review the state of French philosophy at the time of the journal's founding, focusing on the three main French schools of thought in philosophy and on their relations with psychology. Second, after analyzing the preface written by Ribot in the first issue of the Revue Philosophique, we examine how the journal was received in French philosophical circles. Finally, we discuss its subsequent history, highlighting its founder's promotion of new ideas in psychology.

How the criminal "shapes" the crime: a neurocognitive model for psychiatric forensic evaluation

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Advancing the dialogue between inner and outer empiricism: A comment on O’Nualláin

In a recent contribution to New Ideas in Psychology, Seán O’Nualláin draws out a distinction between inner and outer empiricism, and suggests that consciousness research can benefit from analysis in both directions, that is, via the exploration of facts and relations that facilitate a third-person understanding of consciousness (by reference to an analysis of the structures, processes, and functions of the brain) and via the direct exploration of conscious experience itself, both in terms of its computational (content filled) and non-computational (content empty) aspects. In positing a substrate of subjectivity independent of the contents of consciousness (and, more specifically, a state of “nothingness”), Ò’Nualláin follows a long tradition deeply rooted in mythical, religious, and esoteric schools of belief and practice. Although there is considerable debate amongst philosophers, psychologists, and neuroscientists as to whether or not a non-computational view of consciousness is viable, O’Nualláin accepts that such a possibility does exist. Further, he suggests that a dialogue between the inner and outer empiricists will be fruitful. In this comment I, critique Ò’Nualláin's initial thoughts on the subject and draw out a series of useful distinctions that will help to advance the dialogue between inner and outer empiricism. Critical amongst these distinctions is explicit reference to (1) ontological and epistemological interdependencies in consciousness research, and (2) states of consciousness that describe the transition from “mindfulness” through “nothingness” to “no-mind”.

Learning How to Believe: Epistemic Development in Cultural Context

Learning How to Believe: Epistemic Development in Cultural Context

Numbers can be enriching

Numbers are words with distinctive properties that give them a special and important place in scholarly discourse in psychology. Among these are the ability to say the same thing to everybody, the stability of their meaning across time, and their manipulability. These properties make quantitative methods valuable tools in enriching research (research aimed at giving people a deeper, broader, more profound appreciation of the phenomenon) as well as in theory-building research (research aimed at improving a unified and coherent understanding). These views seem compatible with those advanced by Westerman [Westerman, M.A., 2006. Quantitative research as an interpretive enterprise: The mostly unacknowledged role of interpretation in research efforts and suggestions for explicitly interpretive quantitative investigations. New Ideas in Psychology, 24, 189–211] and Yanchar [Yanchar, S.C., 2006. On the possibility of contextual-quantitative inquiry. New Ideas in Psychology, 24, 212–228].

Identity development during the first two university years: Exploring intersections between micro-, ontogenetic processes

Identity development processes are explored through analyses of longitudinal interview data collected with ten students during the first two university years. Micro-level analyses, based upon the work of Josephs, I. E. and Valsiner, J. [(1998). How does autodialogue work? Miracles of meaning maintenance and circumvention strategies. Social Psychology Quarterly, 61, 68–83], entailed the identification of oppositional meaning complexes—statements of conflicting meaning about self—as well as circumvention strategies. Ontogenetic analyses of developmental trajectories were based on Freeman, M. and Robinson, R.'s [(1990). The development within: An alternative approach to the study of lives. New Ideas in Psychology, 8, 53–72] conceptualization of the developmental process. From the ontogenetic analyses, two primary developmental patterns, and several subpatterns, were identified. Linkages between micro and ontogenetic levels were indicated by differences in rates of oppositional meaning complexes for individuals engaged in “developmental work” compared to those not so engaged, and differences in across-time patterning of these complexes for developmental subgroups. Findings support the potential of these methods for identifying semiotic mechanisms that are associated with longer-term developmental change.

Theatre History and Historiography: A Disciplinary Mandate

Historical scholarship, despite the many changes in methodologies and models over the years, is one of the abiding missions of the discipline of theatre studies: yesterday, today, and tomorrow. Yesterday, as is well known, Theaterwissenschaft was the foundational methodology for scholarship and doctoral education. Today, of course, our approaches to theatre history encompass several dozen research methodologies and analytical models. And tomorrow? Will cultural, social, political, and intellectual histories still provide a reliable foundation? Or will we develop fields of investigation and modes of analysis that draw upon new ideas in psychology, neuroscience, and biology? One thing is clear: our methods and models will continue to change.

Errata “How working memory and cognitive modeling functions of the cerebellum contribute to discoveries in mathematics” by Larry R. Vandervert. New Ideas in Psychology 21 (1) pp. 15–29 (2003)

Errata “How working memory and cognitive modeling functions of the cerebellum contribute to discoveries in mathematics” by Larry R. Vandervert. New Ideas in Psychology 21 (1) pp. 15–29 (2003)

Political Legitimacy and Democracy

The term ‘political legitimacy’ is unfortunately ambiguous. One serious source of confusion is the failure to distinguish clearly between political legitimacy and political authority and to conflate political authority with authoritativeness. I will distinguish between (1) political legitimacy, (2) political authority, and (3) authoritativeness. I will also articulate two importantly different variants of the notion of political authority. Having drawn these distinctions, I will argue first that political legitimacy, rather than political authority, is the more central notion for a theory of the morality of political power. My second main conclusion will be that where democratic authorization of the exercise of political power is possible, only a democratic government can be legitimate. Another ambiguity is also a source of confusion. Sometimes it is unclear whether ‘legitimacy’ is being used in a descriptive or a normative sense. In this article I am concerned exclusively with legitimacy in the normative sense, not with the conditions under which an entity is believed to be legitimate. However, a normative account of legitimacy is essential for a descriptive account. Unless one distinguishes carefully between political legitimacy, political authority, and authoritativeness, one will not be clear about what beliefs in legitimacy are beliefs about.

The Paradox of Social Order: Linking Psychology and Sociology

This volume focuses on strengthening the foundations of the social sciences with hypotheses that challenge commonly held rational choice theories drawn from economics. In contrast to the rational choice theories of Becker, Hayek, Popper, and others, argues that the stability of social structures ultimately results from a linkage of non-rational individual conduct (interpersonal imbalances, confusion of minds, etc.) with social order and hence, that a larger role for psychology is essential for the study of the social sciences. This work is an attempt at cross-fertilization of disciplines. Both of these fields are now limited, fragmented, and scattered. In the social sciences we often have to be content with a few pieces (hypotheses, theories) of a provisional construction, pieces that will be quickly modified or replaced. In this precarious situation for the social sciences, what we can do better, what we must try to do better, is to differentiate and generalize our hypotheses and integrate them into the best-established network of knowledge in order to ensure that they continue to develop. In other words, we have to articulate and systematize the social sciences, in particular to reunite sociology and psychology. Social order emerges from non-rational individual behavior (which social order, in turn, upholds). To express it positively, social order and individual non-rationality together make up a whole. The author holds that metaphors such as machine or organism are no longer adequate. Social order can no longer be conceived in terms of a dualistic framework. Social order is not some magical equilibrium that is justified by the satisfactions it produces--to all, to the most capable, or only to those in power, depending upon the justification. Nor can social order be considered either the product of either an invisible hand or of an omnipresent secretary who balances everyone's account. This work is an effort to move beyond the polarities and dualities that limit the theory and research of social science as a whole. Pierre Moessinger is professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of Geneva, Switzerland and the Department of Psychology at the University of Fribourg. He has published in English-language journals in several fields and is the editor of New Ideas in Psychology.